Ludovico Einaudi: the classical composer with billions of listeners
As I write this month’s column, Ludovico Einaudi’s Solo Piano album has been top of the Official Classical Chart for 15 weeks. That’s nothing compared to the years that his previous records have stuck to the top of classical hit parades, thanks to the billions of listeners who stream his music. For a significant portion of the entire world’s population, Einaudi is the classical composer of classical composers.
Einaudi: avant garde beginnings and Beatlemania...
Einaudi’s background in Milan isn’t as a scion of the soft-focused classical, but as a apprentice of the avant-garde. As a student at the Conservatorio Verdi back in the early 1980s, he once conducted a rehearsal of one of Luciano Berio’s operas at La Scala, working with the great Italian modernist at the vanguards of musical culture.
Like Berio himself, he loved The Beatles, plus the possibilities of music technology and recording, so the places where his music was forged aren’t quite what you might be expecting. He wasn’t, say, trying to re-write Satie, but to create a language that would express the emotional fundamentals that mean the most to him: a quiet, slow-paced melancholy that’s both generalised and abstract, allowing individual listeners to bring their own lives, loves and losses to his music’s seemingly simple surfaces.
Einaudi: what's the appeal?
Yet the world-dominating appeal of Einaudi’s albums is one of the enigmas of musical life. It is manifestly idiotic to have anything against arpeggios, or minor keys, or quasi-modal harmonic progressions, or any of the other dominant features of his work. But accounting for the gigantic appeal of Einaudi’s music, and its vital place in the emotional lives of so many – it’s among the most popular choices for weddings and memorials, for the most important veils of our lives – is a perplexing task, at least if it’s judged on the terms that other contemporary composers’ work is often assessed.
Einaudi: a well of darkness we can't escape
Having met Einaudi myself and having heard him play in the Radio 3 studio, it’s impossible to feel that this quiet, earnest musician is making his pieces only in order to appeal to the listening billions. I think there’s a well of darkness that he and his listeners can’t escape, a feeling of some nameless tragedy happening off-stage that the sounds of Einaudi’s music can’t get close to consoling. But that place of unfulfillable longing is where so many listeners want to exist.
Maybe that’s one of the truths behind Einaudi’s exceptional and enduring popularity: its soft-focused sounds are not about what he’s doing with the forms and harmonies of musical structure. Instead, his work is a surrogate for the fact that we don’t want to imagine a world without the siren-song of our subjectivity and sentimentality.
Einaudi: the soundtrack to our lives
It’s not about whether you like or don’t like Einaudi’s music. The truth is, his work is the soundtrack of more people’s listening and emotional lives than the music of any other classically defined composer on planet Earth. Or, to put it in simpler terms, Einaudi’s music is top of the charts of the world’s musical feeling.
