By Marinella Venegoni – La Stampa
24.03.1990
Fifty years? It could be 30 or 90, it would be the same. Tomorrow Mina turns half a century old, and the occasion only serves to make it clear how the singer has become, in Italian custom, a symbol rather than a living person. A symbol of an Italy as good as she was, glorious and optimistic, that of the boom years with which her rise coincided; but also, for most of those over 30, a sentimental symbol in the fullest sense of the word. Perhaps there is thanks to be given to her for choosing to have disappeared from sight, never to sing or speak on TV again or to allow herself to be interviewed: like Greta Garbo, she left room for the imaginary and the legend, which not even the image of fat grandmother can scratch; and perhaps there is less to thank her for the singing testimonies she has left us each year in recent times, her only link to the public way: the discography runs so fast that imprisonment has its downsides, it takes away from those who practice it as the sense of how things are outside, and
Mina often gave us in the 1980s cheap products, chosen and cooked with little grace and perhaps little desire; but it was still sublime mediocrity.
The fans remain many and do not miss one of his releases. Twelve years after her retirement from the scene, with very little promotion, every year the copies of records sold with those bizarre and absurd titles such as “Rane Supreme” or the latest “Uiallalla,” with equally bizarre or absurd covers where Mina gives vent to the most disturbing fantasies about her own image are never less than three hundred thousand: a figure for which several current stars would be willing to sell their mothers. Fanatical of Mina, but for different reasons, are also the major Italian impresarios: for a couple of years the rumor has been spreading among them that, for a figure, for an ideal or for an anniversary, the Tiger might as well retrace her steps, to sing in public again, maybe just once. They have offered her figures with never less than nine zeros, and they are still offering them; how it will end, of course, is unknown.
Just as it is not known, nor will it be known, how Tiger will celebrate her opulent fiftieth birthday tomorrow, whether with glee, with sadness, or trying not to think about it and playing broom: this concerning her is one of the few strictly observed press silences, despite the fact that numerous journalists habitually frequent her as friends, pushing themselves to visit her as far as her home in Lugano. They are all warned: write a word and I won’t talk to you anymore. As the affair continues to work, it is inferred that the friendship with Mina is more coveted than a scoop.
The total silence had begun in ’78, after an already long voluntary exile of six years. Mina had sung at her discoverer Sergio Bernardini’s Bussola to celebrate her 20-year career. An incredible crowd was waiting for her; opulent in her black dress, with wild blond hair, she had run away at the end of the concert without even changing. A friend had snatched from her the last confidence published in quotes, “Tonight I realized that I am not meant to sing in public. I am afraid. I tremble. I don’t feel the appeal of applause at all. What should I do? I am not Eduardo.”
Not that fear was new. In the summer of ’58, while on the stage of the usual Bussola Don Marino Barreto Jr. was concluding his own show, friends had pushed her to the microphone, and Mina had immediately revealed the great talent that slept in her: but it was just a game; two years later, when she was by then a professional, someone present backstage at the “Six Days” recounted seeing her crying from stage fright: “The impresario scrambled her, insulted her by calling her stupid and a cretin, kicked her onto the stage. For a few very long seconds, she remained as if unable to move or speak, then dragged by the orchestra she attacked “Protect Me.” The words said, “Protect me, defend me,” on that “defend me,” Mina kicked out a monstrous, unbelievable scream. To the applause the theater came down.
Fragile fragile, indeed very strong, Mina in her career symbolically represented many typical Italian counterfactuals. She confessed in early interviews that it seemed bad for a woman from a bourgeois family like her to earn money; she explained that she did not talk to Corrado Pani about politics so as not to argue: “I am a liberal, he is a half-communist”; but in ’63 she was the first star to shock Italy because, she unmarried, she was expecting a child by a married man. State TV quarantined her: she became for young people the symbol of a less hypocritical morality, and was then allowed back on the video: no singer ever stayed there so long without wearing out, indeed gaining more and more prestige from it.
No singer has recorded, as she has, 800 songs. Mina’s is an incredible voice, with a vocal range of more than three octaves as demonstrated by “Brava,” written for her by Bruno Canfora: much better than Barbra Streisand’s. She has a natural ability to switch from soft timbres to shouting: Luigi Pestalozza likened her to Cathy Barberian and Callas: “There is something common in their way of conceiving the voice, even as an experiment.” But with that voice, there is also laziness. There is the fear of planes. This is how Mina did not become an international star, who turned down Sinatra’s many invitations to the United States. Gradually preferring the role of a once-a-year singer, locked inside the grooves of a record. Happy birthday, Mina.
