Leonard Cohen

I have fallen in love musically twice in my life. Of course, to tell the truth I've had a lot of affairs - two examples, but I could give many: I go through withdrawal if I don't listen to La Domenica delle Salme for too long, I start to feel strange when I periodically don't get lost in Gianmaria Testa's hot air balloons.

But I've only fallen in love twice (and I feel like I'm already very lucky).

I fell in love with Paolo Conte around the age of 18. One autumn or spring afternoon, I was explaining mathematics to Cecilia and the room was full of light. She was looking for excuses to avoid maths: she turned on the stereo, picked up a cassette and pressed play. A voice jumps out of the speakers, which to me is a thunderbolt. I had never heard anything like it. Gelato al limon is the first Paolo Conte song I have heard.

Much later, I crossed paths with Leonard Cohen.

There is a crack, a crack in everything a That's how the light gets in.

The first time I listened to Anthem, inside me, thousands of shutters opened wide on thousands of lighted windows, with all the noise they make when they slam in the wind and the curtains flutter; hundreds of shutters began to rise and I never stopped listening to Cohen.

It remains my totemic music, the one to return to when nothing else works.

Cohen on stage was an experience: take Tower of song from Live in Dublin and Live in London and see what he does. How cleverly he plays with the audience, how he teases and how carefully he delivers the song, through an irony that has always smacked of wisdom to me.

And when he knelt on stage. He knelt for the music, for the song: full of dignity, he knelt in honour of everything.