The 55-year-old has decided to recount in a book the long ordeal experienced from the moment of diagnosis to today
Two years after the diagnosis that shook his life and forced him to temporarily withdraw from the scene, Giovanni Allevi wanted to recount the long ordeal he experienced in a book titled The Nine Gifts – On the Path to Happiness, and on the occasion of the release of this fourth work for Solferino after The Lizard’s Balance, Revolution, and The Rules of the Piano, the composer and pianist granted a long interview to Corriere della Sera and revealed how he is doing today.
Giovanni Allevi and the Myeloma
—
The most difficult period for Giovanni Allevi, who turned 55 on April 9, seems to be behind him, although today the artist is forced to live with the consequences of multiple myeloma, from back pain to hand tremors: “Today I can control the tremor with a brain self-deception. If my fingers shake, I think it’s beautiful, that my fragility is taking center stage, that I am authentic, I am me,” Allevi admitted with the usual positivity that has always characterized him.
“I experienced the possibility of my end, I thought I would spend all my future time in the company of physical pain. So I felt anguish, anxiety, nightmares, panic,” the composer recounted to Renato Franco, revealing that the risk of a deterioration has not been completely ruled out by doctors: “A vertebra had collapsed significantly and risked breaking, which could have severed the spinal cord. It meant the concrete possibility of ending up in a wheelchair. A scenario not yet ruled out, postponed to an indefinite future, but fortunately it might also not happen.”
Allevi, the new tour and unpublished music
—
Allevi, on tour in this second half of 2024 and in the early months of 2025 with his Piano Solo Tour which will take him across Italy extensively, shared with Corriere della Sera, for the first time, the moment he received the diagnosis: “I was on the street, in Rome, when a doctor called me and communicated the diagnosis. Myeloma. A word with a sweet sound, but at the same time insidious. The first feeling I had was one of disorientation, as if I were living inside a dream, as if I had stepped outside of myself, as if it were being told to another person. I remember the pavement as if it became slanted, as if I were inside a photograph. I had lost my sense of reality. I was already entering another reality.”
Today, two years later, Allevi has not only returned to touring but has begun composing music again also to exorcise the difficulties of the last two years: “Rather than writing a diary with words to express my emotions, I wanted to do it in notes, which is what comes most naturally to me. That’s my nature. I would have gone through months of anxiety, moments of euphoria and pain, moments of exhilaration, hope, and waiting. And I would have put them into music”.
Allevi’s Future Day by Day
—
Looking ahead, Giovanni Allevi admitted that he wants to live every moment and has given a new meaning to the word “tomorrow”: “No longer a distant event in the future, but an expanded present. I have learned to live in the moment, I have learned not to leave a single drop of life unheard. Every dawn is a promise, every sunset is a goodbye. Every day you can be reborn and discover within yourself a strength you never imagined: despite the difficulty, the physical suffering, and the illness it is even possible to find a crumb of happiness”.