Listening today: Francesco Guccini – The locomotive
by Marialuisa Veneziano
Before you start music
Also this Sunday the door of the column opens thanks to one of you.
Our reader offers us Francesco Guccini and The locomotive.
And this time let's prepare: we will not simply enter a song.
We'll get on a train.
At first it will proceed almost with narrative step. Then it will acquire weight, tools, tension, speed. And when we think we're still in front of a songwriter with a guitar, we'll realize that Guccini has already dragged us into a nineteenth-century tale of workshops, steam, injustice, anger and myth.
It lasts more than eight minutes.
Today, in the time when after twenty seconds someone fears that the content "does not hold", it may seem a subversive act already this.
Yet listen to her.
After a while we will not wait for it to end.
It will be the locomotive not to let us go.
🎧 Open listening. Then he keeps reading
This page is designed to be read with music next door.
– THE COMMUNITY
(click on the black arrow to make the listening appear).
Start the song.
For the moment, do not focus on political significance.
Listen to something much easier first:
as the song walks.
Then see what happens at your step.
Inside the score
The locomotive appears in RadiusGuccini's fourth album, recorded in the spring of 1972. The arrangements were curated by Pier Farri, Guccini and Vince Tempera; around the voice and guitar we find bass, drums, keyboards, electric guitar, flute, banjo and even mellotron. It is a record in which folk cantautorale opens up to a wider sound palette, with some echoes of the progressive sensitivity of those years.
Tu The locomotive has a fascinating paradox.
Its harmony is relatively simple. His dramaturgy is not.
Vince Tempera told that precisely that long succession of stanzas posed a problem of arrangement. The solution was to gradually increase tension through changes in shades and addition of instruments.
It is a lesson of narrative composition.
If the harmonic material does not change radically, it must change the energy with which we perceive it.
And so music does exactly what a locomotive does.
First it sets the mechanism in motion.
Then it takes speed.
Then it becomes difficult to imagine being able to stop her.
🚂 THE MOTOR OF THE CANZONE
Try to imagine four listening stations:
RACCONTO → MOVIMENT → ACCUMULATION → COURSE
At first Guccini is almost a narrator.
The voice must show us a man we don't know.
Then the rhythm acquires insistence.
New colors come in.
The stanzas happen and the arrangement gradually stops being simple background: begin to push the story from behind.
We do not need the realistic noise of pistons and wheels.
The train is already in the musical form.
This is the thing to listen to.
The locomotive is not imitated. It is built over time.
But who was that man?
And here we are at the most interesting point.
Why The locomotive born of a real fact.
The historical protagonist was Pietro Rigosi, twenty-year-old and railway fireman. According to the reconstruction of Treccani, on 20 July 1893 he took a locomotive released by a freight convoy and departed in the direction of Bologna, reaching a speed of about 50 km hours, remarkable for the time. The machine was deviated and ended up against stationary cargo tanks; Rigosi survived.
But here comes the essential point:
the song is not the news of the event.
Guccini transforms Rigosi.
He delivers a symbolic opponent.
It builds around him the image of the clash between those who own little and those who possess much, between fatigue and privilege, between industrial machine and rebellion.
The famous luxury train towards which in the song seems to direct the locomotive belongs to the poetic construction: in the historical story there was not that clash between two trains.
And that doesn't "slow" the song.
On the contrary.
Show us as a myth arises.
When history becomes danced
Here Guccini has done something that the singers have done for centuries.
He's got a thing.
It changes.
It enlarges it.
It assigns a form that can be remembered.
He doesn't write a railway record.
He writes an epoeia.
And the same language says it: Guccini consciously adopted an emphatic and rhetorical tone that recalled the tradition of the anarchist song between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The same singer-songwriter would have remembered that the song was born as an anarchist and romantic story, becoming only later a sort of collective flag.
It's an ancient phenomenon.
Achilles does not coincide with a war bulletin.
Rolando doesn't coincide with Roncisvalle's record.
And Pietro Rigosi, once entering the song, does not coincide completely with Pietro Rigosi.
Become a the character a community can sing.
🎧 Listen to this.
Now go back to Guccini's voice.
Note as stories before singing.
The phrasing must contain a huge amount of words without breaking narrative tension.
It is a fundamental feature of the great song: melody cannot become a cage for the text.
You have to bring him.
Sometimes anticipate it.
Sometimes leave him room.
And here is also a beautiful provocation for those who consider "music" only what has an immediately seductive melody.
In The locomotive the word produces rhythm.
The story produces form.
Repeat generates wait.
And the listener progressively begins to know the path to the point to want its return.
That's how a song becomes ritual.
Speed is not only speed
For years Guccini has placed The locomotive at the end of their concerts. It had become practically inevitable: the public waited for it as you expect a conclusion that you already know and that, precisely for this, you want even more. The official site recalls it as a constant presence in the final of the concerts; in live performances it was made even more incalciating.
And it's interesting.
Because at that point The locomotive no longer belongs to the author.
Everyone knows her.
The public anticipates.
She recognizes.
Join.
The concert stops for a few minutes being:
a song → others listen
and becomes:
Everyone knows where we're going.
It is perhaps one of the oldest forms of collective musical experience.
More than custom streaming.
Nobody asked the algorithm what you want to listen to later.
The next track is already decided by a few thousand people.
And good luck to those who try to change the ladder.
The note remains
Sometimes music does not tell the story as it happened. Tell her why we needed to remember her.
This distinction is fundamental.
The historical Pietro Rigosi deserves to be known in his reality.
The Pietro Rigosi of Guccini belongs instead to poetry.
Confuse the two would be bad story.
Pretend they should be identical would be bad art.
The song transforms an individual fact into a universal question:
how much can a man accumulate before he decides to break the order of things?
We must not approve the gesture to understand the question.
And this is where listening becomes interesting today.
Because locomotives change, factories change, jobs change.
But the relationship between dignity, frustration, inequality and desire to be seen does not belong exclusively to the nineteenth century.
The great political songs survive when they manage to overcome contingent politics and reach something more difficult:
the human condition that generates conflict.
🔎 One thing to know
Guccini said he had written The locomotive with an exceptional speed.
He had met the story of Rigosi in the memories of the Bolognese working world and said he had employed about half an hour to write the song, taking notes for later stanzas while composing the previous one.
The amazing part?
The beginning was last written.
It's almost perfect.
A song on a locomotive race was written practically on the run.
Evidently, for once, even the white page had the common sense of getting rid of the tracks.
Little curiosity by musicians
Vince Tempera also remembers the presence of Moog in the arrangement of Radius, confessing with a certain autoironia that then did not even know how to use it.
Seventies, gentlemen.
You bought a synthesizer and then you saw what happened.
Today we do the same with some software updates, so we avoid generational superiority.
Take him with you
When the eight minutes have passed, stop before listening.
Not because The locomotive He's necessarily right.
The best works of art do not serve to give us reason.
We need to be more difficult to remain indifferent.
We met a really existed man and a character who never existed exactly like that.
A true locomotive and a symbolic locomotive.
A chronicle and a legend.
A failed gesture and a song that, instead, continues to run for more than half a century.
Maybe this is the best paradox.
Pietro Rigosi's locomotive was stopped.
Guccini's not.
He crossed different records, squares, concerts, generations and political ideas.
It came from who in 1972 was twenty years old to whom today meets for the first time on a screen.
And he keeps asking a question.
Not necessarily:
Where are you?
Maybe a bigger one:
What makes a human being willing to risk everything to oppose what he considers unjust?
The answer is not simple.
Luckily.
Otherwise we wouldn't need history or music.
That's enough.
Guccini, on the other hand, leaves us a train running.
And after more than fifty years, we are still here to listen to him passing through.
«You accuse me of being empty. Yet without me music would not breathe»
by Marialuisa Veneziano
15 September 2026
He showed up in writing without knocking.
Besides, it would have been inconsistent.
He sat in front of me, and for a few seconds, he didn't say anything. I waited. He will. After a while I began to feel uncomfortable, as it often happens to humans when no one immediately fills the space with words, notifications, ambient music or at least a respectable background noise.
«Is that your way of putting me in trouble?»
Silence smiled.
«No. It is your way of being afraid of me.»
It started well.
You have a bad reputation.
«I know. I am associated with embarrassment, loneliness, empty rooms, phone calls that do not arrive. When a conversation is silent, say: "What a silence!" As if an unwanted guest appeared.»
What about music?
«In music, curiously, you treat me with more respect. You even invented signs to call me.»
It is therefore not absence of music. It is music to which it was forbidden, momentarily, to produce sound.
And the difference is huge.
A semi-minimum break is not equal to nothing. It has a precise duration. It takes time. It must be counted, thought, breathed.
«It's funny.»Look. «Musicians spend years learning when they don't have to play. The others spend a life avoiding it.»
Point for him.
So a break is already music?
