Biography

In 1953 my family settled in Rome after a long wandering around the world, and started a period of territorial and economic stability. It is in this conditions, three years later, that I was born as a third child of a Piedmont father Ugo Drago, born in Arborio (a small village known for its rice) and German mother, Marianne Blumann from Berlin with Slav and partly Jewish origin. 

My father of peasant origin became civil aviator but during the last world war was given multiple honors and later mentioned in different military aeronautics books. My mother came from a rich family (her father who was of Romanian origin was one of Berlin’s most noted surgeons) but decided to renounce her comfortable life at 17 by marrying my father and moving to Arborio to share hard peasant’s life during the difficult years of war. 

I developed my musical interest within my family because my parents, even though they were not musicians themselves, had a particular affiliation to this art. However, I it owe to my grandmother from my mother’s side that I started playing piano. She was an ex. student of a great pianist Edwin Fischer who, after examining her other grandchildren before dying, decided to leave her magnificent instrument to me. 

It was a Steinway – model 0 with especially sweet sound and very light keyboard so it could be played with very little hand pressure. I was seven when I got it; I fell in love with the piano immediately and started playing any melody that came to my mind, fascinated by its expressive means and the possibility of immersing in spiritual dimensions I had never perceived before then. 

During these practices, I tried to imitate, from a vinyl, the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata (op. 27 n-2 Moonlight) played by a pianist that later became one of my favorite ones at least until I grew up – Walter Gieseking. 

The first notes of introductions were easily imitated but the actual creation of melody was a mystery to me. How did that pianist manage to play octaves on the low part of the piano and the triplets with his right hand and even with the high-pitched melodies…I thought he had three hands. 

The key to this mystery was revealed to me during my piano lessons. At first I was frightened I would transform a great, free and intimate personal experience into a formal obligation, regulated by the external factors and a control that is not mine. 

Also, I had to confront myself with my great timidity that often blocked my reaching out to the world. Having said that, I was pleasantly surprised when I entered into the house of my new teacher. All my fears vanished after I saw the lady with white hair who opened the door with a huge smile on her face.

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It was a real fate-determining encounter with Lina Bartomeoli and turned into a friendship that lasted until she passed away in 1991. 

She was a young hope, Guido Agosti’s student, who had to give up on her concerts career and dedicate herself to teaching, for personal reasons. Right away, she managed to understand my needs and, with a lot of love, help me overcome many obstacles that I found in the music discipline.

During my apprenticeship I never even considered the idea of studying to become a professional musician. I could “feel” very strongly the music and this was enough; I challenged myself to play better and better, trying to imitate the role-models I chose and I passed a lot of my time in the concert halls, but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I grow up. 

Listening to the classical music, especially the piano one, left a huge impact on my soul and a feeling of belonging to a certain aristocratic élite that could recognize the values of beauty, truth and profoundness in those pieces of art. I will explain better later in the text how this feeling influenced negatively my course of studies. 

Anyhow, playing music for me was a kind of a game, a challenge for myself to get to know myself better and improve so I didn’t consider it a professional call, and this is how my parents viewed it as well. I had other interests, I liked to play soccer, to fish, to paint, and in adolescence to read, especially about eastern topics and esotericism. 

My studies were marked by two strong influences, both of which I encountered thanks to Lina Bartomeoli – the piano school of Guido Agosti where she studied and the acquaintance with Doctor Marcello Carosi, a homeopathic doctor who supported my great interest in oriental philosophies and for the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. 

Doctor Carosi was a big reference for anyone interested in homeopathic medicine whether it is from a patient or from a doctor’s perspective. For me he was the one who was there for me, completely free of charge, as a doctor, a mentor, a confidant, a role model and support during my teen-aged crisis. It was with his help, even in the indirect way, that I met a woman who later became my wife.

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My musical education got a big turn when meeting Guido Agosti with whom I’ve studied for the last three years before getting a pianist diploma so between 1975 and 1978 plus two long summer courses (at the time the summer courses lasted 5 weeks) at Chingiana di Sienna Academy in 1978 and 1979. 

Agosti was a very important person in the academic musical world and he was certainly a great teacher. When he died, during the funeral, his wife Lydia Stix, a singer of Estonian and Russian origin, remembered the words of Maestro who thought of himself as someone to whom everyone can turn to. 

It was true, but that made me think that for it wasn’t necessary for him to have an exchanging communication with his students, everybody turned to him so he didn’t need to turn to anyone, he would just give, without worrying about who is going to take. 

