Giovanni Allevi: words and music to compose hope
The meeting "Inhabiting Hope. When Music Crosses Grief and Opens to Infinity. The hopes of young people in dialogue between words and music' featured the composer and philosopher.
The thick grey hair, the fluttering hands accompanying the firm, never shouted, dense words that fill the air, Giovanni Allevi, composer, pianist and philosopher was the host of the highly successful meeting 'Inhabiting Hope. When Music passes through pain and opens to the Infinite. The hopes of young people in dialogue between words and music', moderated by Nicoletta Carbone, the voice of Health and Wellbeing on Radio 24.
"In my life before my illness, I had several times played my music in an oncology ward. I must confess that the feeling that dominated my heart was fear.
Although those wonderful people, those turbaned women with their unusually bright eyes, did everything they could to make me feel at home, perhaps putting aside their own pain, I had a restlessness about me generated by a single word: "tumour", it was there, everywhere, he explains.
The maestro continues: 'In my new life, I had been invited again, this time to a paediatric oncology ward, with a difference: I felt like one of them! Already upon entering the Pausilipon Hospital in Naples, the feeling that flooded my heart was no longer fear or anxiety, but an infinite tenderness. I was also in a hurry to meet those children and young people. I knew that I would be walking in a sacred place and that those shining souls, examples of authentic life, would give me unrepeatable moments. The room was all colourful. The little angels in the ward, their heads without hair, some with an IV attached, were already arranged in a semicircle around an upright piano".
So what to play for such a special audience? I thought of Beethoven's unfailing 'For Elisa', Mozart's 'Turkish March' and my own 'Back to Life', perhaps known by some of them. I lifted a hand above the keyboard, my fingers were trembling: 'paresthesias', I thought, smiling in my heart', explains the conductor and pianist. And then 'silence fell in the room. Inexplicably, my hands fell on other keys, on another melody that I had not foreseen, but which was branded into my flesh and only waited to manifest itself in that context: Do Re Fa# - Do Re - Do Re Fa#.
