Stefano Gervasoni, born in Bergamo in 1962, is one of the most internationally recognised Italian composers of his generation. He began studying composition in 1980 on the advice of Luigi Nono and later trained at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Milan with Luca Lombardi, Niccolò Castiglioni and Azio Corghi. Encounters with Brian Ferneyhough, Peter Eötvös, Helmut Lachenmann, Gérard Grisey and Heinz Holliger were decisive for his artistic development. After studying with György Ligeti in Hungary in 1990, he completed his training in Paris at IRCAM, where in 1992 he attended the Course in Composition and Computer Music. Since 2006 he has been Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris.
Gervasoni’s music is marked by a refined and highly personal sound world, in which elusive lyricism, formal clarity and subtle processes of transformation coexist. The voice occupies a central place in his catalogue, in solo, choral, theatrical and instrumental contexts, up to the orchestra. Chamber music also plays a particularly significant role in his work: he approaches it as a laboratory not only for technical research into timbre, polyphonic structure and formal articulation, but also as a space of poetic and expressive exploration, where sound becomes a medium for reflection, dialogue and invention.
Among his distinctions are the Prix de Rome (1995–96), the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellowship (2006), the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation Award (2018), the Coups de Cœur of the Académie Charles Cros, and the Premio della Critica Musicale “Franco Abbiati”, received in 2009, 2022 and 2025, most recently for the recording of De Tinieblas.
His music has been recorded by labels including Aeon, Harmonia Mundi, hatHut, KAIROS, Naïve, Sony, Stradivarius and Winter & Winter. The musicologist Philippe Albèra devoted a substantial book to his work, Stefano Gervasoni. Le parti pris des sons, published by Éditions Contrechamps in Geneva in 2015. His works are published by Ricordi, with part of the catalogue also associated with Suvini Zerboni / SZ Sugar.
(Text updated in May 2026)
In die Luft geschrieben (“Writing in the Air”) is a vocal cycle of lieder based on epitaphs written by Nelly Sachs, from 1943 to 1946, dedicated to real people who went missing as a result of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. Fifteen of these poetic works were discovered only after the poetess’s death, and were published posthumously in 2010.
« This composition is one of my first in which the commitment to civil society is evident. Let’s say it’s spelled out in no uncertain terms for the first time, through the poetry of Nelly Sachs and the tone of that poetry. It’s a tone that speaks out with particular strength, belied by the appearances of a simple, tragically light linguistic register, like the air in which the ashes of a name are scattered. Verses where the wounds of history are traces that have all but disappeared, poetically veiled in words to decipher, absolute in their violence, yet exquisitely delicate in their poetic expression. This is what makes the voice in Nelly Sachs’ poetry the voice of all of us. It’s a warning to future mankind: a sin went down in history and must be atoned for by all. This is the teaching that must be inscribed in the foundations of future civilization. But even today, reason resists assuming responsibility and learning from history; it resists the idea of making decisions in favor of people’s lives collectively, all across the world, in defense of the common good. In musical terms, that’s the tone I’ve always sought when making my music. There’s that same tone, so clear, that we hear in the poetry of Nelly Sachs, especially in the epitaphs of In die Luft geschrieben. The epitaphs were set to music that flows without interruption, and they comprise a wandering journey. They are broken up into groups that are connected by interludes of musical reflection. »
Stefano Gervasoni
“Il rumore non fa bene, il bene non fa rumore” (The noise does no good, and good makes no noise), said the Italian composer Niccolò Castiglioni (1932–1996), one of my mentors.
Is silence the opposite of noise? Is silence good? What is noise? Are silence and noise, although antithetical, also antithetical to music?
My violin concerto is imbued with these questions and unfolds through these reflections.
Silence is not absence, or emptiness.
Silence is richness, fullness of meaning, the rightness of a word.
Silence is a state to be reached within an overflowing sound situation (and within the chaos of the world or everyday life), not through its quantitative reduction but through its qualitative transformation.
It is not a nothingness, devoid of vibration, a place that shields and deprives us of contact with the world, but a space offered to resonance (both physical and mental) within the world itself. It is making the object of perception shine by silencing the subject perceiving it and the external conditions that might confuse, impede, or nullify it.
It is a silence that creates, a condition of fullness, a shift in meaning from what inevitably surrounds us, clamors, and disorients us, to what deeply persuades and convinces us—without the need for explanations, words, or demonstrations—of its rightness.
The solo violin in this concerto is the creator of this journey, this transformation, acting upon an orchestra that is the outside world teeming with the diversity and the richness of the sounds of the people who inhabit it, or the projection of the internal chaos of a single individual.
Text by Stefano Gervasoni