So the students needed to learn and imitate the things he said and showed, just like it was the case with many other charismatic piano teachers. From this point of view I learned a lot from Agosti: attention to different styles of many composers, the noble and elegant phrasing, sound refinement, attention to different music forms and structures…I also found his personal memories of great pianists such as Cortot and Rubinestein very important. 

The strength of his personality resided in his superior culture, even though this quality could be perceived as cold by some. 

A student didn’t have much autonomy with him, and above all, a student needed to be technically advanced because Agosti had no interest in teaching the technical skills for piano. 

All this generated a big conflict inside of me because I felt I had technical issues. I got attached to Agosti, his aristocracy of the thought (which is what made a big impression on me as a young man) but that’s also why I was so harsh on myself about everything I was missing, as if those were my inborn limits.

It took me many years to understand, and it was after my studies with Agosti had been concluded, that in fact I needed a different type of student-teacher relationship. The suffering that this conclusion caused me became the foundation of all of my following choices, when it comes to teachers or the individualization of what I needed to do in my activity as a teacher.

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Thinking about my adolescence period made me put the student in the center of my attention when I started teaching myself – to put a value on the quality of the student-teacher relationship and the communication that needed to be in the center of my teaching activities. 

I was interested in the possibility of raising student’s self-esteem, and self-knowledge so that they can develop the courage while they perform. I tried to put the student’s attention to the particular and personal connection with the keyboard, sounds, their own body which is a true musical instrument. 

This lesson represented for me a place of great discoveries, a privileged laboratory of “scientific” experiments where one can verify the truth of some work hypothesis or simply a place in which both my student and I can witness with amazement an artistic event, its profoundness where the human and the divine unite. 

I came to this point with strong will to give my students what I lacked in the previous years of studying but without doubt, I could rely on my experience with Fausto Zadra and Sergiu Celibidache. 

The objectiveness and the scientific nature of the technical piano elements I acquired with Zadra and the criteria that Celibidache had, in a phenomenological way, with any musical parameter were the concrete and solid foundation on which I based my relations with students. 

Actually, after a transition period (which is the way I like to refer to the three years 1978-81 spent in Musikhochschule of Essen, very important primarily for the transformation of my persona and my reaching out to the world) I had on my professional field crucial encounters with those two teachers Zadra and Celibidache even though they are mutually very different, I’d say opposite and complementary.

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Zadra, Argentinian-born but with Italian heritage, was one of the most known students (along with Marta Argerich, Bruno Leonardo Gelber and Daniel Baremboim) of Vincenzo Scaramuzza, who again was Florestano Rossomandi’s student – an exponent of a school of Naples founded by Beniamino Cesi. 

Zadra had a natural vocation for teaching and communication and he managed, with his charisma and with help of his wife Maria Luisa Bastyns – another great pianist – to create his own private school in Lausanne which brought up hundreds of young pianists from all around the world.

I was fortunate enough to participate in these courses, to become a part of a great tradition of a piano school of an international level and be chosen for his assistant, that way establishing myself as a teacher. Zadra has always believed in my artistic qualities, in spite of my own insecurities and I owe to him the fact that I managed to start my concert career. 

I was there when he passed away, May 17th 2001 at Ghione Theater of Rome and I was profoundly pained. He was playing Chopin’s Nocturne when, by the end of the piece, he collapsed on the keyboard never to get up again. 

The following year I performed at the same theater and I dedicated to him this short memory with accompanied the program of the hall: To exist in every note Was the sentence I heard very often, when I was a student and assistant during the lessons of Fausto Zadra and that sentence is still in my head, as a strong imperative, during my daily studies and it helps me feel his unmistakable presence and his voice next to me. 

That sentence meant and still means – to give the right weight, color and meaning to every sound but not only in the intellectual way which would be a limitation according to Zadra. For him it meant a presence, a complete involvement of one’s being with the sound, starting from the body using at the same time the feeling and the mind. His sound had a rare capacity of seduction and sensuality apart from richness and esthetic beauty. 

He wanted to capture the listener with the force of his commitment, his love towards the mystery of the music, even though he was aware of the limitation of our forces while trying to reach the perfection in art. Zadra loved to play, to joke, to play around in order to reduce the enormous tension that comes with search of perfection that is sometimes neurotic and is formed inside of the artist itself. 

So he joked around with all those who took things too seriously, with the students that were so hard on themselves, artistic admirers, and this was very close to the mystery of life that forces us to a mental changes on a daily basis. 

