Considered a maestro di vita (a sort of life mentor) in his native Italy, Franco Battiato (1945–2021) was a musical master of the eighties in Spain and continues to invoke a sense of nostalgia for Europop fans across the Continent. Over his career, he performed in iconic venues like the Berliner Philharmonie in Berlin and the Olympia in Paris. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, he remains little-known in the Anglophone world. With a career that ranged from the weird side of progressive rock to minimalism and later, in the most unlikely turn of events, mass success (1981’s La voce del padrone was the first Italian album to sell over one million copies), the Sicilian singer-songwriter found himself competing for Eurovision, only seven years after he had won the Stockhausen Price for some very experimental music.
Like his English counterpart Peter Gabriel, Battiato transitioned from a flamboyant, progressive rock persona to first-class stardom, and, like John Lennon (1940–80), he was able to pen both generational anthems and hard-to-digest sound collages. There’s nearly a decade’s worth in the length and depth of Battiato’s “experimental period.” It shows in his eighth discography, L’Egitto prima delle sabbie (1978).
Battiato’s commercial success in the 1980s was partly due to his idiosyncratic take on pop music, which combined his prior influences, from progressive rock to electronica to noise and opera. It bore equally idiosyncratic, hermetic, and multilingual lyrics. While others sang about romantic love, he sang (or seemed to sing) about the love of mystics, space and time, desert sands, and sacred dances of the world, from Bali to the waltz. At the time of this transition to musica leggera, Battiato was a practitioner of mystic G. I. Gurdjieff (c. 1866-77–1949) to which he was introduced by a direct disciple of the Greco-Armenian esoterist, Monsieur Henri Thomasson (who became an occasional lyricist for the singer under the pseudonym Tommaso Tramonti).
Ever the “enlightened pop” artist, Battiato managed to build his breakthrough commercial single, Centro di gravità permanente (1981), upon Gurdjieff’s notion of the alignment of the body, emotions and intellect, conceptualized as the search for a “gravity center” under all the chaotic fragments and disarranged nuclei of habitual personality.
Though Gurdjieff provided a “gravity center” to his exuberant imagery, Battiato was as eclectic in his spirituality as he was in matters of music, all the while remaining sceptical of the “Magical Shop” (1979) of the New Age spirituality of his age. In this song, the esoteric René Guénon shakes hands with Christian symbols and Hindu “hare hare” mantras, “Buddhas go on bedside tables,” and “Tibetan lamas are a bit naive” amidst everything.
Still under the spell of dervish dances and Middle Eastern landscapes, he reserved a more ornamental place to the Far East, with only a few tunes about topics such as the Indian moon (“Luna Indiana,” 1979) or the bells of Tibet (“Campane Tibetane” (1983))—sung in an Italian context.
At the end of the 1980s, Battiato released an opera inspired by the biblical Genesis and an orchestral pop album, Fisiognomica (1988), which marked something of a thematic shift, with more introspective and spiritual lyrics. The 1991 signature song “L’ombra della luce” wonders “why the peace of certain monasteries or the vibrant harmony of all my senses is only the shadow of light.”
His contact with real-life monasteries was, however, only about to start. After sporadic encounters in the spiritual mishmash of his youth, Franco embarked on an exploration of the Buddhist tradition from its Tibetan side. His mother’s death in 1994 reportedly led to an intensification of a meditative routine that he had maintained since the 1970s, initially in the form of Transcendental Meditation and later in a more “Buddhist” guise, with a dedication to all sentient beings in every session.
It would be tempting to say that the first two decades of the twenty-first century saw Battiato as a lay follower of Tibetan Buddhism. Interviewers quote him as saying things like “I’m a fanatic of Tibetan Buddhism,” or “I belong to the Tibetan tradition.” That this was his principal source of spiritual wisdom for a long time to come is quite clear (as he sang: “I learned enough things from Tibetans to be eternally thankful”).
But Battiato’s positionality was intentionally eclectic, methodologically unsound, and conceptually promiscuous, with the occasional touch of iconoclasm vis-à-vis established traditions. He became a staunch supporter of reincarnation, which he claimed (and sang) was part of the original teaching of Jesus, and vindicated the early Christian theologian Origen (b. 185 AD), who was tortured by the Church—topics which he liked to raise with Christian authorities, for a little spice.
Battiato became an enthusiastic reader of the Bardo Thodol (the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead), a work that had frightened him in his youth, and of Buddhist wisdom more generally. A sentence attributed to the Buddha apparently inspired his second feature film, Niente è come sembra (2007), which includes a brief interview with Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche.
The Tibetan cause-in-exile gains some prominence in Battiato’s music, with English as the chosen medium to convey the message: “Do you know Tulku Urgyen?” (“La polvere del branco” (2012)); and “Politicians kill the monks, refusing to listen to reason. Keep your hands off Tibet!” (“Tibet” (2008)). Otherwise, his lyrics are Sanskrit: Oṃ āḥ hūṃ vajra guru padma siddhi hūṃ).
The Sicilian pop star went beyond the surface sympathy for Buddhism and Tibet that is, or was, so common in his guild. In 2010, he released a book-length dialogue with Giuseppe Coco on vegetarianism and traditional Tibetan medicine (which was published on the website Infinito).
