Luca Baccolini

Ruben's story, the prodigy raised by an Italy that once knew how to welcome

At 13, Ruben Xhaferi’s idols aren’t soccer stars—they’re Maurizio, Ivo, and Murray, rhyming with the golden “three P’s” of the late 20th century: Pollini, Pogorelich, and Perahia. For each he has a detail, an explanation, an idea: “And don’t listen to those who criticize Pollini today,” he insists over the phone, “because he still has an extraordinary touch and sense of music, from which there’s only to learn.” Hearing the lucid, grown-up reasoning of this boy is no less striking than listening to him play the piano live.

That will happen tonight at 9:15 p.m. in the hall of the Goethe-Zentrum/Alliance Française on Via De Marchi, for the Circolo della Musica’s season, where he is set to perform a programme of Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart, and Chopin. He had already appeared in Bologna a year ago, quietly, playing Haydn’s Concerto in D major. Returning now, for his debut solo recital, confirms the strength of his path and of his teacher, the Bolognese pianist Sandro Baldi, who took him under his wing first at the Conservatory of Adria and later in Ferrara, where he continues his studies. So far, he has collected only first prizes in every competition he has entered.

Yet nothing in this story smells of predestination. Ruben began pressing keys at age five, drawn more by a world than by a goal. “When he asked me to enroll him in a music school, I thought he wanted to play drums,” admits his father Dritan. “But when I realized he was serious, I had to surrender to the evidence. His ‘illness’ began that way.”

Eight years later, it hasn’t passed—unlike what often happens when willpower fails to support talent. He awaits the completion of a diploma and the artistic maturity of which unmistakable signs can already be felt.

Ruben is the second-generation son of a wave of migration that, thirty years ago, crossed the Mediterranean on routes different from today’s, but with the same motives. His father Dritan is from Vlora, where he painted and dreamed of becoming an artist. He was working on a painting of a sunrise over the sea when the sea itself called him to reality:

“I left the canvas unfinished because the first boats were leaving for Puglia. I seized the chance,” he recalls, “and, as we set sail, I heard the gunfire of the Albanian army. They weren’t aiming at us, but at that moment we couldn’t know. They just wanted to scare us, but everyone knew those masses fleeing a country on the brink of collapse couldn’t be stopped.”

Dritan was 18 in 1991, five years older than Ruben is today, who was instead born in Dolo, near Venice. “At home, though, we speak Albanian,” says Mr. Xhaferi, “because roots must be preserved. Erasing them would be wrong, maybe even a little ridiculous.” Like many second-generation children, Ruben got to know his family’s homeland by returning there on vacation—and he has even played there. He never knew Hoxha’s Albania, nor the Italy of thirty years ago: “A much more welcoming and less racist country than today,” confesses Dritan. “When I arrived in Puglia, I remember an extraordinary welcome, perhaps because war and migration were still fresh realities.”

And one wonders how many Dritans and Rubens never left, never set out in search of their dream.

Luca Baccolini
la Repubblica
April 6, 2019