Tiziano Scarpa: Music Will Save The World

This book, by Tiziano Scarpa, may be regarded as a “conversation” path to classical music, as reading “Stabat Mater” fills you with a passion. The same passion that pervades and saves Cecilia, the main character in the book, who, for sixteen years, has lived in the “Ospitale”, an orphanage where she was abandoned wrapped in a blanket. It is thanks to music and to the letters she writes to “Mrs Mother” that she has grown up.

Her encounter with death, with which she converses in part of the story, is the other element of the novel. This deep, intense and touching book by Scarpa reads well, leaving the reader sorry, not because of how the story ends, but because it is so short. This mature work ends with rich, final notes.

“We are born to flee a body that is destined to die. Something inside us realises that it is destined to die forever, and so, it reacts, it flees. Children are the fear of dying that flees our mortal bodies,” Cecilia says to herself in one of her numerous inner dialogues. And she continues, “In this world, each of us falls in love with his own ghost. We exchange ghosts. We expect people in flesh and blood fit into the beloved image that we have dreamt up for ourselves, we want them to wear it like a second skin that transforms their features and size.”

There is melancholy, and pain in this book. But there is also redemption and an ability to liberate. And it is Antonio Vivaldi and his music that start this transformation in the heart of this fragile but strong creature. This interlacing of emotions and thoughts grows as the apparently simple story increases in strength and intensity culminating in an unexpected finale.

In short, it is well worth a read. Even though this book has divided readers into two clear camps, those who loved it, and those who considered it almost illegible.