I was born in a little village near Ferrara between the Adriatic Sea and the Po River. After winning a voice talent competition organized by the Italian Broadcasting Authority, where she placed first among 7,600 contestants, it took Milva two years to become a pop music star in the 1961 San Remo Festival, where she won third prize. The real change in her career came in 1965 when she met Italian director Giorgio Strehler, who introduced Milva to the works of Brecht. She notes that the grandness of Brecht has to do with the medium he wrote in. Poetry is the most difficult genre around.
Poets have to be direct.
Novelists like Thomas Mann or Isaac Bashevis Singer are great writers but they are expansive and are not limited in their use of the language. Brecht is very precise, concise and direct, and this is his greatness. Milva usually sings Brecht in Italian. This is my language and this is how I can express his poetry in the best possible way. His poetry has no language barriers.