Sì: The Return That Met Waterloo

MAY 15 1974 · 12:10

Gigliola Cinquetti · "Sì" · Italy · 1974 Placement: 2nd · Language: Italian · Composers: Mario Panzeri, Daniele Pace, Corrado Conti · Venue: The Dome · Host: Brighton, United Kingdom · Type: upset · Broadcast: color crt Ten years after she had won Eurovision at sixteen with 'Non ho l'età,' Gigliola Cinquetti came back to the contest as a 26-year-old Sanremo-seasoned veteran carrying one of the most carefully chosen Italian entries of the decade. 'Sì' was a ballad of tentative assent — a woman saying yes, cautiously, to the possibility of falling in love again — and it had already won Sanremo that February in the ritual pipeline that fed the Italian Eurovision entry through the decade. On Eurovision night in Brighton, the conductor Gianni Ferrio walked her through the orchestration and Cinquetti delivered the song in a long blue dress with the unhurried Italian-festival poise that had become her signature. She finished second with 18 points. The song that beat her, by six points, was performed earlier in the evening by a Swedish quartet whose name none of the international juries yet fully recognized: ABBA, with 'Waterloo.' The Italian result became immediately complicated for reasons unrelated to Eurovision. The 1974 contest fell during the campaign for Italy's divorce referendum, and the word 'Sì' — Italian for 'yes' — was the campaign slogan of the pro-divorce side. RAI reportedly declined to broadcast Cinquetti's song during the campaign window on the grounds that its lyric and title could be construed as implicit political advocacy. The ban was widely considered excessive at the time and remains, five decades later, one of the strangest episodes in Italian broadcasting history. Cinquetti's loss to ABBA has since become the most-scrutinized runner-up finish in Eurovision's classical period. Context Eurovision 1974 was hosted in Brighton's Dome because the 1973 winner, Luxembourg, declined to stage the contest for financial reasons. Italy's Eurovision entries in this era were selected almost exclusively from Sanremo's winning slot. Cinquetti had won Sanremo in 1964 as a teenager, won Eurovision that same year, and would later host Eurovision 1991 — making her one of the few performers to appear on the Eurovision stage across four decades. Legacy 'Sì' was censored in Italy for political reasons unrelated to the song itself and reportedly went unplayed on RAI for a period measured in months. The song's loss to 'Waterloo' became a touchstone of Eurovision runner-up mythology, cited regularly in retrospectives as the year Eurovision accidentally introduced the world to ABBA while a proven veteran sang beautifully into the void. Mythology To lose to 'Waterloo' is not really to lose. It is to appear on the same stage as a band about to change global pop.