FUNERAL ODE
IN MEMORY OF FRANCO SPINA

The death of whom we hold dear is an experience that always left its mark on us: thoughts, sorrow, aroused hopes indelibly remain fixed in our memory. The passing of Franco, cousin of my parents, made besides relive to me in more aware way (I was greater) that of my father, happened a few years before. A little for the circumstances (both were 41 years old; both unexpectedly died), a little because Franco had been nearer to me following the loss of the fatherly figure.
So I have felt the need to express what this event had aroused to me: the fragments written then have been filtered, corrected, organized several years later, without nevertheless substantially to add nothing. The passage, after a brief and calm introduction, suddenly explodes on a much dissonant chord with a tense and restless theme exposed by the orchestra. The dismay for the sudden mourning is then also expressed by the soloist voices, even if in less tense and dramatic way. The tone-semitone scale used gives a feeling of uncertainty, of lack of references, after already the orchestra, with his continuous modular , had tried the tonal sense severely. The sad andante that follows sees the exposure, from the oboe, of a sad and expressive theme, at times alternated by the rhythm of a funeral march and with some counterpointistic trait. The entrance of the choir replaces the desperation of the solos (“Franco is dead, I don’t see anymore him”) with the hope that death is not the definitive word (“Pray for him, angels of sky, hand him with you in heaven”). A sad hope, that doesn’t eliminate the sadness but gives it a sense. After the repetition of the themes of oboe and choir, the initial one returns in the coda, once again dramatic and tense; in the final measures it is instead the choir to say the last word: hope, eternity, heaven. Johann Sebastian Bach was usual to finish with the major chord the passages in minor tonality: here, to express the light of a hope that nevertheless cohabits with the suffering and the pain, it is the sixt altered degree (and not the third one) of the scale to be raised of a semitone in the end: the result of this passage from minor to lydian mode is as a beam of light that illuminates the pain, a true but not yet fulfilled promise.

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