Michael Nyman
The Piano

We are in the mid-1800s. Ada is a young woman who became a widow and mute following a trauma. Her only connection to the world is her eleven-year-old daughter who communicates with her through sign language. She lives in England. At one point, an unknown landowner asks for her hand in marriage and her relatives accept. Against her will, she must move to New Zealand, where this man is exploiting the potential of this still virgin land and the naivety of the natives. Ada wants to bring her piano with her, but the new husband has no intention of keeping it in the house. A man, living in a wooden hut, will take it; also English but now integrated into the indigenous community and therefore called by everyone "the savage." Ada is strong-willed, she rejects her husband with the same vigor with which she desires the piano and makes a deal with the "savage": she can go to the hut to play, in exchange she will teach that seemingly rough soul about music. From this point on, the piano is the red thread that runs through a story of love, jealousy, and violence. Against the backdrop of the bigoted and traditionalist English colonial society, a song of freedom from a woman who will not bend, who wants to live her own way.

This is "The Piano", Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1993, Oscar to Holly Hunter (Ada) and Anna Paquin (the young Flora), and "The Piano" by Michael Nyman is the soundtrack. It retraces the story of the film which seems to be entirely built on a single musical theme, the one we find in its basic form in "The Heart Asks Pleasure First", a theme we encounter practically everywhere in the film and which is nothing but the song that Ada loves to play while "the savage" Baines watches her and slowly falls hopelessly in love with her. The same song that accompanies the innocent Flora's games in the rainforest, the same song that (slightly darkened by a more somber arrangement) accompanies the act of violence by Ada's husband, blinded by jealousy. In essence, this CD consists of a single song, but Nyman's creativity manages, through at times ingenious musical devices, to make it seem always different. Indeed, at certain moments, the intensity of the execution is such that it seems that the piano notes speak, telling us the story from their point of view, protagonists of a bitter and sad affair but also dense with hope.

Like the film, so too is the accompanying music a journey into the emotions of man that are always the same but are presented in different forms, which can be delicate or devastating. The famous notes of Nyman are the backbone and frame of this "drama," becoming, depending on the moments, either delicate or incisive. A desire to be cradled by the music, to let oneself go into the magic woven by the harmonies, to let the score simply enter within us without any resistance, this is Nyman's album. 19 tracks where the underlying protagonist is love, with that bittersweet aftertaste of melancholy that, sometimes hidden, sometimes revealed, cannot in any case be separated from the apparent "beatitude" that this great composer gives us.