Notes of nostalgia: Chopin and Pascoli. Live listening guide by the Maestro Pier Paolo Bellini. At the piano Maestro Giulio Giurato.

 

Spirto Gentil is a new proposal for listening to music, not only because it sets out to emphasize a repertoire that today is either completely forgotten or appreciated only by a few experts, but especially because of the series’ purpose. It is not yet another aesthetic or stylistic analysis, but rather a rediscovery of the foundation of every aesthetic attempt. Therefore, the series is positioned within that great Christian tradition that, over the course of 20 centuries and thanks to its constant ecumenical vocation, has been able to appreciate the most sincere expressions of the human experience, regardless of their culture of origin. It is not mistaken, then, in seeking to understand the original spirit of this series, to return to the extraordinary activity of the medieval copyists or to that of more recent personalities like Charles Moeller. Their work is born from an ancient certainty: Unum loquuntur omnia (all of reality proclaims one thing).

“In music, in the panorama of nature, in dreams at night (as Leopardi himself wrote in his Canto Notturno…), it is to something else that man pays homage, from which he expects something: he awaits it. His enthusiasm is for something that music, or everything that is beautiful in this world, has awakened within him. When a person begins to feel this, his soul immediately harks to await the other thing: even in the presence of what he can grasp, he awaits an¬other thing; he grasps what he can grasp, but he awaits another thing.”
(Luigi Giussani)

“Sadness has taken hold of me – why? Not even music consoles me today – it’s already late at night, and I don’t feel like sleeping; I don’t know what’s missing – and I’m already past 20 years old.” This brief passage from Chopin’s diary summarizes the entire human experience and, consequently, the artistic trajectory of the great Polish composer. It is the feeling that something is missing, something not yet well-defined, something that is not there but that was at one point, whose absence in the present generates sadness: and Chopin’s music is constantly poised to make room for this longed-for, yet absent, object.

In life, man is struck by the things that move him and that attract him most instinctively, things that he likes, that are convenient for him, pleasant. In short, he is dominated by the instinctive, the immediate, the easy, the lively. And, instead, life lies beyond the music in the foreground: it is one note from the beginning to the end, from childhood until old age. One note! When a person becomes aware of this note, he never loses it again, he cannot lose it: it remains a fixation, but it is the fixation that makes one wise, learned, intelligent. It is the fixation that makes man: the desire for happiness.
(Luigi Giussani)