«Of course. Try to remove them all.»
The result would be terrifying.
Music would become a pronounced speech without commas, without points, without inspirations. A person who tells you his whole life from elementary schools to retirement.
Mozart, after a while, would also ask for help.
The pause organizes the musical speech because it separates, articulates, prepares, surprises. It can be breath or abyss. It may conclude a sentence or deliberately prevent it from closing.
In the language of baroque musical rhetoric there was even the Suspirate: the fragmentation of a line through small breaks that can evoke the sigh.
Silence became a rhetorical figure.
He did not interrupt the expression.
It was the expression.
But we think about music as a sound.
«It's your first mistake.»
He almost looks at me with compassion.
«Confuse the material with the shape. Also a cathedral is made of stone, but no one would say that its size depends on the number of bricks.»
In music the sound acquires meaning because there are separation, duration, distance.
Think about the range.
Two notes do not form a range only for what they are, but for the relationship between them.
Even a melody needs something that is not materially present.
Edmund Husserl, reflecting on the consciousness of time, had observed that we perceive a melody because the newly passed note continues to be held in memory as we wait for the next one.
In other words, we listen to the present by bringing us behind what does not sound anymore and prolonging us to what does not sound yet.
Silence seems to have fun.
«See? It's always me.»
Beethoven used it a lot.
«Beethoven treated me very seriously. Sometimes even with brutality.»
Just think about the attack of the Fifth Symphony.
Even before the famous reason, Beethoven inserts a tiny rhythmic space. Then those four notes are blocked by a crown.
The gesture seems elementary.
It's not.
Those interruptions transform a few heights into an event.
Playing only the notes without understanding what happens around them means saying a question by eliminating the question mark.
Beethoven understands very well that energy is not born only from sound.
Born fromwaiting for sound.
In his mature language, the cracks can become almost dramaturgy: a fracture, a suspension of thought, something that obliges the listener to complete interiorly what the orchestra has momentarily abandoned.
«Beethoven», sigh my interlocutor, «He had at least the good education to let me work.»
Haydn loved to play with her, too.
«Oh, Haydn! A man who understood that the audience, to be surprised, must first feel safe.»
Haydn's musical humor is often built precisely through manipulated expectations: prolonged expectations, false conclusions, caesures, unexpected returns.
Silence can be comic.
It's important to remember.
It is not always death, metaphysics and fog on the abyss.
Sometimes it's just timing.
A comedian knows very well: a joke called half a second too soon can die; half a second break can blow it off.
Music and comedy share something essential: both govern expectation.
BOX IRONIC
What about Debussy?
Silence changes expression.
«Finally someone who wasn't always trying to fill me.»
In Debussy the space between the sounds often becomes part of the timbre matter. The agreement is not only valid during the attack: it applies in its resonance, in its decay, in the way it leaves the air modified after itself.
The piano, above all, teaches an interesting truth.
After the hammer hit the rope, the pianist can no longer "make" that note.
Can only Listen to her die.
This is one of the most severe lessons of interpretation.
Control is not always about acting.
Sometimes it is not to interfere.
A good pianist must know when to let a deal continue without adding anything.
«Surprisingly applicable concept also to conversations», observe the Silence.
I can't blame him.
And Mahler?
«Mahler knew I could be frightened.»
In Mahler's music, silence is almost never neutral. It can arrive after immense orchestral masses and, precisely by contrast, become louder than the orchestra.
Particularly in the tarde pages, the rarefaction of the sound tissue assumes an almost existential meaning.
The final of the Ninth Symphony seems to gradually subtract matter to sound.
Dynamics lower.
The phrases are fragmented.
The orchestra seems to lose weight.
The final gesture does not have the character of the theatrical conclusion.
It's quite a progressive leave.
And then something extraordinary happens: when the instruments stop playing, the listener does not immediately perceive the end.
For a few seconds he continues to listen to something that is no longer there.
«That's it.», says the Silence, «It's one of my best moments.»
But at some point John Cage arrived and made her the protagonist.
«Ah. Someone finally gave me the lead role.»
In 1952 John Cage presents 4’33”.
The pianist David Tudor sits on the instrument and, in the three movements of the opera, does not intentionally produce notes on the piano.
Popular legend often says that 4’33” be "four minutes and thirty seconds of silence."
But it's an imprecise definition.
The point of the work is that absolute silence does not exist in the experience of listening.
During the execution remain the cough blows, the movements of the public, the breath, the noise of the room, what happens outside.
Cage therefore changes the boundary of the work.
He does not ask us to listen to what the musician produces.
He asks us to notice what was already playing around us.
«Ammetta however»I tell him, «that you had an exceptional print office.»
«Seventy years later, you are still talking about it.»
Touché.
But many people consider 4’33” a provocation.
«Why would it be a problem? The history of art is full of very useful provocations.»
In fact Cage does not force us to love 4’33”.
He forces us to ask a question.
Where does the noise end and the music begins?
The answer is not purely acoustic.
It depends on the attention.
A clacson heard as a disturbance remains noise.
The same clacson consciously inserted into a composition becomes musical material.
The sound physically has not changed.
It has changed our way of organizing it mentally.
And that means listening is not a passive gesture.
It's a creative act.
So the real theme is not silence. It’s listening.
«We finally get there.»
Contemporary society has a curious relationship with silence.
We're constantly trying to eliminate him.
We enter a store: music.
Let's get in the car: music.
Let's run: headphones.
Let's study: playlist.
We cook: podcast.
We wait five minutes: phone.
Even the elevator, poor man, had to equip itself with a soundtrack to prevent two humans spending twelve seconds together without a diversion.
It's not necessarily bad.
Democratization of listening is a huge achievement.
But there is a less reassuring question:
What are we trying not to hear?
Henri Bergson distinguished the measurable time of watches from the lived duration of consciousness.
Silence gives us that duration.
Without external events that segment it, we suddenly feel the time.
And hearing time also means listening to ourselves in time.
Maybe that's what bothers us.
In the end pop music also uses a lot of silence.
«Sure. I've never signed an exclusive contract with classical music.»
A break before the chorus can make it immensely more effective.
One stop Suddenly the accompaniment brings the voice to the foreground.
In the funk the relationship between attack and space is essential.
In jazz a musician can create tension just avoiding filling each line.
In rock, a suspension before the sound explosion prepares the listener’s body.
In electronic music, break prepares the drop also through subtraction and rarefaction.
Even in the rap silence can have metric weight: a word isolated from a break can acquire more strength than a burst of syllables.
The principle is always the same.
The ear desires what is temporarily denied to him.
Silence smiles.
«I don't want to brag, but I have a decent transversal career.»
What does the interpreter represent?
This is serious.
«Responsibility.»
A written pause does not allow the musician to stop playing.
On the contrary.
During silence the musical tension must continue.
It's one of the hardest things to teach.
The beginner student thinks:
note = music; pause = nothing.
The mature musician includes:
note = gesture; break = other gesture.
A crown doesn't mean "let's stop for a while."
It means deciding how much time can expand without losing shape.
A crack is not a hole.
It's a threshold.
And in the ensemble the break is even a social act.
You have to breathe together.
Feeling when the others are coming in.
Stay in time even when no sound is produced.
It is almost a philosophy of cohabitation.
I mean?
«Being present without occupying space.»
Shut up.
He looks at me.
I figured out the lesson for once.
Perhaps we have confused too often the presence with production.
If we don't talk, we believe we don't contribute.
If we don't intervene, we're afraid to disappear.
If we don't publish, we don't comment, we don't answer, we don't fill, it almost seems that we cease to exist.
Music offers a different possibility.
A voice can silent for many jokes and stay perfectly inside the composition.
His momentary absence is not equivalent to irrelevantness.
In fact, he can make his return decisive.
Let's also think about relationships.
Listening to someone does not mean to wait politely for it to end up being able to finally tell something more interesting about us.
It means, at least for a few moments, give up our solo.
It's not very small.
So the silence between two people can also be musical?
«Depends.»
There are different silences as there are different agreements.
There is silence of intimacy.
The one where nothing needs to be filled.
There is silence of embarrassment.
The punishment.
Who doesn't find words.
Who would have too many.
There is silence after a serious news, when any phrase would sound insignificant.
And there is the very rare of those who can stay next to a pain without immediately trying to correct it.
In music not all tensions require instant resolution.
Some need to stay.
Maybe people should learn the same principle.
We have an almost harmonic smania to solve others:
"You must react.”
"It will pass. "
"Positive thought. "
They're all toned too soon.
Sometimes the only musically correct answer is a suspension.
So you are not always peaceful.
«Absolutely not.»
Silence can be violent.
We think of the silence imposed, censorship, omerity, indifference.
Not everything silent is deep.
Sometimes he just shuts up because he didn't have the courage to talk.
It is important not to romanticize it.
The music itself shows it.
A break only works if there is a context that gives it meaning.
