A musical program is born from many ideas. My idea was to let a musical discourse flow from a poetic quote and to explore philosophical themes through music.
The musical program, inspired by the quote from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), «As lonely […] as overburdened by vast distances», features the juxtaposition of masterpieces of piano literature that perfectly represent in music the concepts of return to the past, temporal distance, and solitude, as well as a sense of spirituality understood in all its forms, evoked in the text of the poem Childhood.
Rilke’s philosophical thought elaborates on solitude as an emblematic aspect of the artist, since, as he also describes in some letters addressed to Kappus and later collected in Letters to a Young Poet, solitude is necessary for the maturation of the artist’s inner expression. It proposes a journey that contemplates various eras, cultures, and compositional systems through the idea of distance in both a literal and philosophical sense. The reference to remoteness, directly proposed with the choice of J. S. Bach and authors who were inspired by the past like O. Respighi and O. Messiaen, offers the opportunity to empathize with the sense of distance and solitude, also emphasized by the Lisztian piece that Rilke himself sought out.