Though Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi has achieved international fame thanks to the piercing melancholy, booming crescendos, and arena-ready orchestration of albums like Divenire (2006), Nightbook (2009), and In a Time Lapse (2013), fans may be surprised by his latest album, Underwater. His first solo piano release in 20 years is quiet, contemplative Einaudi, filled with melodies that never make a splash, but are content simply to float. 

It’s a logical follow-up to Seven Days Walking, Einaudi’s six-hour, 80-track 2019 release he described as a kind of meditative travelogue of daily walks in the Swiss countryside. With both albums, he found inspiration in those escapades, but while Seven Days experimented with repetition, Underwater is much more focused on variety. 

Vanity Fair spoke with Einaudi over Zoom earlier this month about creative inspiration, the pandemic, and why Underwater marks such a special new chapter of his career as something truly rare: a modern-day classical superstar.

Vanity Fair: I thought it was poetic that you released Seven Days Walking in 2019, just before people started taking daily walks. I know I started taking daily walks in 2020 without fail. How does it feel to know that you provided such calmness and escape for people during a tumultuous time over the past couple of years? Have you taken in knowing that people listen to your music when they’re anxious and upset? 

Ludovico Einaudi: I never thought about that in these terms, exactly, but I think the Seven Days Walking is a piece of music that, if you know it, probably you know that it recurs. It’s the same music with different variations for every day. So every day, if you listen every day in a week week, it’s similar to what you do in the week because maybe on day one you are going somewhere and on day two, you are going probably, maybe the same places, but maybe you [take] a different path to arrive [at] the same place. And then the third day you meet someone and the fourth day you are walking with your dog and it’s raining. 

So, actually, the music came like this with the idea that with all the similar thoughts that you have in a period of time, you have similar thoughts that develop each day. Maybe you’re thinking that, let’s say, in a year, you have some thoughts that you have that are moving around and sometimes you focus on some and other times you focus on others, but you are mainly on the road of thoughts. I think what I like about music, about also what I see about the effect that my music is also having on other people is not necessarily the fact that some people may be relaxed with my music, but I quite like more the idea of inspiring thoughts and inspiring inner movements in the people. What I like very much is when people tell me that they start creating other things, they start writing. There are many students [who] achieve their goals while listening to my music. Other people are painting. Other people are drawing. Other people are running and thinking, and walking and thinking. So, I quite like the fact that it is moving something in others. 

What kinds of music do you listen to when you want to be inspired? 

Well, it’s very random. Sometimes I can be inspired by something that I hear casually—that could be classical music, electronic music, African music. I mean, if you listen to Bach, it’s difficult to fail because Bach is always inspiring ... Generally I’m more inspired by instrumental music, not because I don’t like songs—I mean, I’ve been living all my life with beautiful songs. But when you have voices, the space is more filled. It’s not an empty space that you can fill with yourself, with your inner creativity, but you are completely overwhelmed by the song in a way. And with instrumental music, you have more space between you and the music to reflect, a reflection that is, I find, beautiful when you need to be inspired. 

Why did you decide to release music from home during the pandemic? Was it helpful to revisit your music and rerecord some of it, or was it someone else’s idea? 

I was improvising some late-night short concerts on Instagram—without telling anyone! In fact, my press office was complaining that I didn’t tell anyone that I was doing this and what I liked about those instant concerts was the fact that I just like that who was there, was there, and there were not any expectations from anyone, and it was just the desire for me. Suddenly, I wanted to play and I just opened my phone and I played for 20 minutes. In that sense—I did the like seven, eight, ten in an amount of time of two or three months so regularly, but not just every now and then—and maybe because it was my desire to do it, that nobody was telling me to do it, I just felt inspired in doing it completely. 

I saw that the people that were listening, they really enjoyed what they were experiencing with me. The sound was not a good sound because I was in the mountains at the time and I had a very small piano... And also, I could not have a tuner for the piano because everyone was locked in their houses. But that piano that was very rough and imperfect gave me something, and I wanted to remember the sound of those moments that I experienced with the people and so I decided to make a recording. I recorded the album with an iPad. [Laughs] Everything sounds very, very homemade, but it was just a nice memory of this. And I think the people who were listening, they were happy to have it also. 

Let’s talk about Underwater, your first solo piano album in 20 years. Why did you return to this sort of album now? And was it composed on that same “rough piano” you had in the mountains? 

I never thought about Underwater in those terms of my first solo piano album in 20 years. I mean, it happened that I was in the mountains [at the time], so part of this music was composed on that rough piano. Another part was composed in the countryside where I have my studio and I have a better piano. But the idea was that I started to keep a diary of my days that were based on some long walks in nature. And at the same time, I was coming back home and I was just sitting—sometimes briefly, sometimes for longer—at my piano and making music. I wanted to have a memory of those days... with a sort of musical diary. I started to do this every day and after a couple of months, I started to listen to this music, and I found that every four or five days there was something that I loved to listen to again... I was quite nervous. It was interesting because some of the music... It was almost like listening to something that I hadn’t done. The music came like an unconscious flow. I was connected to something inside that was not connected exactly to the normal thinking, but it was like a flow of something that came. I mean, I’m exaggerating because, of course, if you make music professionally, of course there’s an amount of elements that you master in the years, of course, but the forms, the melodies, sometimes I had to listen carefully again because I was not able to to replay the music that I recorded. Because I didn’t know how it was done. It was not coming from a logical process, but it was coming from somewhere else. I was very attracted [to] this new process for me. 