We all owe so much to this man full of fantasy and talent which he used to organize schools of specialization and festivals, for cultural and general education of hundreds of students from all around the world. Personally, I owe so much to this one-of-a-kind Maestro for all that he has taught me and for contributing to the formation of me as a person, for his support and encouragement even during the most difficult moments. 

Fausto Zadra left us a year ago, in this very theater playing Chopin’s Nocturne and by this sealing his dedication to the music: an event full of meaning of unforgettable artist and person.

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Another important reference in my education, even though he is so different from Zadra was, without doubt, Celibidache, a unique orchestra conductor whose performances I lived as the highest spiritual and musical moments I’ve ever experienced. 

The first time was in 1979 when I was a student in Germany at the Folkwang Hochschule of Essen, after getting my diploma. Alezander Lonquich, at the time student of Folkwang Hochschule as me, took me to his own concert at Wuppertal. When we got there we realized that the tickets were sold out but we were actually lucky because we got the seats reserved for the choir. 

It was an extraordinary experience because the music was directed, other than by his precise gesture, by his particularly expressive facial mimic which followed and anticipated the meaning of a musical becoming. I had a strong feeling that my life was changing but I had to wait for six years before getting the chance to attend one of his courses. I think that his courses of Phenomenology of Music at Mainz University, one of the most important places were one could think about the meaning and ways of creating music. 

More than 80 people, student of music, orchestra professors, direction students and concert players from all around the world attended his classes twice a year for 15 consecutive days. Every morning he would arrive before us, sitting in his chair because he was at that time already suffering from gouty arthritis, he would look at his watch and at 10.00 a.m. he would invite the participants to ask questions. The arguments regarded the relations between the sound and human conscience – how do the sounds make an impact on us, the study of conditions through which music can be manifested.

At first I was really destabilized because Celibidache used to put in question, with a superior capacity of thought and sensibility, every “traditional” reference to which every average student relies on starting from the idea of interpretation, technique which often hides nothing but laziness and ignorance. 

 After a while, I realized with much difficulty that you can renew, consciously, that strain of thought that bought me back to my first, independent approaches with my grandma’s piano, when I was discovering sounds and those dimensions that only music could introduce to me. The Mainz courses gave the opportunity to perform in front of the great Romanian conductor. Soloists, chamber groups and even small orchestras and conductors took turns every evening of the course. It was like a workout room that allowed everyone to improve even more every aspect of the studied matter. 

A few days after my arrival in December 1985, with phenomenology themes not yet in my mind, I decided to play the first part of a Mozart’s Sonata. I played with a youthful enthusiasm and a dramatization and accentuation of the contrasts (which is very typical for a Zadra’s student) without paying attention to the poor resources of the piano I was using, or the unfortunate acoustics, decided to show my musicality and my passionate personality. 

The result would have put down anyone because he said with a provocative and cutting tone of voice: “You play Mozart as if you were writing a love letter but you’ve put bombs inside of it”. Basically he told me I had no clue and that I showed how one should not play, at least not Mozart. I did not respect not one phenomenological criteria in order to start imposing tempo and the sonority. 

At that point I could have done like many others have: observe the type of work he did and leave as soon as possible, convinced, but not completely unrightfully, that what really matters for the musical success is something else, starting from the display of brilliant technique…trying to make an impression. But that’s not what I was interested in. 

I kneeled down and stated studying, listening, thinking about everything that I didn’t understand, and there was a lot of things I didn’t understand. Besides, Celibidache had already sent me to a journey of no return. In an interview, he said while talking to his philharmonic orchestra of Munich: “I switch on, I make it incandescent, that desire to interrelate, the desire that is in each and every one of them”. 

There, he has placed that wish inside of me too, the desire that has always been there - to find connection and give meaning to everything I was doing. I attended all of his seminars in Germany, Italy and France as well as numerous concert rehearsals and all of that was a priceless testimony of his way of working. 

Very different to my previous course, opposed by a close personal relationships with my teachers, I didn’t feel the need to get that much close to Celibidache because I felt that was dangerous. He had an extraordinary charisma and charm, his smiles could destroy any natural psychological defense but when you least expected it, he could devastate you with his cutting judgments. 

His closest students were objects of his mood swings and constantly felt the pressure and the responsibility of the role they had. How many times have I witnessed extremely flattering judgments of the Maestro, followed in the next round by severe condemnations of their work.

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I attended Celibidache’s courses for four years and during the last course I finally had an important verification of the work I’d done. One of many exercises he proposed was to write on the board a twelve-tone series, carefully distributing the opposite phases of expansion and contraction of musical tension in order to achieve the final integration. 