Otherwise it's not a break.
It is lack of structure.
«See? Even I need grammar.»
What is the most difficult silence for a musician?
Think about it.
«The one after the last note.»
She's right.
The interpreter arrives at the end of a track and has to face a very delicate moment.
Technically the execution is finished.
Musically, often, no.
A great performer does not immediately abandon the keyboard, arch or gesture.
Let the resonance die.
Store for a few seconds the shape in space.
The public perceives it.
There are endings after which an immediate applause seems almost a violation.
Not because there is an aristocratic code of the concert.
But because the body understands intuitively that something is still happening.
Music has ceased.
Listening is not.
And this is perhaps the point where silence reaches its maximum intensity.
If he should give advice to music listeners?
«One.»
I'm waiting.
Of course.
«Sometimes you don't do anything while you listen.»
Nothing.
Don't drive.
No images.
Don't answer the messages.
Don't order your shopping.
Do not use Bach to increase productivity, Chopin to fall asleep or Mozart to convince your brain to get results that Mozart himself had never promised.
Put a song.
Sit down.
And leave him the scandalous right to be the only thing that is happening.
Perhaps we will find that listening to music is one of the most radical forms of attention that have remained there.
Last question. What then is Silence?
For the first time it seems to hesitate.
Then he answers.
«They are the place where the sound includes not being eternal.»
And suddenly the whole music story seems to be in that sentence.
A note has value because it ends.
A phrase can move us because it doesn't last forever.
A whole symphony is only possible because each sound accepts to leave room for the next.
Perhaps this is the reason why music speaks so deeply about life.
We are also temporal creatures.
Let's go in.
We stay for a few jokes.
Let's change shades.
We meet other voices.
Sometimes we find harmony.
Sometimes a dissonance.
Then, inevitably, we have to shut up.
But music gives us a less naive consolation of eternity.
He teaches us end doesn't necessarily mean you haven't been.
The last note of a symphony disappears.
Yet the symphony happened.
One voice shut.
Yet he can continue to resonate in the memory of those who listened to it.
Maybe that's what Silence keeps.
Not nothing.
The trace of what has passed.
I get up to take him to the door.
«Can I ask you at least how you prefer to be quoted?»
This Sunday the music comes once again from one of you.
A reader has proposed No potho reposing and chose, in particular, the live interpretation of No..
And maybe he couldn't choose a version more suited to the spirit of this column.
Because there are songs that belong to an author.
Then there are others who, at some point in their history, seem to stop belonging only to those who wrote them. They pass by mouth, from generation to generation, enter into marriages, departures, returns, memorials. Someone sings them and someone else, without knowing well why, feels like he's home.
No potho reposing It's one of these.
It is not officially the hymn of Sardinia — since 2018 it is Procurade and moderate — but it was even among the songs taken into consideration for that recognition. More than an institutional anthem, it has become something perhaps even more difficult to decree by law: a place of collective memory.
🎧 Open listening. Then he keeps reading
This page is designed to be read with music next door.
(click on the black arrow to make the listening appear).
The recording that accompanies our listening dates back to Christmas concert of 9 December 2006. Noa dedicated her to Andrea Parodi and Sardinia. The video is now published on the official channel of the artist.
Let her go.
And for a few minutes don't worry about understanding every word.
First he listens to what the voice does when words belong to something bigger than her.
Inside the score
The title with which today we know the song comes from poetry To Diosa, written in 1915 by Salvatore "Badore" Sini, lawyer and poet of Sarule. In 1920, Joseph Rachel made his famous musical appearance; from the following year the composition appeared in the repertoire of the Philharmonic Musical Body of Nuoro directed by Rachel himself.
And it's important to point out something.
No potho reposing was not born as an ancient anonymous song mysteriously emerged between the Sardinian mountains.
He has authors. He's got a date. He's got a story.
Yet time has turned on it a fascinating transformation: a song has been gradually absorbed by tradition until it is perceived as a common heritage. Cori, popular singers, classical musicians, jazz musicians and rock artists crossed it into dozens of different interpretations.
This, for a musicologist, is already a wonderful story.
Folklore is not always what is born without author.
Sometimes it's also what a community decides not to let go.
A melody that can't stand still
The meaning of the title is simple and terrible:
"I can't rest. "
He who speaks does not find peace because thought continually returns to the loved one.
Today probably someone would recommend distraction, exit, do sports, silence notifications and possibly not control the last access.
Salvatore Sini did something less practical.
He wrote a poem.
Lucky for us.
Rachel's music has a wide, cantabile performance, supported by a ternary pulsation that gives it something of the cradle and something of the incessant movement.
And here's the little paradox.
The music waves gently.
The text, however, says there is no peace.
The musical body seems to cradle what the heart cannot placate.
It does not need a great harmonic complexity to achieve this effect. Strength lies in the continuity of the line, in the melodic opening and in the return of phrases: love is not represented as a momentary explosion, but as a thought that insists.
Come back.
And he's still coming back.
As some names do within us.
🎧 Listen to this.
Now try to stop following the translation.
Listen the direction of phrases.
You will feel the melody continuously upwards and then falls, as if it tries to reach something that remains a little further.
Listen to the repetitions.
In a bad song, repetition may be a lack of ideas.
This is the opposite.
Repeating means not being able to stop thinking.
And then listen to Noa.
Do not try to determine whether its pronunciation belongs to Sardinia. That's not the point.
This is a voice coming from elsewhere and entering a music received as a gift.
And it is precisely this distance to make interpretation so meaningful.
A handy song
Here history becomes almost more beautiful than musicology.
Noa says that Andrea Parodi invited her to Sardinia and taught her No potho reposing. In the description published on his official channel, he recalls his voice, his artistic audacity and the deep bond he had with the island. Shortly after that meeting Parodi died, at 51. When Noa participated in the 2006 Christmas concert, she chose this song and dedicated it to her memory and Sardinia.
Let's think.
A poet writes for a woman.
A composer turns those words into song.
An island adopts that song.
Andrea Parodi takes him in his own voice to make one of the symbolic interpretations of his path.
Then he teaches it to an Israeli singer.
He is gone.
She sings it.
This is what music can do with time.
Don't cancel it.
He crosses it.
Andrea Parodi had made No potho reposing a constant presence of its repertoire; the Foundation that bears its name also documents the collaboration with Noa in 2006.
And then the performance we are listening to is not just a cover.
IS a return.
The note remains
There are music that remind us when we no longer know how to do it.
This is perhaps one of the reasons why No potho reposing has crossed the border of the simple love song.
He speaks of a precise person, and yet everyone can live it.
It's about distance, but it's become a member.
He speaks of someone who cannot rest thinking of those who love, and over a century he was sung for loves present, distant, lost, for a land left and found, for people who continue to live in memory.
Something happens here that belongs to music rather than words.
A poem says:
I love you.
A song sung by thousands of people ends up saying:
we know what it means.
And it is in that passage from me to us that a song begins to become heritage.
🔎 One thing to know
No potho reposing is also known with the original title To Diosa.
Salvatore Sini's poem dates back to 1915; Joseph Rachel put it in music in 1920. In the course of the 20th century the song passed through choirs, interpreters of tradition, cultured music, jazz and popular music, until it became one of the most recognizable sound symbols of Sardinia.
And a curiosity says a lot about its identity value: in 2018 No potho reposing was among the alternatives discussed to become official anthem of the Sardinia Region. In the end it was chosen Procurade and moderate.
Maybe that's okay.
Some songs do not need a decree.
They have already been elected from the heart.
Take him with you
When the last note is over, think for a moment about the journey that made this music.
From Sarule to Nuoro.
From paper to voice.
From Sardinia to the world.
From Andrea Parodi to Noa.
And now from our reader to this page.
That's exactly why we wanted to open it. Sunday listening to your proposals.
A beloved music does not remain firm.
It's delivery.
Somebody let us know.
We keep it for a while.
Then we'll go to someone else.
And perhaps this is the most beautiful form of immortality that music can grant: do not prevent things from ending, but allow them to continue in another voice.
No potho reposing speaks of a love that does not let rest.
But after more than a century he also tells something else.
A land.
A language.
A man who gave a song to another voice.
A singer who, when that man was gone, returned her singing.
A musicological reading of ties, absences and what remains
by Marialuisa Veneziano
8 September 2026
There are friendships ending with a banged door.
They're almost lucky.
They have a date, a cause, maybe even a guilty one. We can tell you: "this happened," "that said," "we haven't spoken since then."
Then there are others.
The ones that don't end at all.
They decrease.
First call every day. Then once a week. Then a distracted message, some birthdays, a promise to see itself formulated with the same conviction that certain governments announce epochal reforms.
Finally silence.
No fights.
No death.
And yet something is dead.
Perhaps this is one of the most unique forms of adult pain: losing someone who quietly continues to exist.
Music knows this kind of disappearance.
