Walter Valdi

I worked in that of Baggio / in the assembly line / and I turned a washer / always one always the same, / and one day it was / that I got a tic" (Walter Valdi, The tic) Walter Valdi, pseudonym of Walter Giovanni Nicola Pinnetti (Cavenago di Brianza, 20 August 1930 - Milan, 9 October 2003), was an Italian artist, songwriter and actor, author of theatrical and musical pieces in the Milanese dialect.

Biography

Walter Valdi was born on August 20, 1930 in Cavenago di Brianza, in the province of Milan (now the province of Monza and Brianza), in the seventeenth-century building that now houses the town hall, Palazzo Rasini. Still at an early age he moved with his family to the Lombard capital, where he resided for a long time in Viale Monza.

His father was a well-known lawyer, which prompted him and his two sisters Egle and Lia to undertake legal studies and, later, the legal profession. Valdi opened a studio in via Podgora, which was then closed to devote himself full time to the profession of artist.

He married Gabriella Falcetti and had a son, Antonio Amadeus, so baptised in honour of Mozart, his favorite composer. For a long time suffering from heart, he died on 9 October 2003, at the age of seventy-three, after being admitted to the Niguarda hospital.

The beginnings

From an early age Valdi was a lover of theater and cabaret, as well as of the dialectal culture learned in the family. During his university years he enrolled in the mime school of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, directed at the time by Marise Flach.

However - it was the fifties - the seriousness of his "official" profession, the lawyer, and the "good name" of the family to defend made him take part in the first goliardic magazines under a false name: this was how the pseudonym was born Walter Valdi, in fact, with whom he was also known later.

His first important role was played by interpreting the sexton in a version of the Tosca staged in the Veronese opera season. Later the director Giorgio Strehler hired him for the (silent) role of the host in a version of the Falstaff.

Breakthrough

His moment of greatest notoriety began in 1963, when he was hired as a mime in The Fair of Dreams, a television show hosted by Mike Bongiorno. From there began a happy moment of his career: thanks to the cue of a musician known in RAI Valdi came into contact with the Derby Club, the real shrine of the Milanese cabaret, the proscenium from which all the most important names had or would have passed of Lombard comedy, from Dario Fo, to the Owls, from Cochi and Renato to Teo Teocoli.

Alongside the latter he also appeared on television in the 1978 television drama Il balordo, based on the 1967 novel of the same name by Piero Chiara. He also had a role in That next door, an evening television sit-com produced by RAI, with Ric and Gian, in the mid-seventies of the last century.

For twenty-five years he was a master of style and comedy for many of these stars: Enzo Jannacci, Paolo Villaggio, Renato Pozzetto. He worked with Adriano Celentano. He created with the maestro Giovanni D'Anzi a show for two that received the favor of audiences and critics: Lassa pur ch'el mond el disa.

Over the years, Valdi became the author of musical pieces that made epoch, which were often reinterpreted by other artists, from Il Palo della Banda dell'Ortica, made famous by the dazed execution of Jannacci (who changed the music and called it Faceva the palo), to Coccodì coccodà (to music by Armando Celso), re-recorded among others by i Gufi and Bruno Lauzi, from Il tic, made famous by Giorgio Gaber, to Cocco and Drilli, a real smash of an edition of the Zecchino d'Oro in the version of the Piccolo Coro dell'Antoniano. In 1981 he won the Ambrogino d'Oro - a Milanese song festival for children - as an author with the song "Ma che Cavolo", sung by a 4-year-old girl, Laura Pergolesi.

Among other successes is the comedy Ciappa el tram balorda written together with Carlo Colombo, gratified by hundreds of repeats. In 1992 he took part in the third edition of the Sanscemo Festival with the surreal song The Stripes. In 1997 she starred with Raimondo Vianello and Sandra Mondaini in the episode Four aces for a robbery of the TV series The Mysteries of Cascina Vianello. Valdi also worked as a film actor: A certain day by Ermanno Olmi, where he masterfully plays the role, needless to say, of the protagonist's lawyer, Carlo Lizzani's; Stories of life and underworld; I made splash and Domani si balla! by Maurizio Nichetti.

Style

Valdi's favorite settings were those of popular Milan, the courtyards and the suburbs, often praised and compared, by contrast, to the boorishness of the new rich, in the years of the economic boom, or to new social models (by immigrants to businessmen, from bureaucrats to politicians) in whom it became difficult to recognize oneself for those who shared their culture and their environment of origin.