Then, the participants could play the piano (the same “damned” unreliable piano from my first performance) and even from the first try show all the existing relations in that melody. Even though this action can seem very simple, actually it was a tricky test for everyone because every time we’d have one accent too many, a variation unjustified by the speed or a wrong interpretation of the subdivisions inside of the series, showing implacably both our physical and mental stiffness. 

Anyway, I wanted to give it a try myself, without many expectations, just for the pleasure of a challenge accompanied by its natural emotion. I played without hesitation, with a miraculous perception that there is a function which corresponds to every sound, clarifies its meaning, gives more meaning to all the previous sounds and frees more spaces to the sounds to follow. 

All this, up to the last note which, like the last moment, brings us back to the first sound, enhancing, in my mind, the complex meaning of the entire series. It was a wonderful experience, acknowledged by Celibidache right away but followed by a certain doubt -- Was it done by chance or was it a happy achievement of a mature student? He asked me to repeat my performance…

In spite of the expectations that grew up and larger attention I had, I played with the same spirit getting a uniform sense of the series of sounds despite of small variation of dynamics and correspondingly agogic. 

Celibidache was particularly content because he could show right there that uniqueness and cohesion of a performance does not necessarily comes from playing the known standards or “doing exactly the same thing” but it depends on the capacity to listen and perform and its interior freedom in that precise moment and in a particular disposition of the objective phenomena which comes with a pureness of conscience and a corresponding spontaneous reaction of one’s will, purified, freed from clichés and conditioning. . 

It is clear that these are the “miraculous”, rare moments who don’t depend on our wishes even though we can try to create the conditions needed for them to happen. 

But in that precise moment, I was able to be present in the entire process and that was enough, I understood the direction in which I had to go. This is how a new musical life has begun, more aware and responsible directed to a new integration of all of my past and present experiences.

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In the years that followed my experience with Celibidache, so from 1989 on, I stayed in touch with some of his students and assistants to learn something more about some topics of phenomenology and, besides, my concerts activity that developed even more in those years, I started studying, with a lot of passion, the composition with a renowned composer and friend Alessandro Cusatelli. 

My interest grew for other artistic forms abandoned during my adolescence like painting and sculpture, expressed in the anthroposophy indications and then at eurhythmics besides from forms of conscience and the use of body in the Feldenkrais technique. 

After getting married and experiencing fatherhood in its various phases, today I feel I can use those experiences, whether they are musical or not, in a creative way, if it’s for the concert preparations or in my teachings. I was able to do this also because my wife and I attended for a long time groups of spiritual, cultural and psychological elaboration led by Marco Guzzi, a poet, a writer and a spiritual guide of a rare mankind that accompanied us in discovery of our most hidden interior reality with all the sides of our soul and showed us the way of meditation. 

A while ago a student of mine told me during a lesson “But, Maestro, how can you understand so precisely everything that goes through my head while I play…my thoughts, all of my anxiety, my fears, my expectations and aspirations”. 

It wasn’t difficult for me to reply that what she was feeling, even though it’s a personal and particular form, was a part of my own experience, those emotions and feeling were very familiar to me, I felt them in my body and in my soul and I had to recognize her gestures and her facial expressions, her posture and the slightest and the obvious stiffness of her body. 

This has been an object of my thoughts, in all the forms in which my creativity could explicate. At this point I think that all my life was a product of a continuous mediation between contradictory moments and experiences, starting from the mediation between the two different worlds that my parents came from, their social, cultural and ethnical diversity. 

It’s not that my mother or my father, as single individuals were more cultured one from the other, but they belonged to two opposite cultures, one being the German/Slav middle class and the other a rural piedmont culture from which my father distanced himself with his studies and the trips around the world. 

I found these two worlds inside of me, sometimes conflicting, other times complementary and enriching. Being very close to both of them, even though in different forms, this dichotomy brought me to a natural tendency of reflexivity. 

Bachelard wrote that the essence of the reflection is in the perception of lack of comprehension of something (and I add, also of the will to make up for this lack). So, maybe even in the continuous struggle to integrate different complementary realities, even the strong will to find out what are my difficulties and find solutions, can explain the natural tendency to tune in with my students’ difficulties and the empathic wish to help them. 

The struggle I first considered a personal weakness revealed to be a uniqueness even when it comes to the musical expression which allowed me to combine unknown realities, more vague, more subtle and soft, constantly improving my means, and more adequate technique of expression.

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