Because in music not everything that is silent is over.
Aristotle had already understood the problem
Much before social networks, Aristotle had distinguished three fundamental forms of friendship: the one founded on utility, the one founded on pleasure and that, much more rare, based on mutual recognition of good.
The first two last as long as it lasts.
If the interest changes, the utility ends.
If you change your pleasure, you end up dating.
The third is more difficult because it does not use the other for something: see the other.
Two thousand years later we have sophisticated tools to keep in touch and continue to have exactly the same problem.
It's not hard to have relationships.
It is difficult to meet someone in front of whom it is not necessary to be continually interesting, useful, efficient, cheerful.
The contemporary society rewards the performance.
Even in relationships.
We must be available but not too needy, sensitive but not heavy, present but not intrusive, fragile but preferably in times compatible with the commitments of others.
The pain, above all, has very little networking skills.
When life begins to hit seriously — disease, loss, failure, separation, fear — We discover that some people were fond of our version in greater shades.
At the first modulation towards the minor ask politely the account.
And right here music begins to become interesting.
The counterpoint of friendship
A good friendship does not look like unison.
The unison is reassuring: two voices follow the same note.
But two human beings who always thought the same way would probably be unbearable after twenty minutes.
True friendship rather resembles the counterpoint.
In the counterpoint the voices remain autonomous.
They don't have to coincide.
They have different directions, profiles and rhythms, and yet they build together an intelligible form.
This is one of the deepest insights that the history of music can offer to the philosophy of relationships.
The second voice is not important because it repeats the first.
Maybe because we don't always look for someone who eliminates pain.
It's important because he answers them without cancelling.
Bach knew that perfectly.
In one escape the subject is pronounced by one voice and then delivered to another. While one speaks, others do not cease to exist. They continue, comment, support, contradict.
No good escape works if all parties claim to be the soprano at the same time.
Social life, too.
It's just that the problem is called a meeting.
Friendship requires this counterpoint ability: continue to be oneself while leaving room for the existence of the other.
Not fusion.
Report.
Dissonance is not the opposite of harmony
We have done a serious wrong to the word "harmony".
We use it as a synonym for lack of conflict.
A harmonious family.
A harmonious couple.
A harmonious friendship.
As if musical harmony consisted of an endless succession of consonances.
It would be unbearable.
The history of Western music is a history of tension management.
Sustainability.
Ritardi.
Passage notes.
Prepared dissonances.
Changed agreements.
Chromatisms.
Dominants who promise resolutions and then, with some perfidy, go elsewhere.
Music does not eliminate tension.
It gives you a sense.
It's a huge difference.
A seventh dominant is not beautiful despite its instability.
It is beautiful also thanks to it.
A delay acquires strength just because a voice remains momentarily where it should no longer be.
Curious definition, if we think about it, even some people in our lives.
The musical maturity consists in understanding that dissonance is not necessarily error.
The emotional maturity should probably learn the same thing.
A friend is not the one who never contradicts us.
He is the one with whom even dissent keeps a relationship.
And then the deception cadences arrive
Who studies harmony knows well that small cruelty called cadence of deception.
Everything seems to prepare the conclusion.
The dominant tends clearly towards tonic.
Our ear already knows where it's going.
But not.
The agreement deviates.
Waiting resolution is denied and music takes another path.
If there is a musical process that describes adult life well, here it is.
We prepare for a conclusion.
There's a deviation coming.
We thought he was that person.
That work, that house, that future, that friendship.
Dominant.
Then life puts another deal.
We have no wrong theory.
A deception cadence has simply arrived.
The extraordinary thing is that in music a cadence of deceit does not necessarily destroy the composition.
Prolong it.
It compels the phrase to seek another solution.
How many times does the same happen to us?
The bat doesn't make life beautiful. It would be foolish to support him.
But it can change the shape.
Schubert and the art of changing light without changing room
Few composers know the feeling of precariousness as Schubert.
In his music something mysterious happens frequently: we have not yet come out of a sentence and already the harmonious landscape has changed.
A modulation, a third relationship, an improvised far-off tonal region, and what until an instant seemed familiar acquires another light.
It is a music that knows how little it is because what we know becomes foreign.
People do that, too.
Someone who knew our way of laughing, our fears, details that no one else could understand, one day speaks to us with the courtesy reserved to an acquaintance.
And maybe that's what hurts.
Not the distance.
The transformation of intimacy into extraneity.
An old friendship does not become painful because we have forgotten.
It becomes painful because we remember very well.
Music has memory
Philosophy has discussed the relationship between time, identity and memory for centuries.
Music offers a concrete demonstration.
We cannot understand a melody by listening only to the present note.
Each note acquires meaning because we remember the previous one and imagine the next one.
Without memory there is no musical phrase.
There are only later sounds.
When Beethoven presents a theme and much later makes it back transformed, emotion also arises from recognition.
We've heard it before.
But it's not the same anymore.
Just like us.
Maybe that's why a song associated with a person possesses almost brutal power.
It's not just autobiographical memory.
The very structure of music forces us to live at the same time present and past.
A photograph says:
You were there.
A music can say:
For a few minutes, you're still there.
And it's an almost metaphysical difference.
Why do we listen to music when we're sick?
Not necessarily because we want to be comforted.
Sometimes we do something seemingly absurd.
We are sad and choose sad music.
We're alone and listen to Schubert.
We have the cheerfully devastated heart and decide it is the ideal time for Mahler.
From the point of view of emotional efficiency would seem a questionable strategy.
And yet it works.
Why?
We're looking for something I know.
Schopenhauer attributed the music a very unique position between the arts, because it felt that it reached the deep structure of our will, without passing through the representation of objects.
We can discuss his metaphysics.
But intuition remains very powerful.
Music doesn't need to tell us:
"I know you're sad."
It can simply build a form in which sadness becomes habitable.
This makes some great works.
They don't eliminate pain.
They give it walls.
Music doesn't say: "You must react"
Here it has a remarkable advantage over many human beings.
A sonata doesn't ask us when we finally decide to move on.
A quartet doesn't suggest that "time fixes everything."
Mahler does not send very good motivational days.
Music does not claim that our pain has a socially acceptable deadline.
It stays.
And perhaps his ability to remain explains why, in the most difficult times, we can perceive it almost as a presence.
Be careful, though.
Music does not replace friendship. You can't take us to the hospital. He can't help us. You can't tell us we're wrong. He cannot do that terrible and wonderful thing that makes a real friend: to contradict us when it would be much easier to indulge.
But he can teach us something about the quality of the presence.
The string quartet as a small political theory of friendship
Let's get a quartet.
Two violins, purple, cello.
Four stamp identity.
No one is self-sufficient.
The first violin can lead, but without viola and cello would lose harmonic depth; without the second violin, much of the internal structure would become unthinkable.
In the great quartetistic tradition — Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bartók — the four parts become interlocutors.
Goethe defined the quartet as a conversation between four reasonable people: the image is famous because it catches something essential.
In chamber music it is not enough to play your part well.
You have to listen to what others do while playing your own.
This could be one of the best definitions of friendship.
Do not stop to exist to listen to each other.
Do not stop listening to each other while we exist.
Mozart and Haydn: the greatness of recognizing the greatness of others
There is then a kind of friendship particularly rare in the artistic world: the one capable of surviving the talent of the other.
Mozart dedicated six quartets to Haydn after a very long and severe compositional work.
Haydn, listening to Mozart, openly recognized the extraordinary greatness of the young colleague.
It's less trivial than it looks.
Recognising the superiority or talent of the other without feeling diminished is one of the most mature forms of friendship.
Envy says:
If you shine, I disappear.
Friendship says:
I can see your light without losing mine.
This is also polyphony.
Schumann and Brahms: When believing in the other comes first of itself
In 1853 Robert Schumann welcomed the young Brahms and dedicated him an article destined to change his career, presenting him as a new great voice of German music.
In the Music Court, being new can become the most serious of suspicion.
by Marialuisa Veneziano
************
🎧 MUSIC FOR LETTURE To accompany The process to the impossible voice, we recommend listening to Concerto in mi bemolle major per sassofono contralto e orchestra d’archi, op. 109 by Aleksandr Glazunov, in the execution of Valentine Michaud with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, direct from Vasily Petrenko. Approximately fourteen minutes in which the saxophone no longer has to justify its existence or demonstrate by those who have received its voice: simply simply speak. The stamp passes from the most intimate cantability to the virtuosity, dialogues with the bows, transforms itself and remains always recognizable. It is almost the musical answer to the process of our fairy tale: what we have inherited can go through without preventing us from becoming something that previously did not exist. Click on the arrow of the logo "cuffie", press play and start reading.
In Paris, in a shop where it was impossible to find a screwdriver because Adolphe Sax claimed that he had «put in a safe place», a tool was born that immediately provoked a problem.
Not a sound problem.
Sound was great.
