From what you say, it is very clear that you haven't read all the users' replies. No one here is envious of Giovanni Allevi, and this is evident throughout the entire discussion... As far as I/we are concerned, what we want to remind everyone is that there are people much more prepared than Giovanni Allevi, both from a composer's and a pianist's perspective—Masters who are wandering aimlessly because they didn't have the luck of meeting the right people in the right place at the right time (not by "miracle" as you euphemistically described in your post), and this is perfectly in line with today's Italy, where there is no investment in culture and brilliant minds are forced to go abroad to find a little light, precisely because the place that belonged to them here in Italy has been occupied by some puppet who was undeservedly placed there by someone else... Not through merit, then, but through connections and political pushes. You speak of "musical culture" and Allevi is certainly not the example... Musical culture is built by studying and investing time in it, with sacrifice and much listening—certainly not by listening to something that arrives instantly precisely because it is lacking in content. To draw a parallel, if I have to speak of literary culture, I take Dante as an example, certainly not Fabio Volo (with all due respect), even if the numbers would seem to shift the balance toward Fabio Volo.
The reason is very simple... Fabio Volo certainly uses a simpler and more immediate language; he reaches everyone precisely because his reading does not require literary preparation. In Dante, there is genius. I still remember when I studied the Divine Comedy in scientific high school... Some passages gave me goosebumps. In it, one tastes the perfection of the structure, the continuous references to human knowledge across various disciplines (not only literary but also scientific, historical, linguistic). We cannot say we can truly express a serious opinion on a literary work if we have not engaged with the most demanding works, those that do not arrive immediately and must be read, studied, and explored in depth. If one does not know literature, one cannot express thoughts related to technicalities, and the only thing we can say is:
- I liked it -
or else
- I didn't like it -
Music is no exception, and if one does not deeply know the works of the greats of music—just as the same parallel of Dante in Italian literature is true—our opinion lacks great credentials and appears, to those who do know, coarse and useless.
Returning then to the subject of this topic, as I have already said in past posts, the greatness of a composer is recognized "over time." Only the greats of music have known how to leave us something that endures and resists time and the various styles that have followed, just as Dante did for literature. If you think about it, this is extraordinary. Not necessarily wanting to talk about theater and opera, just to lower the stakes, one only needs to think of the general public: in cinemas, as on the radio, pieces of so-called "classical" music are still used today. If Allevi does not enter the category of the greats, only time can prove this, and anyway I, like others, harbor strong doubts that his music will stay afloat.
Today there are no excuses for being "sheep." The vast majority of Italians are sheep because they are slaves to a sick system; they are lazy, they have no desire to learn, to grow, or to build their own cultural background.
For people of our time, finding information is as easy as drinking a glass of water. In a connected world, information is at your fingertips 24/7. If you don't know something, you open the internet and search for it; we can buy books from anywhere in the world instantly, ebooks, etc. Therefore, the solution is not to listen to the first thing the media feeds us and play into their game, but to engage with the great works that have resisted time, to study, and then to evaluate with knowledge what others want us to listen to... The solution is to become passionate about a subject and study it deeply, trying to document oneself as much as possible.
Ultimately, no one would have been so harsh with Giovanni Allevi if he had been a more humble person, without pushing themselves to utter words that attempted to undermine the greatness of Beethoven and which, in response, obviously ridiculed him for having the audacity to say them... As far as I am concerned (my personal consideration), the Greats are those who share their knowledge with passion, in a simple way, with a smile on their lips and great humility because they have nothing to prove, unlike someone else who has immolated themselves as the "inventor of new classical music"; here are the messages"}
viral and dangerous, what Allevi passes on, messages to which the "sheep" obviously believe, and when you say "if there were 2000 Allevis," this danger increases exponentially: that is, giving as an "high" example something low; musical culture would not only fail to grow but would plummet even worse than its current state.
Besides, as a litmus test, it seems to me that no one has anything to say against Fabio Volo; he does his job and there is nothing wrong with this, regardless of the quality of his pen (later there will be those who buy his books and those who do not because they prefer other genres or authors), and perhaps this happens because Volo never had the audacity to say that Dante lacked a "sense of metrics."