The city that Valdi knows and describes is the humble and hard-working Milan or, at the limit, the reckless one of the poor people who make a living or the two-lire criminals; in short, those whose adventures inevitably end in that of Filangieri al nùmer dù, that is, at the well-known address of the prison of San Vittore.

His characters are wonderful losers who, despite being defeated by adverse circumstances (or by those who are smarter and more opportunistic than them), perhaps before committing suicide by throwing themselves into the Naviglio, they laugh and think that the drastic decision can still reflect a little '.

His humor is cynical and often surreal: Valdi never resorts to proclamations but always prefers the irony and the disenchanted gaze of those who have no illusions, but do not intend to stop fighting for.

Valdi's style, as a whole, can be in some ways similar to that of some contemporary French chansonniers, such as Boris Vian and Georges Brassens, cynical, ruthless and at the same time tender and human like him, rich in understanding for the characters and the stories they describe.

The pole of the Banda dell'Ortica is a valid summary of what has been stated so far. The song tells the story of a band of thieves in perfect I soliti ignoti style (the "Nettle" is a popular district of Milan). The gang leaves one of its members to act as a "pole", that is, to ensure that no one arrives to disturb the blow; but the pole sees very little, and hears even less. "He was staring at the night / he saw nothing, but he heard nothing on the other hand / because to see, he didn't see a truck / but to hear, he heard nothing" (W. Valdi. The pole of the Ortica band).

The criminals are all captured by the police; all except the pole, which, unaware of the arrest of his friends, remains fixed in his position. The next day passersby mistake him for a beggar and give him alms. He, thinking that it is the accomplices who bring him the loot at ten lire at a time (which later became a hundred in subsequent versions), "circumspect, looks around and puts away", but is angry by the slowness of the work and promises himself to work next time on his own.

Also, a famous monologue talks about the beautiful twin brothers who, while walking on the street, are killed by a custom-built car. Passers-by who stop admire the car rather than looking at the poor victims.

There are many other Milanese songs that bear the signature of his very particular humorous figure:

The büsa növa (meaning the "new hole" in Milanese), which - making the verse to the rhythm of the bossa nova, also imitated in the title - denounces the vices of the bureaucracy by narrating the misfortunes of a citizen who goes to the town hall to protest for the conditions of the streets

When Milan was Milan

When you were young

Oh Signur, the story of a flawed man who is happy to be in the world The machine (funny representation of an incomprehensible machine, a symbol of new technologies and the new prosperity of Italy in the boom)

La Gh'ha Ona Face, a song dedicated to a not very beautiful woman

The defect

Yet Mi Disi, a poem with music that tells the Milanese lifestyle Ringhera, on the old houses and courtyards of Milan

A Milanese in Milan, a song that makes fun of southern and foreign immigration in Milan

I Wahha Puthanga, his most memorable song, a cheerful and light-hearted text that nowadays would sound very little politically correct.

Valdi was also the author of children's songs:

in 1974 he published a 33 rpm - So per sport - intended for them. Among the songs contained in this LP, in addition to Cocco and Drilli and the aforementioned Coccodì coccodà and Il Pole by the Ortica band, there are also other songs that have made the history of Italian music for children such as La tartaruga sprint, Il michelasso and The Peppina coffee.

In an article written on the occasion of his death, the music critic of the Corriere, Mario Luzzatto Fegiz, wanted to remember Valdi with one of the lines from the Milanese author's repertoire, cynical and fulminating as in his style: "I always read the obituaries and cinema.

If someone I know is dead, I'll go to the funeral. If not, I'll go to the cinema. " He composed the piece Mamma mia che ache stomach (which in the refrain recalls Il caffè della Peppina) in the interpretation of Topo Gigio.

In Memory

Over the years immediately following his death, Milan has not forgotten Walter Valdi. There have been numerous initiatives linked to the memory of the singer-songwriter lawyer: among these the "Festival di Valdi", on the bill in November 2006 at the National Theater, with the intervention of his friend Nanni Svampa, Enzo Iacchetti, Giorgio Faletti and many others, and the establishment of the "Walter Valdi prize", reserved for emerging composers and songwriters selected by a jury of journalists and professionals in the sector on the basis of the value of their compositions and their "manifest Milanese character".

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