Giovanni Allevi certainly needs no introduction: an internationally renowned musician, he is known worldwide for his music. His numerous performances have been widely covered by the media, from the concert at the Senate of the Republic in 2008 to his participation in San Remo in 2015. He always draws a large audience to his performances, and the genius of his person and his art fascinate many, not only due to the notes he knows how to produce but also the thoughts he knows how to inspire. Despite his widespread media and commercial success, his name is sometimes subject to criticism in the austere world of classical music, and his artistic production has not been immune to sharp judgments.
In recent years, unfortunately, he has made the front pages of newspapers due to his illness: a form of cancer, multiple myeloma, forced him to step away from the musical scene to undergo treatment. His absence from the stage lasted several years until the beginning of this year when he resumed touring around Italy.
The show I attended in Milan was one of his first public appearances: in a theater packed to capacity, Giovanni reunited with his audience, who showed him extraordinary affection and appreciation.
I still remember the words with which he introduced the opening piece: the maestro apologized in advance for some notes that might end up “out of place” due to the many medications he was still taking. It was pointless to expect a perfect performance—Allevi seemed to warn—because, after his illness, he had not yet regained full control over his fingers.
I thought to myself that, ultimately, if I wanted to experience a perfect execution of his pieces, it would have been sufficient to stay home and turn on a stereo. The beauty of live performance not only accepts but, I would say, demands those thousand imperfections that the “charm of live shows” never fails to provide.
Umberto Galimberti argues that our individuality lies in the quality of our imperfections, our ticks, our fragilities, and perhaps, in a word, our irrationality. While rationality makes us men equal in dignity and value, it is our irrationality that makes us unique, singular, and unrepeatable. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” writes Tolstoy, and perhaps, by extension, we could say the same for our rationality.
Think about it: what makes us unique individuals is that part of us that no computer could ever simulate—desire, love, passion, dreams, relationships, friendships, fears, sufferings. All these things belong to that irrational dimension that escapes logical and mathematical control. Yet, they are what make us who we are, what make us original and unattainable individuals.
It is only in the realm of finiteness, fragility, and imperfection that the human resides; it is only in this threshold of inaccuracy and imprecision that a meeting between real, true, sincere, flesh-and-blood people is possible. There is a part of us that no artificial intelligence will ever be able to reproduce, and that is the part where our fragility and incompleteness emerge most evidently. The computer does not know how to make mistakes, how to fail, how to put that out-of-place note in the symphony of our lives. Yet it is precisely that discordant note that makes our existence a melody, though imperfect, absolutely unique.
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