Era già tutto previsto
Riccardo Cocciante
How to study this song
The card for “Era già tutto previsto” is built from 51 study entries at B1-: 10 Italian words, 5 adjectives and 36 verb forms. Start with the glossary: amici and cose come up again and again, so they are the ones to know first. This one leans on its verbs: 36 distinct forms against 5 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level part of the list will already be familiar; the rest is what closes the gap.
The words of this song, in several languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| IT | EN | ES | FR | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| amici | friends | amigos | amis | amigos | vrienden | Freunde |
| cose | things | cosas | choses | coisas | dingen | Dinge |
This card holds 8 more words. You meet them when you play the song.
Adjectives
| IT | EN | ES | FR |
|---|
What this song teaches you
Level · B1-
- Vocabulary words
- 10
- Adjectives
- 5
- Word combos
- 7
- Expressions
- 11
- Verb forms
- 36
- Quiz questions
- 35
More Italian songs at this level
Background
About the song
«Era già tutto previsto» is the fourth track on «L’alba», the fourth studio album by Riccardo Cocciante, released in June 1975 by RCA Italiana. The record was produced by Marco Luberti, Cocciante’s long-time writing partner, and arranged by Sergio Rendine, with contributions from Lucas Sideras and Niko Papathanassiou. It was recorded in Studio A at RCA in Rome, the studio where much of the Italian singer-songwriter music of the decade was made. Like almost every song on the album, it is credited to Cocciante and Luberti.
The album arrived at the right moment. A year earlier Cocciante had broken through with «Bella senz’anima», a furious song about a man confronting the woman who is leaving him. It was a major hit, and it was also controversial: it was considered sexist and was censored on Italian television. «L’alba» built on that success. It climbed to number two on the Italian album chart, in a season when the soundtrack of Dario Argento’s «Profondo rosso» by the band Goblin was fighting for the same top positions, and it finished 1975 as the eleventh best-selling album in Italy. Its lead single, «L’alba», backed with «Vendo», also reached number two and stayed in the top ten for three months.
«Era già tutto previsto» was never released as a single, and at first it lived in the shadow of the title track. It grew slowly into one of the best-loved songs in Cocciante’s catalogue. It tells, in the first person, the end of a love affair seen from the side of the man who is left behind. The story moves through three stages, each opened by the same sentence that gives the song its title: a secret beginning, a painful conversation in the present, and a lonely ending at home. The narrator insists that he had seen everything coming, and the last lines reveal the one thing he had not been able to predict.
The song is built as a long crescendo. It begins quietly, almost as if he were talking to himself, and the arrangement and the voice rise together until the final lines are practically cried out. Cocciante’s rough, cracked tenor, which would become his trademark, carries the whole emotional weight of the piece. There is no refrain in the usual sense: the returning title line works as a hinge between the three parts, and each time it comes back the singer sounds a little more defeated.
For Cocciante the mid-1970s were the years in which his style took shape. Born in Saigon in 1946 to an Italian father and a French mother, he moved to Rome at the age of eleven and studied at the French lycée there. He started out as an organ player in Roman clubs and formed a band called GL6 with Marco Luberti and Paolo Casella, before launching his solo career in 1971 under the French name Richard Cocciante. The partnership with Luberti, who wrote and produced with him through this period, gave his early albums their mix of intimate storytelling and big orchestral sound.