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Stories   >   Ludovico Einaudi tells BBC Music Magazine, his writing will always struggle to find acceptance in classical music

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Ludovico Einaudi tells BBC Music Magazine, his writing will always struggle to find acceptance in classical music

Posted: February 3, 2022

His fans may run into the millions but, the pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi tells BBC Music Magazine's Claire Jackson, his style of writing will always struggle to find total acceptance within the classical music world.

Claire Jackson writes…..Ludovico Einaudi has a special manuscript displayed in his studio. It’s a student piece of his, with corrections from a surprising mentor: Karlheinz Stockhausen. When the renowned avant-gardist came to Milan during the early 1980s, the young Einaudi was a keen attendee at his lectures. ‘It was a very important experience for me,’ says the Italian pianist and composer, smiling at my surprised expression. ‘At the time, Stockhausen was writing Licht [his seven-opera series – Donnerstag, Samstag and Montag were premiered at La Scala], which uses the idea of composing to a formula. I loved the idea that a week of music could be contained in a single seed. It’s something that has stayed with me. Of course, my language is very different to Stockhausen.’

‘Different’ is a wry understatement. Stockhausen’s electronic and aleatoric works are considered among contemporary music’s most advanced achievements, but not, as one editor has said to me, ‘the sort of thing one hums after the concert’. Einaudi, on the other hand, specialises in hummable melodies – according to the Official Charts, his music is currently streamed over a million times a day, played everywhere from arena concerts to yoga classes. Should you ever see a ‘play me – I’m yours’ piano at a shopping centre, someone at some point is sure to sit down and tap out a little Einaudi.

But Einaudi’s greatest achievement is the re-popularisation of the celebrity pianist-composer, developing the legacy left by Liszt. Whereas the Hungarian virtuoso pushed the newly invented piano to its limits, the strings are more likely to remain intact after an Einaudi concert. But while the Italian takes a much softer, less technically demanding approach, his music appears just as impactful on its audience.

The cover of Einaudi’s latest album, Underwater, features a swan photographed by the composer himself. He increasingly turns to nature for inspiration. ‘The more I live the more interested I am in having a relationship with nature rather than human beings,’ he says, only half-jokingly. The 12 pieces on Underwater are all for solo piano, which has been ‘prepared’ by adding additional felt to the hammers. ‘I was looking for a specific colour – it was a long process,’ he says.

Like so many recent projects, Underwater was impacted  by the 2020 lockdowns. The first entirely solo album Einaudi has released in 20 years, it was written during a period of extended isolation and has an improvisatory style. ‘I wrote every day and began to edit and refine sections as you would,’ he says, ‘but I found that I was not adding to the music. The best pieces were musical breaths; once I’d exhaled, it was done.’

Underwater follows on from Cinema, a compilation of Einaudi’s greatest screen-writing hits. To date, he has written for 80 film and TV projects, including The Intouchables, Nomadland and The Water Diviner. He is also the unlikely creative behind the soundtrack to This Is England, a gritty, powerful British film (and subsequent TV spin-off) about skinheads and white supremacist culture in the 1980s. In between snippets of The Specials and The Smiths are dark piano melodies that perfectly track the on-screen trauma. It’s bleakness that goes beyond the comfortable tunes in, say, Nightbook or Seven Days Walking, and reveals another side to the composer.

What Einaudi’s music means to so many listeners may be gathered through a glance at YouTube comments (he has over one million subscribers to his official YouTube channel). ‘As someone who suffers from mental health issues, I find this music so helpful,’ says one writer, ‘This music literally saved my life,’ notes another. ‘Ludovico is the pianist who made me start piano lessons at 44,’ adds someone else, while a jovial commentator puts ‘how many people came here as they need to knock out an essay’. (That last one attracted over 2,000 likes.)

It might not be the most harmonically adventurous or technically complex, but Einaudi’s pianism heals, soothes, engages and encourages. It comforts hectic minds and brings peace. ‘There’s an anxiety about having to be busy even if there’s no reason for it,’ he says. ‘My music is a manifesto for slowing down.’

READ THE FULL BBC Music Magazine ARTICLE