Ludovico Einaudi: ‘I don’t care if the classical world says negative things about me’

You can tell a lot about the standing of Ludovico Einaudi by his entrance into our interview. The 69-year-old Italian composer is officially the most streamed classical artist of all time – more than Mozart, Bach and Beethoven at approximately nine billion streams a year – and will this month perform a six-night residency at the Royal Albert Hall, the longest-ever run at the venue for a pianist. It is serious crossover success. Yet as he walks into the fourth-floor dining area of a plush central London hotel, dressed in a pale green linen suit and fedora looking like a monied tourist, he sits down in the far corner table to whispers and stares from other diners trying to work out exactly who this famous person is.

That’s because Einaudi’s music is much more well-known than Einaudi himself. He’s the type of artist whom you will have heard without even knowing it: his plaintive, emotive piano pieces have quietly infiltrated our everyday lives via film, TV and adverts, as well as the sort of easy-listening Spotify playlists that make it possible to rack up nearly nine million monthly listeners (again, more than Mozart, Bach and Beethoven).

Iggy Pop and Ellie Goulding are fans; Nicki Minaj walks onstage to his music; Ricky Gervais used an Einaudi piece for his sitcom Derek; he’s been sampled by Professor Green and remixed by Mogwai; his music features in the This Is England franchise and adverts for, among others, British Airways, Apple and Dior; Einaudi scored the soundtracks to the Oscar-winning films Nomadland and The Father. His biggest track, “Experience”, has more than 16 billion views on TikTok, attracting him such a young audience that he is Gen Z’s classical artist of choice, helping him sell out arenas all over Europe. His reflective latest album, The Summer Portraits, his 17th in his 20th year as a Decca artist, came out in January and naturally has millions of streams.

Ludovico Einaudi performing at Teatro Dal Verme in Milan in 2023 (Photo: Sergione Infuso/ Corbis /Getty)

And yet Einaudi remains the unassuming creator out of the spotlight. I get the impression that’s the way he likes it. “I always thought my music was stronger than looking at me,” he says. “I’ve never spent too much time exposing my image. I prefer to have stronger music than a stronger image.”

Einaudi’s success is more notable given he is somewhat detached from the classical world. Perhaps suspicious of his mainstream success, classical music critics have been harsh about his credentials and abilities.

That despite Einaudi being a music scholar: born in Turin, he studied at the Conservatorio Verdi in Milan under the tutelage of avant garde composer Luciano Berio, who encouraged Einaudi that he could blend classical composing with his love of the 60s rock and pop he grew up on, such as The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix (he tells me he went to watch Paul McCartney in London last year: “When he started with “A Hard Day’s Night”, I cried. It was too much.”). Berio made him “try and understand if there was a way to manage to evolve and make those apparently different words become one.”

It perhaps in part explains some of the elite snobbiness towards him. “Absolutely,” he says. “I don’t understand. I mean, I can understand, but I don’t understand why they keep considering me a classical musician. I feel closer to Paul McCartney and Thom Yorke. I never felt at ease with the academic world because I like relations where they are simple, and the classical world is not like that. So I don’t care so much if they say negative things about me. It’s not my world.”

Yet the people have spoken, especially the under-30s. It can perhaps be traced back to 2011, when Radio 1 DJ Greg James championed Einaudi’s track “I Giorni” on air, saying it helped him study. Does he consider why the kids have gravitated towards him? “I don’t know if I have a complete answer to that. Probably there is something about me that didn’t change in my perspective. I am successful but I never think I am. All the streams is something that they tell me but it doesn’t stay. So I keep my doubts. I never completely feel confident with myself. I think this is something I feel I can have in common with a young person.”

Einaudi, jovial and unassuming company, is here to record an episode of Later with Jools Holland tonight, as well as test out some pianos he will perform on in the UK later this summer. Fittingly, it is the first boiling hot day of the year: The Summer Portraits, a textured, warm and moving record, is an album forged from the sunshine season.