I had never done something completely without filter, without a mind filter in a way. [With] this new music I started to feel that there was something new for me that I enjoyed in this music that I’ve done, that I wanted to keep and share with the world. This was the reason for this album. And at the end, the idea of Underwater is that the water describes the fact that I was in a different dimension, as everyone may be. I was in a parallel world that was not the life that I lived before. It was a world where there was a beautiful silence around me. I don’t know [what your experience was] but for me, I was experiencing that the entire world was in that dimension. A beautiful inner peace, that feeling. And so with that beautiful peace inside, my sound started to be different. 

You said that you would record for some days and then revisit other ones, but how long did it take you to create the 12 pieces of music on the album? 

The process was longer because I kept recording music for—I still do it now, but maybe not so regularly—but I think I recorded like 500 pieces of music, so the difficult was to select. I still have now maybe 300, maybe 350 pieces that I haven’t had the time to listen to. 

[Laughs.] So you were underwater when you were selecting the 12?

Exactly! So it took me a long time to select, for example, around a palette of 150 pieces of music. To find a balance, to create a frame... to have all the colors or the nuances that I wanted to have. I mean, at the beginning, the first selection was 30 and I felt I couldn’t go below 30. But then I continued to work on the selection. And finally, I wanted to arrive to 12... maybe because I was coming from [a] project that was very long. It’s like when you’re writing a book, and you decide if you want to write a big book or a smaller one. And in that sense, it was like writing a novel of 200, 250 pages. I didn’t want to go to a bigger size...  I wanted to maintain a sort of lightness and maintain the idea that when you finish that you want to start again, to listen to it from the beginning, and to leave the desire of something that is missing. 

You said that you thought of this music that you recorded at this time as a kind of musical diary. Have you always thought of your music like that? 

I haven’t...but in a way when you’re writing music or probably when you’re writing words, the work is always a diary of who you are of the time. There’s something that is connected to your life and to your private life, to your memories, to your, to your life in general. 

I read that you played guitar as a teenager. What came first, the guitar or the piano? How did your musical knowledge evolve? 

I started with the piano because my mother was playing piano at home and she introduced me to the piano. She introduced me to a very boring piano teacher that I had in the first years of my life. [Laughs.] ... I remember it was like going to the doctor, that piano teacher. When I was eight, nine years old and my mother was luckily she was playing [for] me, Chopin and Bach. But at the same time, she was discovering herself the music of the time. So she enjoyed the Rolling Stones, she played me “Satisfaction” from the Rolling Stones and “Help” from the Beatles. At the time guitar was the instrument that everyone was playing, so I was very attracted by guitar, by all the music that was coming out from the UK and the US. Jimi Hendrix and folk music and rock music. I started to play guitar and I was playing a bit of blues, I was playing folk music, fingerpicking and learning the Beatles songs and all that stuff. Actually, I think my experience with the guitar was very important for my piano writing, because I always had in mind the resonances of the guitar, how in guitar with arpeggios, you have some open strings that resonates and and I use piano a lot with the resonances. I play a lot with the pedal and also, coming from the experience of the guitar, I am very concerned about the sound … But some people think that when you are pressing a key, it’s a key that represents the sound... For me, it’s like I used to be connected with an instrument that’s like guitar. So with the piano, I always had the desire to create something that was more personal, that was more connected to what I really wanted in terms of sound, well, what was my imagination of the sound. I’ve been struggling and searching, and I think maybe I’m still searching. I am maybe never satisfied about the sounds that I create. It’s like when you’re searching for something, you never arrive to the end. I will keep searching all my life, searching for the perfect sound that maybe one day [I’ll find], or maybe it will never arrive! Hopefully. Because with that idea in mind, I can constantly change and find and change and find and change and find. 

I saw that you’re going to be returning to your live performances soon. Is that something you’ve missed, performing for large audiences in proper spaces?

I’ve done 15 concerts in Milano that I enjoyed very much because they were in the same places. So I start to enjoy performing more concerts in one place because it’s like a process of perfection in something that you create. And then day after day you master it. You get acquainted with the room, with the sound, even [with] for the instruments, [with] the piano. There’s no stress, because it stays there for days and it gets better and better... I’m looking forward [to] the upcoming tour, to be back in many places in Europe and in the States in June. What I don’t like in general is to just be one day in one place and another day in another place. After a while, it’s very alienating. 

I have one last question, and it’s related to the music that you provided to films. So many movies have included your music over the past few years. How does that process work for you? When people approach you, how do you make the decision about whether or not to provide your music for a particular film?  

It could require that there is a script that makes me decide that I want to be involved... sometimes it’s the director or someone involved in the production—maybe an actor. For example, when I decided to give my music to Nomadland, I was intrigued by the story. I hadn’t read the book, but I read the synopsis. And I was very positive about the fact that Frances McDormand was involved, because I love her work. The whole project seemed to… have some connection with my vision… Most of the music is coming from Seven Days Walking, and there’s a sort of parallelism between the nomadic idea of the music and the nomadic idea of the film. But I mean, sometimes it’s unpredictable. Sometimes you’re not sure, then you meet the director and the quality of your relationship with the director is good. And so your opinion changes and you decide to do something…it really depends on feelings. It’s all about feelings. 

Sorry, but can you tell me what the music I’ve been hearing in the background has been? Is someone playing the piano in your home? 

Yeah, it’s my daughter! She’s playing. She’s having a piano lesson on Zoom. [But] I don’t know what she is playing now.  

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