The problem was to figure out where he came from.
Adolphe had built it with a shiny metal body, many keys and a small tip on the mouthpiece.
He put it on the counter.
He observed it.
Then he breathed him in.
The workshop filled with a warm and deep voice, capable of being strong without shouting and sweet without apologizing.
The Celestine Clarinet lifted the keys.
— Interesting.
The Baron Trombone denounced the pavilion.
— Audace.
Mademoiselle Oboe shook his eyes.
— Suspect.
The new instrument slowly opened its eyes.
— I was born?
Adolphe smiled.
— I think so.
— Who are they?
— Saxophone.
The little one repeated the name.
— Sas-so-fo-no.
He liked him.
He had just started smiling when Celestine approached.
He looked at the mouthpiece.
Then the tip.
Then again the mouthpiece.
— Wait a minute.
The Saxon was worried.
— What?
Celestine pointed the tip.
— I know that one.
Baron Trombone approached.
— Even this metal seems strangely familiar to me.
Mademoiselle Oboe examined the keys.
— And these?
Quiet.
Adolphe, who knew very well the moment when the tools were about to turn a curiosity into a process, took the coat.
— Good night.
— Where are you going? — asked the Saxon.
— To sleep.
— What about us?
Sax opened the door.
— Try not to establish a court before tomorrow.
The door closed.
The instruments looked.
Celestine.
— Of course we won't merge a court.
At eight and twelve o'clock in the morning the Court had already been founded.
His name was:
OTHER COURT OF AUTHORIES
He presided over Professor Purissimo, an old silver diapason so right that even his shadow seemed to stand on the watch.
Purissimo had dedicated his whole life to a conviction:
Everything really original must come only from itself.
No one had ever noticed that even he was built by someone.
He wouldn't have been careful.
On the wall behind the judge was a huge writing:
I'm sorry.
The Saxon was sitting in the middle of the hall.
Next to him was Annetta, the small aunt of the mouthpiece.
Annetta had no legal qualifications, but he had not prevented her from declaring herself a defence lawyer.
— Do you know anything right? — He asked her for the Saxon.
— No.
— Then why are you defending me?
— Because I'm small and aggressive. It is practically a vocational training.
Professor Purissimo beat the hammer.
TAC!
— Open the process against the instrument called... how?
— Saxophone.
Purely unleashed a register.
— Recent name.
— I was born yesterday.
— Worse again.
A Mormon crossed the hall.
Purissimo continued:
— The defendant is accused of possessing a voice built with elements already belonging to other instruments.
The Saxon opened his eyes.
— But I didn't steal anything!
— We will.
— I was born yesterday!
— Youth is not a musical attenuation.
Annetta got up.
— Objection.
Purely looked at her.
— On what base?
— It seemed like the right time.
— Rejected.
— Good. I just wanted to try.
The first witness was the Celestine Clarinet.
He entered with elegant step.
— Do you recognize anything from the defendant? — He asked Purissimo.
Celestino observed the Saxon.
— The simple tip.
The room bit.
Purely dirty.
— So do you confirm that the defendant has something that already belonged to your family?
Celestine settled.
— I'd rather say he had great taste.
Annetta jumped up.
— The tip was not invented by you.
Celestine is offended.
— I never said that.
— You were thinking it with an unbearable accent.
Pure beat the hammer.
— Silence!
Second witness: the old Oficleide.
He looked at the metal body of the Saxon.
— I know that principle.
Third witness: Mademoiselle Oboe.
— Those keys weren't born yesterday.
Fourth witness: the Flute.
— Not even the holes.
Fifth witness: Baron Trombone.
— I don't know exactly why they called me, but I want to report that metal has been present in my family for generations.
Purely closed the file.
The Saxon suddenly felt very small.
He looked at his body.
Your tip.
The keys.
Until then, he was part of him.
Now it looked like evidence.
— So... — whisper — Is there nothing really mine?
Purely felt it.
— That is precisely what the Court intends to establish.
Provisional judgment was terrible.
— You have seven days — He declared Purissimo.
— To do what?
— To find at least one part of your voice that owes nothing to anyone.
— What if I can't?
The judge pointed out a big eraser on the table.
Annetta paleed.
— You won't want...
— The name "Sassophone" will be deleted from the logs.
— What about him?
Purely looked at the instrument.
— It will be classified as Composite Musical Copy number 47.
The Saxon felt a thrill.
— I won't have a name anymore?
— Copies don't need it.
Annetta jumped on the counter.
— This is barbarity!
It was pure.
— The barbarism is not the responsibility of this Court.
— Too bad. You'd be very qualified.
That same evening the Saxon decided to leave.
He had to find the First Sound.
An absolutely original voice.
Something that was not born from anything earlier.
Annetta came with him.
Celestino showed up in front of the door with a suitcase.
— I come too.
The Saxon looked at him.
— You testified against me.
— I said you got a tip.
— It seemed pretty serious.
— I didn't know they wanted to erase your name.
Behind him, Baron Trombone appeared with a cloak.
— I will come too.
— Why?
— For the spirit of justice.
Celestino looked at him.
— What about that basket?
The Trombone hid it.
— Come on.
— For seven days?
— We don't know how long justice will last.
Annetta peeked in.
— You brought six croissants.
— Justice consumes energy.
They left.
The first stage was the Museum of Antique Instruments.
The keeper was such an old harpsichord that every time he told a memory someone had to check whether it was still History or had already become Archaeology.
— We are looking for the most original tool in the world — said the Saxon.
The harpsichord enlighted himself.
— Finally.
— Is that you?
— Of course.
A voice came from a theca.
— Um.
It was a psalm.
The harpsichord stiffened.
— Don't start.
The Salterio smiled.
— I didn't say anything.
— You were thinking it historically.
They tried the Piano.
— You were born from something?
Piano looked at the harpsichord.
Then the Clavicordo.
Then Christophers portrayed in a painting.
— I'd rather not answer without my litter.
They tried the Violin.
— Was there anything like this before you?
The Violin contemplated the ceiling.
— Genealogy is a bourgeois concept.
Annetta sighed.
— ♪
In the evening they had questioned twenty-three instruments.
Everyone had ancestors.
Everyone got something.
No one came out of nowhere.
The Sassofono was discouraged.
— If nobody is completely original, why are they processing me?
Baron Trombone ate the third croissant.
— Because you are the last one.
— So?
Celestine answered slowly:
— It is always easier to see the debts of those who come after us than remember ours.
The Saxon remained silent.
It was the first thought he brought with him from the road.
The next day they arrived at Room of the Ancestors.
It was hidden under the museum.
There lived instruments that the world had almost stopped playing.
Ancient cornets.
Bombarde.
Serpentoni.
Viole d’amore.
Chalumeaux.
One of them, an old Chalumeau, recognized Celestine.
— Ah.
The Clarinet stopped.
— Do we know each other?
— Not personally.
The old tool smiled.
— But part of me has come to you.
Celestine said nothing.
For the first time the Saxon saw it without the elegant air.
He just seemed excited.
— Does it bother you? — asked the Saxon.
— What?
— That something of you ended up in a tool that came after.
Chalumeau laughs.
— Finished?
— Yes.
— Boy, if anything of me came to him, then it didn't end at all.
The Saxon approached.
— But he doesn't sound like you.
— Good.
— Why?
The old Chalumeau turned him a good look.
— What a terrible legacy would be that which obliges children to become copies of grandparents?
Later they met Madame Viola of love.
The Saxon told her about the process.
She listened.
— Do they want to know if there's anything in you that doesn't come to anyone?
— Yes.
— And you want to find her?
— I have to.
— Why?
The question irritated him.
— Because otherwise I won't be original.
Viola smiled.
— And why do you have to be original?
— To be entitled to my name.
She stopped smiling.
— This is dangerous.
— What?
— Confuse the value with the absence of debts.
The Saxon did not understand.
The Viola directed Celestine.
— Who did you learn to speak so well?
Celestino directed his masters.
He pointed out his story.
— What about you? — He asked the Trombone.
The Baron began a family speech so long that Annetta had to stop him.
— We understand: you are practically related to the Roman Empire.
The Viola returned to the Saxon.
— See?
— What?
— We all bring something in.
— Then no one is original.
Viola shakes her head.
— You're still looking at the parts.
— Where am I supposed to look?
— To what happens when those parts become you.
That night the Saxon did not sleep.
She looked at Annetta.
— You're from before me.
— Yes.
He looked at Celestino.
— Your stuffing, too.
— Yes.
He looked at the Baron.
— Metal.
— Not personally, but I accept the tribute.
The Saxon sighed.
— Then I'm old.
Annetta gave him a hit on the mouthpiece.
— We are all made of the past.
— What about the future?
She smiled.
— That depends on what you're doing.
On the sixth day something unexpected happened.
The Saxon saw a shadow moving behind a column.
— Who is it?
Nobody.
