“My future is an expanded present, I don’t want to go too far forward”, says Giovanni Allevi, guest of Bruno Vespa on Cinque Minuti. Having returned to perform live on the piano at Sanremo 2024 after two years of treatment for myeloma, Allevi is engaged in a tour that will take him to stages across Europe.
A few days ago, during the concert at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, he confessed to having severe back pain, but was ready to drown it in music: “The back pain started right in the middle of the concert, so I said that phrase that it’s strong, it’s tough,” he says. “The idea that physical pain can be transformed into music is not only a spiritual fact, it is also physical, because when the concert grand piano is playing my energy is absorbed, as if the piano were a very soft mattress and then the contractures of the paravertebral muscles dissolve”.
The illness has multiplied his joy of living, he underlines: “Now I try to grasp from life all the gifts it offers me, much more than before”.
As for the degree in philosophy, “in Sanremo I quoted Kant and I was happy, because when I faced the experience of the concrete possibility of my end and of physical pain, the immortality of the soul returned to being a central node in my thoughts : the immortality of the soul, the great hope or the great illusion of the human race? And then I was enveloped by Kant’s words, in that splendid final page of the Critique of Practical Reason, in which he says that each of us immediately feels that in the depths of our being there is something greater, beautiful, good, prior to our aggression, which transcends our individual experience and my physical pain.”
Allevi also talks about the relationship with his father: “For many years he was my biggest detractor. He is a supporter of the great classical tradition, of symphonism, of Wagner, he saw a sacrilege in my attempt to write new music”.
Finally, thanks to the “patients of the Milan Cancer Institute and to all the people who are experiencing this very difficult journey: they give me great strength”.
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