It finds Einaudi in wistful mood. He’s not normally nostalgic – “people tend to think too much about the past, especially until it becomes a weight” – but several factors have him looking back. He went on holiday to the Mediterranean with his family where he was stirred by some paintings inside his beach house – “very beautiful, nice colours, something very personal” – painted by a woman who visited every summer in the 1950s. “I started to think about this family. And this opened me, already my imagination was like a dream.”

It got him thinking about his own childhood, especially the summer holidays to Bocca di Magra near the coast of Tuscany – intimate family footage of a seven-year-old Einaudi makes up the video for the beautiful “Rose Bay” (though much of the album’s artwork are photographs taken by famous fan Mary McCartney). “We should realise that childhood is still so relevant to you,” he says. “It’s very important the experience that you gain in the first years of your life.” For Einaudi it was his “relationship with nature, the light of summer and the sea salt, my friends, the first loves, and the first food that I was tasting”. He calls this time “a paradise”, which played into tracks like “Punto Bianca” and “To Be Sun”.

Around this time he also moved back to Turin. “Not for nostalgic reasons,” he says with a smile. He never liked Turin too much growing up, and left for Milan as soon as he could. “It was feeling slightly small, like a big village. I think it’s the mentality, which is narrow.” He’d had a bad time at school, what he calls “my darker years”, from the age of 14 when he was more interested in the “rebellion in the air” thanks to the onset of rock’n’roll. At 16, he did the very rebellious (and uncommon) thing – driving to Morocco with friends for a month. “My parents were not happy,” he smiles.

Ludovico Einaudi studied at the Conservatorio Verdi in Milan but says that musically he feels closer to Paul McCartney and Thom Yorke (Photo: Mary McCartney)

But there he had an epiphany. He played what he calls his first concert, with his guitar, to no more than 15 people. “I was feeling very connected with the music, and when I stopped, everyone was almost like waking up from a dream.” He realised he’d an effect on people. “I said to myself, ‘OK, I think music is the thing that I want to deal with.’”

Music was already in his blood thanks to Einaudi’s incredible family history. While his paternal grandfather, Luigi Einaudi (“a great economist”), was Italy’s post-war President between 1948-1955, his maternal grandfather was the opera conductor and composer Waldo Aldrovandi. During the height of Mussolini’s reign, Aldrovandi fled the country to Australia via London. “They were asking for [conductors to play] fascist music. So he decided to leave. I admire the fact he took the decision to not be part of [the regime].”

Einaudi’s mother was only 12 when she was left behind. “He was not supposed to go for ever. It was a temporary situation, hoping that things were going to become a lot better.” But a combination of the Second World War and his grandfather’s subsequent ill health meant he never returned home before he died in 1952. His grandfather had started a family while in exile in Australia: his mother struck up a nice relationship with them, and Einaudi remains so close to them he visits them when in the country. Rose Bay is the name of the area where his grandfather lived: the track was written last year before a gig at Sydney Opera House, where he imagined what his grandfather’s new life was like.

He feels a kinship with his grandfather, he says, but gives thanks to his mother’s influence. She played the piano every day. “My mother used to talk a lot [about his grandfather] and music, I think, was the world where she connected with this loss. Music was a very sentimental place. I started to listen to her play, and how she maintained her emotions close.” Her favourite was a Chopin piece called “Raindrop”. “And there’s one note repeated,” he says. “It was like a raindrop coming into my soul. One specific day when I was eight, I realised this music was giving me a new emotion. It opened my sensitivity.”

As with his mother, it seems like music is the place he best expresses his emotions. “Music is the place where I can deal with my emotions. It’s a place where I can express and share with others. Honestly, in social situations with others, I tend to hide.”

And yet when he plays live to thousands of people, his muted music strikes a chord. “It feels strange to say, but it happens. With 500 people or 25,000, the concert is the same. There’s a beautiful connection.”

Einaudi’s album ‘The Summer Portraits’ is out now on Decca. He plays six nights at the Royal Albert Hall (29 June – 4 July), as well as Manchester Co-op Live (6 July), Dublin 3Arena (8 July) and Edinburgh Castle (10 & 11 July)