Ludovico Einaudi: A Minimalist Voice with Monumental Impact

Launching this new composer profile series last month, we began by exploring Ralph Vaughan Williams and his inspiring vision of music for the people. He famously commented: ‘what we want is real music, even if it be only a music hall song. Provided it possesses real feeling and real life, it will be worth all the off scourings of the classics in the world.’ Complexity was not necessarily king; instead, honesty, quality and reach. With that democratic vision in mind, our next portrait provides an interesting contemporary commentary…

Some turn their noses up at Ludovico Einaudi. Commercial success has long caused suspicion in certain professional circles, whether in their own day for Rossini, Arthur Sullivan, Puccini, Tippett or more recently, Andrew Lloyd Webber. Some see Einaudi’s music as commercially cynical, sacrificing genuine musical interest and substance for a bland and samey, playlist-friendly blancmange. Artistic discussions aside, it’s impossible to dismiss Einaudi’s extraordinary impact on modern musical tastes; arguably many of the trends we see – in young artist releases, new label signings, streaming, film soundtracks and composition styles – can trace their way to him. 

This summer, Einaudi enjoyed the longest continuous headline run by a pianist in the history of London’s iconic Royal Albert Hall, with six consecutive nights. That puts him on a par with Pink Floyd legend Dave Gilmour, who performed a six-night run there in 2024. Then, just last month, Einaudi announced his biggest UK show yet: London’s O2 Arena next July. Although he’s made it the norm, we shouldn’t overlook the fact this is a solo pianist playing original instrumental music… selling out an arena graced by the world’s biggest pop stars. 

Two unlikely classical mentors

‘Avant-garde’ is not a phrase normally associated with Einaudi, but it reflects at least part of where he has come from.

As a young man, Einaudi enjoyed the orchestration classes of Luciano Berio. Taken at face value, Berio’s compositions couldn’t be more different: his long partnership with virtuosic mezzo Cathy Berberian resulted in prickly vocal writing, including some of the first-ever notations of mouth-clicks, laughs and cries in music. Where, perhaps, there is a clearer musical parallel is in their eclecticism, acting like a sponge to an increasingly internationalised, cross-fertilising music scene; Berio’s arrangements of Beatles songs and exploration of African vocal music surely helped reinforce Einaudi’s own interest in pop and world genres. The idea that music can be drawn from many sources is underlined by Berio’s Sinfonia, a musical collage with quotes from over a dozen other composers; it divided critics who felt it was either the future… or just a lazy fad. Sound familiar?

An even more surprising mentorship is hinted at by the early Einaudi manuscripts that feature the handwritten notes… of Karlheinz Stockhausen. The man who wrote a string quartet for four helicopters surely couldn’t be further from Einaudi’s musical aesthetic; but this is by no means the first time Stockhausen’s work has cut through to the mainstream, when we remember that The Beatles so admired his experimentalism, they featured him on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. 

When Stockhausen visited Milan in the 1980s, he gave a series of lectures that a young Einaudi attended keenly. In interviews since, Einaudi has pointed to the pivotal example set by Stockhausen’s Licht, the monumental series of seven operas (one for each day of the week). Einaudi told BBC Music Magazine: ‘I loved the idea that a week of music could be contained in a single seed.’ A lot, from a little – a concept hardly alien to a good pop song. 

To fans and critics alike, Stockhausen’s prediction that in the future ‘composers will find it much more interesting to write one work during a whole lifetime and integrate everything they do’ finds an interesting contemporary reflection in Einaudi. 

Influences

There are many classical precedents for Einaudi’s style. With its punching power on streaming platforms, you could argue there’s a parallel in Erik Satie’s ‘furniture music’; these are pieces to accompany the everyday, rather than ones that shout for your devoted attention. 

Minimalism is the other obvious influence. Einaudi has often cited Philip Glass as one of his inspirations. With both, there’s a clear pop sensibility in the use of repetition, short musical cells and simplistic accompaniments. There’s a stripping back of music to its essentials, creating a trance-like sense of meditation that lands especially strongly in today’s age of mindfulness and mental health awareness. 

Einaudi’s writing has often struck me as like gentle pop songs for the piano. It’s interesting, then, to note that he began composing music as a teenager not on piano but on guitar; that’s how pop stars start! A teenager strumming a guitar, the focus would be less on harmonic or rhythmic complexity than on catchy melodic hooks and ‘vibe’. This makes sense of Einaudi’s wide currency on pop radio. In 2011, BBC Radio 1’s Greg James used his music as a playlist for university revision and later aired tracks during exam season; such was the impact, Einaudi’s music entered the UK’s mainstream pop Official Singles Chart Top 40. 

The early days… and a piano concerto

Indeed, Einaudi has described his first forays into composition as ‘songs without words’ – a sort of Felix Mendelssohn piano ‘sigh’, but with the harmonic idiom of a pop song. 

