Addio, Gian Maria Testa, Stationmaster

- By Gabriele Ferraris

“Working for the railroad suited me. I was comfortable there; it was a supportive environment. I always liked my job. I began working for the railroad on April 1, 1982, and I decided to leave on April 2, 2007. Exactly twenty-five years. I decided to leave because, eventually, I couldn’t keep up with both the concerts and the railroad.

Railroad stations are still places filled with all the variety of human experience. So far they haven’t managed to make them as sterile as airports. A railroad station is a place where the pleasure of an arrival and the sorrow of a departure are visible. You can read it from the expressions on people’s faces. And so, well, maybe you even feel like singing to them.”

-- Gian Maria Testa, interviewed by Letizia Airos for i-Italy TV

Gian Maria Testa’s long, courageous fight is over. He’s gone. He left us at the age of fifty-seven, and, even if by now I expected it, I still can’t get it into my head. As everyone always says, we still have his songs. In my case, though, I still have memories and nostalgia from twenty years of a beautiful friendship. We met in February of 1996, in Paris. A strange place to meet, since we were two people who had grown up in practically the same place, among the hills and vineyards of Italy’s Piedmont. That day, though, I was in Paris and I read in some newspaper that the following day the chansonnier italien Gian Maria Testa would be in concert at the Olympia. Back in those days, I knew little about the railroad stationmaster from Cuneo who wrote such beautiful songs. In France he was already greatly loved, but at home no one paid him any attention at all.

So I decided I wanted to meet him, and I got to work to make sure it happened. I can’t remember how I managed to hunt him down. Not the easiest thing to hunt down someone from Cuneo in Paris, during that earlier time, prior to the triumph of cellphones. Back then, though, I was pretty good at hunting and I got my man. We fixed a rendezvous at a small bistrot in the Marais, on the morning before his big concert at the Olympia. Back then the Olympia was the temple of song. Only the biggest stars—and practically no Italians, only Paolo Conte was a regular there. And so I went off to meet that railroad stationmaster from Cuneo, just as he was getting ready to go onstage at that sacred space. I was expecting to see someone with a hellish case of stage fright.

But Gian Maria Testa didn’t seem like someone suffering from a hellish case of stage fright, even though he did later admit he was nervous. He just hid it really well behind that wrinkled moustache of his. He didn’t even seem like a stationmaster—without the red cap, he wasn’t how I’ve always imagined them. One time, though, he did show me his red cap, so I’m sure that back then he really was a stationmaster. He only quit that job many years later, because—like any good Cunese with farmer’s blood in his veins—rather than leave a steady job at the railway station, he worked like hell for years, with his concerts at night and the job in the morning. You know how things go in the music world, one day you’re a star and the next day nobody comes looking for you anymore…

Anyway, that morning at the bistrot in the Marais, Gian Maria Testa didn’t have his red cap with him, and I guess I was a little disappointed, although on a rational level I understood there was no reason to run around Paris with your red cap on, even if you were a railroad stationmaster. But that wasn’t the only surprise that Gian Maria Testa had prepared for me that morning. We talked at length, about all varieties of human experience, about our common roots in lower Piedmont, but hardly at all about music. In that bistrot in the Marais, a lot of the time we spoke in Piemontese: more or less a Northern Italian version of a film with Totò and Peppino. A lovely morning. And that evening, at the Olympia, was a triumph.

After that I wrote a long article for my newspaper, telling the story of the Stationmaster on stage at the Olympia. Soon after Enzo Biagi interviewed him on his TV show, Il Fatto, and so Gian Maria Testa finally became popular in Italy, too. Twenty years have gone by since that day in Paris, and it’s been wonderful to hear, throughout those years, the records and concerts of Gian Maria Testa. Not so many records, yet each one necessary, precise. Songs that told us of life, of emotions, but also about our world today: immigration, above all, became a central theme of his poetics.

Gian Maria Testa was a fortunate man: he had a gift and he managed to make it bear fruit. But behind every fortunate man there is always an intelligent woman who loves him. Paola was Gian Maria’s fortune: she made him the envy of almost any man, she’s the mother of a marvelous boy, and a brilliant manager. Paola Farinetti invented memorable stageshows for Gian Maria, pairing him up with the leading names in Italian music and theater, from Enrico Rava to Erri De Luca. And so Gian Maria Testa—the ex-railroad stationmaster in Cuneo, born in Cavallermaggiore, raised in a family where they spoke only in dialect—became a total artist, a high-culture phenomenon, a musician with an exquisitely refined sensibility. Yet he remained—always and in spite of this—a simple man, someone almost embarrassed by the compliments paid to him; the self-same man I met twenty years ago in Paris, on the eve of his fame in Italy.

The last time I saw him we met at the Festival of the Mind, in September in Sarzana, near La Spezia, Italy. He was keeping his wife Paola company; she was the producer for one of the shows that year. To see them was a joy as always. He seemed in good shape, so I asked him how he was doing. Good, he told me, good. A bit of fatigue, that’s all. I hoped it was true. As we said goodbye, I told him, The next time I want to see you on stage. You can count on it, he replied. And I believed him. We all did.
 

Gabriele Ferraris (gabosutorino.blogspot.it) was for many years the music critic and editor of the weekend supplement for La Stampa in Torino, Italy. He is also a member of the Confraternità della Bagna Cauda of Nizza Monferrato. This essay was first published by La Stampa on March 30, 2016