Baron Trombone left.
The mantle hanged him.
Falls.
— An ambush!
Celestine looked at him on the ground.
— You're tripped.
— A pavement.
Behind the column is Professor Purissimo.
The Saxon backed.
— Did you follow us?
— I had to make sure you didn't fake the evidence.
Annetta shook her eyes.
— For six days?
Pure water.
Celestine approached.
— Why are you really here?
The old diapason looked down.
It was the first time it seemed less straight.
The Saxon noticed something.
On the side of Purissimo there was a small engraving.
A date.
And the name of a builder.
— You were built too.
Pure stiffened.
— Of course.
— With a metal that existed before you.
Quiet.
— And the principle you vibrate with?
Pure did not answer.
— That was also known.
Annetta opened her eyes.
— Professor Purissimo...
The diapason shouted:
— I know!
The Hall of the Antenates was silent.
Pure tremble.
— I've always known.
The Saxon looked at him.
— Then why did you create the Court?
Pure remained a long time without talking.
Then his voice changed.
He wasn't the judge anymore.
— Because I was scared.
— About what?
— That if everything comes from something, then nothing really belongs to anyone.
The Saxon approached.
Purissimo continued:
— I spent my life looking for a completely pure voice. A note without ancestors. An idea that should not thank anything.
— Did you find it?
The diapason closed his eyes.
— No.
— So?
Purely looked at him.
— I started judging others.
Annetta, for once, said nothing.
On the seventh day they returned to the Court.
The room was raw.
Instruments of each family occupied the docks.
On the table of Professor Purissimo was ready the big rubber.
The Saxon left.
Purissimo again assumed the strict face of the judge.
— Did you find a part of your voice coming from nothing earlier?
The Saxon inspired.
— No.
A caterpillar walked the hall.
Mademoiselle Oboe whispered:
— It's over.
Purely looked at the gum.
— So you admit the charge?
— No.
— You just declared...
— I found something more important.
Pure lifted his eyes.
The Saxon turned to the public.
— I looked for the First Sound.
— And?
— No way.
Someone protested.
The Saxon continued.
— The piano has a story. The clarinet has a story. The violin has a story. The trombone...
The Baron stood up.
— A particularly prestigious story.
— Sit down.
— Of course.
The Saxon looked at Purissimo.
— Even you have a story.
The judge did not answer.
— So yes: in me there are things that came from others.
He directed Celestine.
— A principle I know thanks to instruments like him.
He pointed out the old ancestors.
— Ideas built over the centuries.
Then he touched his body.
— I wasn't born from nothing.
Pure took the hammer.
— So what?
The Saxon smiled.
— So I don't have to prove that nobody gave me anything. I have to prove that what I have received does not stop in me the same way he has arrived.
Quiet.
Pure remained still.
Then he said,
— Words.
The Saxon nodded.
— You're right.
The room held its breath.
— Music should respond with music.
The Saxon took place in the center.
Celestino looked at him.
The Oficleide.
Mademoiselle Oboe.
Ancient tools.
Everyone who somehow had something to do with it.
He took a breath.
Suonò.
The first sentence had something that Celestine recognized.
— The tip — He whispered.
Then came a color that the Ophileid recognized.
— Metal.
A figure crossed the keys.
Mademoiselle Oboe just smiled.
— I know that, too.
Professor Purissimo listened.
He seemed almost satisfied.
Here's the evidence, thought.
It is made of pieces of others.
But the sentence continued.
The Saxon let everything he received pass through him.
He didn't hide it.
He didn't imitate her.
He turned it.
The sound became warmer.
Then deeper.
Then suddenly brilliant.
A voice that could smile and, a moment later, confess something.
Celestine couldn't say:
This is from me.
The Oficleid could no longer say:
This is mine.
Mademoiselle Oboe stopped looking for similarities.
Because at some point all those tracks had stopped being separate pieces.
They became a single voice.
The voice of the Saxon.
When he finished, no one spoke.
Annetta dried a corner.
— Powder.
Celestino smiled.
— Of course.
— Don't comment.
Professor Purissimo looked at the big gum.
Then the Register of Authentic Voices.
He opened it on the first page.
It was written:
It's ORIGINAL.
Purissimo stayed long to stare at her.
Then he pulled it off.
The room moved.
— Professor...
He took the pen.
He wrote slowly:
Tell us you've got it.
The Saxon looked at him.
— Am I absolute?
It was pure.
— Technically, the Court does not yet have a procedure for such cases.
Annetta wobbed.
— Of course.
The judge lowered his voice.
— But you will preserve your name.
The Saxon smiled.
— Thank you.
Purissimo stopped him.
— Don't thank me.
— Who?
The old diapason looked at all the tools present.
— Those who preceded you.
Then he added:
— And those who will leave you someday.
Before the session ended, Annetta raised an imaginary paw.
— A question.
Pure sighed.
— What?
— Now you'll still call yourself Professor Purissimo?
A fun buzz went through the hall.
Pure lightning.
— Of course.
— I would recommend Professor Almost-Purissimo.
Somebody laugh.
— Rejected.
— Professor Pretty Authentic?
They were stronger.
— Reject!
— Professor Debitore-Riconoscente?
Even Madamoiselle Oboe laughed.
Pure tried to resist.
Then something happened that no one had ever heard.
The old diapason laughed.
A little laugh.
Argentea.
Perfectly plastered.
— Take off! — shouted.
Some time later Adolphe Sax built other instruments of the same family.
Smaller.
Larger.
More sharp.
Deeper.
One of them, just born, approached the first Saxon.
— Can I ask you something?
— Sure.
— Is it true you copied the other tools?
The shop stopped.
Celestine turned his head.
Annetta smiled.
The Saxon looked at the little one.
— I have received a lot from others.
— So is it true?
— No.
— I don't understand.
The Saxon indicated a staircase.
— If someone teaches you the first step, are you forced to stop there?
— No.
— What if you get in?
— I'll be right there.
— And then?
— Third.
The Saxon smiled.
— Here.
The little reflecté.
— So receiving does not mean copying.
— No.
— What does that mean?
The Saxon looked out of the window.
Paris kept making noise as if it had something urgent to say.
Then he answered,
— It means someone gave you a point to go. The rest of the road, however, you have to follow it.
Annetta got dirty from the mouthpiece.
— Possibly plastered.
And everybody laughed in the shop.
Then the Saxon took breath.
And he played.
Within that voice there were centuries of instruments.
Inventions.
Tentatives.
Errors.
Find out.
But the sound that came out no longer belonged to any of them.
It was through a story.
And he found a new way to continue.
No one really creates from nothing. Within what we are living words received, examples, errors, teachings, gestures, ideas and people who preceded us. Being original doesn't mean pretending nothing to anyone. It means knowing what we have received and having enough freedom to transform it. Copying means stopping where someone has already stopped. Hereditating means leaving from there. Because the true identity is not born by erasing the traces of others. It was born when those tracks crossed us and, without disappearing, became something that did not exist before.
🎭 IN FAVOLA CAST Each character has a voice. And every voice hides an idea. (click on the arrow and find out more!)
🎷 The Saxon — (Identity) Just born and already charged. He doesn't know who he is yet, but everyone seems to know what he should be. He will find that becoming oneself does not mean starting from zero, but do something new with what we received.
⚖️ Professor Purissimo — (The illusion of purity) Diapason, judge and personal enemy of everything that does not fit perfectly into a definition. He predicts uncontaminated origins from others because he is afraid to find that he also owes something to someone. Very strict with the debts of others, less with their own.
🌾 Annetta — (The Ironic Consciousness) It is a tiny tip with the self-esteem of a symphonic orchestra. He interrupts, stings, corrects and says loudly what everyone thinks slowly. Remember the truth does not become less true only because it makes laugh.
🎶 Celestine, the Clarinet — (The inheritance) Elegant, refined and initially very happy to recognize something in the Saxon. Then he understands that transmitting does not mean possessing. A good ancestor leaves traces; a bad ancestor claims copyright on descendants.
🎼 Mademoiselle Oboe — (The elegant prejudice) Refined, impeccable and convinced that good taste always needs its permission. He immediately recognizes in the Sassofono something already seen and for this he looks with suspicion: it represents who confuses familiarity with value and novelty with a fault. However, when he stops looking for similarities and really begins to listen, he discovers that even elegance can learn something from the unexpected.
🎺 Baron Trombone — (The tradition) Bring your own family tree even when you go to buy bread. He is convinced that being ancient is already a quality, but it will end up understanding that tradition is only true when offers a starting point, not a place to stop.
🎼 Madame Viola d’Amore — (The memory that lets go) He saw modes born, triumph and disappear, so he doesn't impress easily. He knows that being overcome does not mean being erased. The true memory does not hold: delivery.
🎩 Adolphe Sax — (Invention) He puts existing things together and has the audacity to call the result "new". This is precisely how much creativity works. The inventor does not create from nothing: he sees possibilities where others only see scattered pieces.
