Musica esiliata. Per un ascolto di Cristina Campo

The article attempts to investigate in some places of Cristina Campo’s literary production the thematic, structural, and suggestive presence of musical references. Some passages taken from different works and writing projects are placed in dialogue, and yet united by the attempt to formalize and redefine music as a hidden response to writing, and sometimes as a path to asceticism and meditative silence. Listening to the madrigalists, Chopin, Beethoven, and other musicians, undoubtedly favored by a familiar familiarity with musical composition, constitutes for Cristina Campo’s work a sort of counterpoint, a pole of comparison, which moves the author’s metaphorical imagination and system of affections, in parallel by various genres of writing, from letters to essays to works in verse. Listening thus does not remain a mere metaphor but becomes a method to approach texts: those to be read and written, as well as those to be translated. And the specificity of the musical code appears decisive for the formation of Cristina Campo’s poetics, in all its concrete forms. Keywords · Campo, Cristina; Music; Poetics; Chopin, Fryderyk; Guerrini, Guido; Benedetti Michelangeli, Arturo; Savinio, Alberto; Listening; Sprezzatura; Schneider, Marius.