After a three-month stay in Kathmandu, he produced a documentary-book, Attraversando il Bardo (2014), to examine a range of perspectives on life after death, with a predominance of Tibetan Buddhist voices including: Lama Jampa Gelek, Lama Khangser Rinpoche, and Lama Jampa Monlam. More pensautore (thinker-songwriter) than ever before, Battiato became known in some quarters as the songwriter who believed in reincarnation, and spoke a great deal about it, even sounding a bit proselytical before interviewers: “Believe, believe [in reincarnation], take my word for it,” he urged in an interview that was published years later on the website Jot Down.
The singer’s embrace of rebirth was the result, he claimed, of meditative experimentation (BSO) leading to states where he could “perfectly remember” the entry into the maternal womb and acquire “vivid and strong memories” of several previous lives (Barinedita), including one as “an early twentieth century woman.” (La Stampa)
It is thus shocking that, one year after his documentary on the bardo, Battiato is quoted in Ragusa as repudiating Buddhist ideas on rebirth in rather dismissive terms. That was November 2015. In a previous interview in Corriere Della Sera in July he had been his usual self, speaking about animal rebirth and respect for all sentient life, and in December of the same year he was to release a second book about the “intermediate state,” Lo stato intermedio. On the face of it, the interview does not fit his intellectual development very well. As the musician retired from public life in 2017, little was known about him in the years preceding his death in 2021.
All the evidence points to close association with his friend, the Catholic priest, thanatologist and proponent of inter-religious dialogue, Guidalberto Bormolini, and, through this influence, to a renewed interest in the Christian ascetic tradition—from its most yogic and vegetarian angle. However, there were rumors—spread by outlets like El Pais and some evangelical platforms like Evangelical Focus—that Battiato had ditched all things Buddhist, stopped meditating, and virtually died a Christian death.
Yet these rumors were contradicted by Bormolini himself, who was present at the moment of death and describes the late musician as someone who “meditated a very great deal,” “followed a path of absolute awareness,” and “couldn’t be pigeonholed into a Church.” As Bormolini reiterated, “Above all, he didn’t want to be pigeonholed.” (Corriere Etneo) “The possibility of returning to life after death,” he explains, “was certainly one of those things he didn’t entirely exclude from his horizons; this was quite clear in his thinking.” (Corriere Etneo) One could throw in other testimonies (Live Sicilia) and the fact that Battiato’s last recorded song, published in 2019, has precisely his most reincarnationist refrain:
Many are the paths,
but only one leads to the truth.
[Chorus]
Until we are free
we will return again
and again and again and again.
Clearing up this potential misunderstanding has no big implications: Battiato was never a Buddhist nor a Christian, but someone who took pride, throughout his life, of living in “a salad of religions,” a “mystical salad” dressed with intuition that brought him close to inter-faith voices like the Catalan Catholic priest and Christian-Hindu-Buddhist philosopher Raimon Panikkar (1918–2010) or the German Benedictine monk and Zen priest Willigis Jäger (1925–2020). Like many European artists of his generation, Battiato perceived exclusive allegiances as something of an existential dead end:
I’m neither Muslim nor Hindu
Nor Christian nor Buddhist
I’m not for the hammer
Neither for the sickle
And even less for the tricolour flame [a reference to a well-known “post-fascist” party]
Because I’m a musician (“I’m That”, 2004)
What is left is an eclectic oeuvre that guides the attentive listener through a curated selection of spiritual references from diverse cultures, with an emphasis on Tibetan Buddhism in his final decade in the spotlight. And not only through music. In 1985, Battiato founded a publishing house, L’Ottava, and released some of the earliest Italian translations of works by Gurdjieff and his disciples, interspersed with the reflection of other interests and affinities, from Mali to Japan. Decades later, in 2012, he sent a letter to the major of Santa Luce (near Pisa) to recommend the construction a monastery linked to Pomaia’s Lama Tsong Khapa Institute (affiliated to the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition), mentioning the artistic and environmental benefits of a project that “would bring international prestige to your municipality, which has a predestined name, and to Italy.” (Fondazione sangha ets)
Santa Luce translates as “Holy Light.”
See more
Sowa Rigpa – La scienza della guarigione per un’alimentazione consapevole (Infinito)
Franco Battiato: «Una nariz como la mía o la aceptas o te pegas un tiro» (Jot Down)
Battiato oltre la morte con padre Bormolini (BSO)
Vi va un po’ di rock’n’roll? (Fenice)
Battiato a Bari: «Mi sono reincarnato e ricordo le mie vite precedenti» (Barinedita)
Battiato: “In una vita precedente ero una donna” (La Stampa)
Battiato: Se a Papa Francesco preferissi lo yogurt (Ragusa)
Franco Battiato: «Anima gemella? Mai avuta, solo amiche. Non sono uno che litiga per il dentifricio» (Corriere Della Sera)
La perspectiva Battiato (El Pais)
The mysticism of Franco Battiato (Evangelical Focus)
Battiato all’amico sacerdote prima di morire: “Ho fatto una vita bella, sono in pace” (Corriere Etneo)
L’ultimo saluto a Franco Battiato, un artista alla ricerca del divino (Vatican News)
La religiosità di Franco Battiato “non è riconducibile ad una religione” (Live Sicilia)
Unpublished Battiato: the letter in favor of the monastery (Fondazione sangha ets)
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