Today’s listening: Franz Schubert – Gretchen am SpinnradeD 118
by Marialuisa Veneziano
30 August 2026
Before you start music
There are educated thoughts.
They come, they get recognized and then, with some common sense, they leave.
And then there are others.
The ones coming back.
Let's get them out and get back. We change room and follow. Let’s try to take care of each other and they, with a tenacity that deserves best cause, begin exactly from where we left them.
Schubert was just seventeen years old when he turned one of these thoughts into music.
A girl sits at the archer.
Hands work.
The wheel turns.
But she's not there anymore.
It is entirely within the memory of a man.
🎧 Open listening. Then keep reading.
This page is designed to be read with music next door.
SCHUBERT – GRETCHEN AM SPINNRADE, D 118 (click on the black arrow to make the listening appear)
Inside the score
Before Margherita gave us a word, the piano already told us everything.
The right hand constantly draws circular figures of semichrome.
It is wheel of the archer.
On the other hand, the left scans a regular, almost mechanical movement: the pedal, the foot gesture that keeps the wheel moving.
Schubert does something extraordinarily modern: he does not simply describe an object.
It transforms an external gesture into psychology.
The wheel turns because the archer turns.
But after a few jokes we understand that Gretchen's thinking is also turning.
Meine Ruh ist hin.
My peace is lost.
All the Lied was born of this impossibility to stop.
The piano continues to grind time while the voice recalls the passage of Faust, his face, smile, the sound of his words.
The more she thinks about him, the more the music turns on.
We are not looking at a girl at the archaeologist.
We're listening an obsession from within.
🎧 Listen to this.
Follow the piano.
At first the wheel seems almost regular, domestic.
Then listen to what happens when Gretchen begins to remember Faust more intensely.
The vocal line goes up.
Harmony tends.
The breath becomes more and more urgent.
As long as the memory arrives:
His kiss.
And that's where Schubert makes the most beautiful gesture.
For a moment, the wheel stops.
The piano loses its incessant movement.
As if the memory had become so powerful to interrupt even reality.
Quiet.
Suspension.
Then Gretchen returns to himself.
And slowly the wheel starts again.
It's one of the moments when we understand why Schubert didn't just "play" Goethe.
He read it through the sound.
The note remains
There are thoughts that we do not remember: we continue to live them.
The greatness of Gretchen am Spinnrade is not only the famous imitation of the archaeologist.
If so, we would have a wonderful descriptive music page.
Schubert does something much deeper.
At first we believe that the piano represents the wheel.
In the end we understand that it represents Gretchen.
His thought became circular.
It does not proceed towards a conclusion. He always comes back to the same point: he.
This is what happens to us when a memory becomes too big.
The world keeps moving.
We continue to do the necessary things.
We open doors, we answer, we work, we fix, we walk.
The wheel turns.
Yet, under every gesture, there may be a name around which everything secretly continues to rotate.
Schubert knew.
She was seventeen.
Which is slightly irritating for all of us who at seventeen years were already satisfied when we could understand what to do in the afternoon.
Take him with you
When the track ends, the wheel has not solved anything.
Gretchen is no longer free than he was at first.
The memory remains.
The desire remains.
Even the shade seems to bring it back to the point from which it had left.
Yet we have understood something.
Not all thoughts must lead us somewhere.
Some come back because they keep something that we have not yet finished loving, understanding, losing or wanting.
Maybe that's why Schubert lets the wheel continue.
He's not trying to heal Gretchen.
He listens.
And in doing so he transforms his restlessness into one of the most extraordinary musical images of the human mind.
A wheel.
A girl.
A memory.
And that strange truth for which, sometimes, while life continues perfectly to proceed, the heart remains firm at the same point.
A book that has been closed for too long. A boy decided to open it. And a music ready to return to the world.
by Marialuisa Veneziano
***********
🎧 MUSIC FOR LETTURE To accompany The awakening of the Giant, we recommend listening to the initial chorus "Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen" from Passion according to Matthew, BWV 244 by Johann Sebastian Bach, in the execution of Netherlands Bach Society direct from Jos van Veldhoven. It is precisely the music at the center of our fairy tale: the great one Passion that, in 1829, Mendelssohn helped to bring back to the public. Two choirs, orchestra and choral intertwine in a monumental construction that seems to progress slowly from a long time to us. It is not only the beginning of a Passion: for our history it is the very voice of the Giant reopening his eyes, abandon the powder of the shelf and breathe back through other hands, other voices, another time. Click on the arrow of the logo "cuffie", press play and start reading.
In Berlin, in a large hall where men spoke undervoice for respect for music and scores spoke loudly as soon as men left, there was a shelf that no one ever looked at.
It was tall, dark and slightly crooked.
On the last shelf, crushed between a volume of motets and a collection of corals that claimed to have personally known at least three principles, he rested a huge book.
It had the worn cover, the folded corners and many pages that the little Minuetto, the most vain among the compartments of the room, considered it almost a manufacturing defect.
— How many pages do you have? — He asked him one night.
— Lots.
— I see that. How many?
— Enough.
Minuetto sighed.
— That's why they don't play you. Today we have to be brief.
The great book did not answer.
On the back he had a name that dust had almost hidden:
Johann Sebastian Bach.
And below, in letters now a little discolored:
Passion according to Matthew.
The other scores called him simply The Giant.
Not because he was scared.
Because it occupied a lot of space and spoke very little, two characteristics that, according to Minuetto, in the musical environments were often enough to be considered important.
Every night, when the lights went out in the hall, the scores started their conversations.
Ottavia the Chromium ran from one leggio to another bringing news that no one had asked her.
— Tomorrow they try Mozart! I heard everything! Full orchestra! Two oboi! Two horns! And maybe even cookies in the range!
— Cookies do not concern music — Herr Fagotto.
Herr Fagotto was an old tool that lived in the corner and considered everything that had happened after his youth a progressive deterioration of civilization.
— In my day... — He often said.
No one had ever understood exactly what his time was.
They changed according to the subject.
Madame Ragnatela lived above the Giant.
She was a small ragna convinced that she was appointed General Custodian of the Archive, although no one remembered by whom.
— The Giant is perfectly preserved — He declared.
— You're covering me with webs. — He was watching.
— Preventive storage.
— I can't almost see.
— The light spoils the paper.
And so years passed.
The scores were coming.
They were open.
Play.
Closed.
Others became fashionable.
Others stopped being.
The Giant stayed there.
But what no one knew was that he had not been completely forgotten.
He was the one who learned to hide.
A long time before he had known hands that peeled him, musicians who bowed on his pages, voices that turned those little black signs into something capable of filling a church.
He remembered a man.
Not his face with precision.
Hands.
Hands tired, strong, fast.
Hands they wrote.
Correct.
Cleared.
Recomposed.
Those hands were gone.
Not even those rumors.
And the Giant had discovered one of the most difficult things to understand:
time also takes away what we thought should remain.
So he made a decision.
He wouldn't sing anymore.
If it had been closed, nothing would have changed.
No new voice would take the place of the ancients.
No one could have played it differently.
The past would have been safe.
Or at least he thought so.
Every afternoon, however, a little girl arrived in the room.
His name was Lotte.
He was nine years old, two braids that never remained of the same length and a curiosity considered excessive by all adults except his father, who worked in the hall and had now given up to prevent her from asking questions.
Lotte couldn't read a score.
So, unlike adults, he wasn't afraid of important scores.
One day he sat down in front of the shelf.
He looked at the Giant.
— You must be very sad.
The book had a taste.
Of course, Lotte couldn't hear him talk.
Or maybe.
In the fables this distinction has never been particularly useful.
— Why? — asked the Giant.
— Because no one opens you.
— Maybe I don't want to be open.
Lotte thought about it.
— This is even more sad.
The Giant is offended.
— I belong to another time.
— My grandfather belonged to another time.
The book was silent.
— Where is it?
Lotte lowered his eyes.
— There is no more.
For some time no one said anything.
Even Ottavia la Croma, who had passed to announce an urgent matter concerning a dynamic fork, decided to postpone.
Then Lotte smiled.
— But some things I say to her.
The Giant didn't understand.
Lotte got up and ran from his father.
But that phrase remained in the pages.
A young man came to the room some time later.
She was twenty years old, hair that seemed to have discussed with the comb and lost all interest in reconciliation, and a curiosity at least equal to that of Lotte.
His name was Felix Mendelssohn.
Minuetto observed it.
— Too young.
Herr Fagotto:
— In my time at 20 years, we had already the decency to look tired.
Felix began to examine the scores.
He opened one.
Then another.
Then he came to the giant shelf.
Madame Ragnatela came down immediately.
— Vietato.
Felix, of course, didn't hear it.
He extended his hand.
The Giant stiffened.
The cover was opened.