It’s a stylistic hybrid that reflects his education. Einaudi’s mother had played the piano to him as a child, everything from Bach to Chopin to The Rolling Stones; her father had been an opera conductor. Einaudi gained a diploma in composition from Milan’s Conservatorio Verdi and was awarded a scholarship to Tanglewood. His first pieces were played everywhere from the Teatro alla Scala to Lincoln Center. Such beginnings sound more akin to how a traditional contemporary concert composer starts out, than a global crossover superstar.

A more conventionally classical discipline has returned at least nominally in recent years, with his Piano Concerto Domino commissioned to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society and premiered in 2016. At 23 minutes long, it’s substantially more extensive than a familiar Einaudi album track and features the piano alongside string orchestra and harp. It’s ‘traditional’ in observing a standard three-part classical form and the idea of the soloist having the ‘main role’; that said, the Einaudi signature remains with relative harmonic and textural stasis. Again, there’s a preference for homophony over contrapuntal exchanges and short repeated phrases over any long-lined thematic development. It’s not a dazzling display of virtuosity and solo-ensemble ping-pong in the style of a traditional concerto; it’s a concerto more in name than substance.

I Giorni (‘The Days’): analysed

It might sound familiar and even inevitable now, but this recording came out in 2001 – long before contemplative piano releases became the norm. 

Compositionally, it does a lot to feel familiar. At the start, everything is simple, uncluttered, and unhurried; the opening melodic phrase is made of just three notes, simply picking out the underlying harmony. There are pregnant pauses at the end of each phrase, recalling the adage that music is the space between the notes. The rhythms gradually become more active until we reach the familiar I-V-VI-IV harmonic structure, the same chords that sit under such pop bangers as Let It Be (clang, another Beatles link), Don’t Stop Believin’ and Someone Like You. The melody at this point feels likewise ‘comfortable’, moving mostly in steps – easy to sing back – and again sticking to three notes. These rarely lean on a dissonance at first, preferring to reinforce the comfortable diatonicism of the chords beneath. This slowly changes as the top line blossoms into wider, expressive leaping intervals. It’s like a tentatively opening flower, with the emphasis on miniscule change against a stable, consistent backdrop. 

Contrary to many traditional classical pieces (and certainly what a classical education might instil), the compositional focus here is not on harmony, structure or rhythm, or even really on any singable, long-lined melody; instead, the aims are texture, mood and flow. Think vertical, not horizontal: this is music that encourages us to soak in the moment. 

Impact 

It’s said that Einaudi’s music is streamed one million times a day. He is the most streamed classical artist of all time, and this is music ideally suited to the streaming age: where people choose a piece as much from a mood-based playlist to accompany a non-musical activity, as they do a specific album for a sit-down focused listen. This makes more sense of those compositional priorities of texture over harmony; repeated melodic motifs over thematic development; consistency over change. 

But paradoxically for such a popular artist online, Einaudi has helped revive the industry of physical sheet music; books of his work come as hotly anticipated as any album. Likewise, one can argue he has also encouraged a revived perception of the piano as ‘cool’, helping inch it back towards its former prestige as centre of any respectable home; just as in the 19th century playing the piano was a laudable and widespread social credit, so too when I was at school was it ‘cool’ if you were the kid who could play Einaudi. Teenagers who would otherwise listen to hip-hop and pop anthems were gathering around my 14-year-old self, demanding I Giorni. Piano playing is once again a desirable mainstream, social achievement.

This has in turn spawned a new generation of pianist-composers: sample Hania Rani and Hauschka (both of whose music appears in our ‘The Sound Weavers’ programme alongside Einaudi’s — watch below), or Stephan Moccio, Ólafur Arnalds, Alexis Ffrench, and even the legendary dance DJ Armin van Buuren (who has just released a contemplative piano album). The piano is definitely ‘cool’ again.

There’s been an interesting impact on compositional styles, too, including the notable trend in recent contemporary music to sound (for want of a better word) ‘filmic’. Einaudi has scored many a TV and film soundtrack over the decades himself; you can enjoy one of his most famous screen works, Fly, in the excerpt below. This piece featured in the 2011 French blockbuster The Intouchables; the gentle use of electronics and percussion helps underscore the heart-warming story of friendship on screen. Whether Einaudi sounds filmic or film music sounds like Einaudi, there’s a shared sound world; like it or not, a focus on texture and mood over harmonic progression and thematic development is only growing. Aaron Copland once said that a piece of film music should be considered a lightbulb that warms the screen – and I wonder if now we listen to music in much the same way, with Einaudi’s work a lightbulb to our everyday activities. All music is film music?

In the programme notes to his Piano Concerto, Einaudi wrote: ‘my music tends to avoid labels. It has been defined as minimal, pop, neo-classical and contemporary classical, but for me it is the sum of all these definitions that reflects my musical identity. It is in the search for the connections between different languages that I live with my work’. 

Ultimately, Einaudi doesn’t care about the label – an artistic spirit that I and many fellow composers share these days, regardless of how we might express that musically. Music is about the freedom simply to ‘be’.