A dust cloud hit Felix.
Ottavia sneezed for seven consecutive games.
Felix began reading.
Slowly first.
Then more and more carefully.
The Giant felt something he hadn't felt for years.
The notes inside him were moving.
A distant voice seemed to wake up.
Then another.
Then a choir.
The old book was afraid.
Turn around.
Felix stepped back.
— Curious.
— Damn it! — protested the Giant.
— Interesting — said Felix.
— I said rude!
But Felix reopened it.
Minuetto observed the scene with growing concern.
— This young man does not know respect for ancient music.
Herr Fagotto brontolò:
— Finally.
That night Felix had a dream.
It was in the large hall, but the shelves had become very high and the leaves flew in the air like white birds.
In the end there was the Giant.
— Why don't you want to be played? — Felix asked him.
— Because nobody can play me like that.
Felix was silent.
— That's true. — he finally said.
The Giant didn't expect that answer.
— Then leave me here.
— No.
— Why?
Felix approached.
— Because remembering doesn't mean remaking yesterday.
— So what does that mean?
Felix looked at his pages.
— Allow yesterday to arrive until tomorrow.
The Giant trembled.
— But if new voices sing my notes, the old ones will disappear.
Felix pointed out Lotte, who was sitting at the bottom of the room in his dream.
— When you repeat a phrase from your grandfather, do you cancel your grandfather?
The Giant looked at the baby.
— No.
— Then maybe a new voice doesn't erase the old one.
Felix smiled.
— Maybe the door farther.
The Giant did not answer.
Because there are thoughts that, when they really come deep, they need silence before finding an answer.
The evidence began.
And they were a disaster.
At least according to Herr Fagotto.
— Too fast.
— We haven't started yet — they noticed.
— Exactly. An unbearable rush.
Ottavia the Chroma ran on the pentagrams shouting:
— Wake up! Wake up! After almost a hundred years we can’t show up!
Minuetto offered himself as an artistic consultant.
— I'd notice.
— What?
— Everything.
— Why?
— The modern public.
— And what does the modern public want?
Minuetto stopped.
— I have no idea. But everyone says you have to give it to him.
Madame Ragnatela suffered a lot.
Every time someone turned a page, his web was destroyed.
— Barbary! — screamed. — Years of archival work!
Little by little, though, something happened.
The notes that had long remained still began to remember that they were not born to be watched.
One after another they became sound.
The Giant listened.
They were different voices.
Different hands.
A different time.
At first it hurt him.
Then he understood something strange.
Those new voices weren't taking the old place.
They were doing what the old had done before them:
They got the music.
And then they delivered it.
He arrived on 11 March 1829.
The Sing-Akademie Hall in Berlin was full.
Felix Mendelssohn went to the podium.
The Giant was open in front of him.
The pages trembled.
— I can still run. — said Minuetto, hidden under a chair.
— You are not even part of the work — Sibilò Ottavia.
— Precisely. I have less to lose.
Herr Fagotto took a position.
— If we have to attend a historical event, I hope at least that it will end at a reasonable hour.
The Giant didn't listen to them.
He looked at the audience.
New faces.
New clothes.
Another century.
— They won't recognize me. — He whispered.
Felix put a hand on the score.
For a moment the Giant had the impression that he could hear it.
— Are you taking me back? — He asked.
Felix lifted his eyes.
And in the mysterious language that sometimes exists between a musician and a page he replied:
— No. I'm entrusting you to the future.
He raised his arms.
Quiet.
Then the music began.
The first sentence crossed the hall.
The Giant recognized every note.
But no voice.
For a moment he felt a fit.
It's not them.
Then a voice picked up a sentence.
Another led her forward.
The instruments took advantage of it.
The choir raised her.
And something began to pass from one person to another.
You couldn't see.
And yet there was.
Like a little light.
From the composer to the pages.
From pages to musicians.
From musicians to the audience.
From past to present.
The Giant finally understood what had been wrong for many years.
He believed that living meant staying the same.
Instead, living meant continuing to be received.
Bach didn't come back to the hall.
The old voices didn't reappear.
No dead hand returned to browse the pages.
That's why the miracle was bigger.
The past had not returned.
He found a way to move on.
Under the chair, Minuetto had become strangely silent.
Ottavia looked at him.
— What?
— It's not modern at all.
— Is that a problem?
Minuetto listened a little longer.
— No.
Then, almost countervoke:
— I think it's the opposite.
Herr Fagotto dried an eye.
— Are you crying?
— Condensa.
— March?
— Historical condense.
When the last note is lost, for a few seconds no one moves.
The Giant waited.
Then the applause came.
Strong.
Long.
The old book felt something like happiness.
— I'm back — He said.
Madame Ragnatela, for once, did not answer.
Because the most important moment had not yet arrived.
Outside the hall, Lotte walked by his father.
He listened to everything.
He didn't understand all the words.
He didn't know the story of that score.
He couldn’t even explain why that music hit her.
But as he walked the road he began, without noticing, to sing a small sentence.
The Giant heard it from the window.
— My music!
Lotte kept moving away.
— He's taking away my music!
Madame Ragnatela slowly came down on the cover.
— No.
— How not? Can you hear her?
— Of course.
— So what are you doing?
The ragna looked at the child disappearing at the corner of the road.
— He's moving her on.
Then the Giant remembered.
A child sitting on the ground.
Two unequal braids.
A phrase pronounced almost by chance:
Some things my grandfather said to her, too.
Finally understood.
People don't defeat time by preventing things from changing.
They cross it by leaving something in the hands, words, gestures and memory of those who come after.
That night the Giant returned to the shelf.
Minuetto approached him.
— So?
— So what?
— You're back young?
— No.
— Have you become modern?
— No.
— Famous?
The Giant reflects.
— Maybe.
Minuetto seemed satisfied.
— I knew it.
— But it doesn't matter.
Minuetto was deeply troubled by such a little worldly statement.
— So what does it matter?
The Giant looked at their pages.
— Someone can open me again tomorrow.
Madame Ragnatela began instinctively to weave a thread on the cover.
The Giant shook him gently.
— Not this time.
— What's that?
— Let me open.
— But dust!
— Come in.
— The light!
— That'll come too.
— Your fingers!
— They'll turn the pages.
Madame Ragnatela was scandalized.
— You're gonna ruin yourself.
The Giant smiled.
— Maybe. But at least I'll live.
And that night was slightly open on the shelf.
He no longer waited for someone to bring him back to the past.
He was waiting for someone willing to take him a little further to the future.
And somewhere in the streets of Berlin, a little girl kept singing.
Remembering does not mean holding back the past so that it remains still. It means delivering what we have received to someone who will come after us. Things really live change voice, change hands, cross other times; and that's exactly how they don't end up with who created them.
🎬 IN FAVOLA CAST Each character has a part. And someone, maybe, plays more than one.(click on the arrow and find out more!)
📖 The Giant An old score that stopped wanting to be opened. (The memory) — represents what we have received from the past and that, for fear of losing or changing it, we risk transforming it into something real. His journey teaches that guarding does not mean closing: it means delivering.
🎼 Felix Mendelssohn Twenty years, curiosity and the dangerous habit of opening what others have left closed. (The bridge) — is the one who communicates two times. He does not want to rebuild the past, but to allow him to reach the future. It represents the interpreter, the scholar, the teacher and whoever receives something and chooses to hand down it.
👧 Loans Nine years, two unequal tresses and no subjugation in front of important things. (The inheritance) — represents what continues without knowing yet to continue. The phrase learned by the grandfather and the melody chanted after the concert show that we often bring within us what we received much before understanding its value.
🎩 Minu Elegant, vain and convinced that anything too long should be immediately shortened. (La moda) — represents the need to be always new, current, easy to consume. He is convinced that what does not belong to the present is inevitably overcome, until Bach shows him that some works do not need to be modern because they manage to be contemporary at every age.
🎶 Ottavia la Croma Very small, very fast and unable to stay still long enough to finish a conversation. (The future) — is what runs forward. Brings news, movement, curiosity. Remember to the Giant that time cannot be stopped: we can only decide whether to stay still or travel with him.
🎵 Herr Burbero, nostalgic and absolutely certain that "at his time" everything worked better. (The nostalgia) — represents the other temptation of memory: to idealize what has been until it makes it untouchable. He loves the past, but he risks loving him because he can no longer change.
🕸️ Madame Ragna Self-proclaimed responsible for the preservation of the entire archive. (The fear of losing) — She wants to protect everything so well that she can almost breathe. It is the symbol of a conservation that, when it becomes excessive, ends up resembling the burial. His comedy hides a serious question: How much can we protect something before we stop her from living?
What about Bach?
Bach doesn't need to get into the scene. (The voice remaining) — is present precisely through what he left. He does not return as a ghost, he does not speak, he does not ask to be remembered. His music does something much more powerful: continue without him.
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