Le Onde (Italian “The Waves”) is the title track of an album released in 1996 by the Italian pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi. Trained at the Conservatorio Verdi in Milan, Einaudi began his career as a classical composer, later incorporating other styles and genres such as pop, rock, folk, and world music. Einaudi has composed the scores for a number of films and television productions, including This Is England, The Intouchables, I’m Still Here, the TV miniseries Doctor Zhivago, and Acquario (1996), for which he won the Grolla d’oro. His music was used as the score for the Golden Globe and Academy Award-winning films Nomadland and The Father.
The album is based on the novel The Waves by British writer Virginia Woolf, and was Einaudi’s first solo piano album. The album enjoyed mainstream success, particularly in Italy and the UK. The inside of the CD booklet reads “If it were a story it would be set on the seafront of a long beach. A beach without beginning and without end. The story of a man who walks along this shore and perhaps never meets anyone. His gaze lingers occasionally to look at some object or fragment brought from the sea. The footprints of a crab or a solitary seagull. I always take the sand, the sky, some clouds, the sea. Only the waves change, always the same and different, smaller. larger. Shorter. Longer.”
Le Onde is a slow and flowing piece. Einaudi claimed that he wrote the piece “Le Onde” when he was thinking of The Waves. The piece is split into parts, with each part being repeated until the coda at the end which brings it to a close. It builds up texture incorporating a melody in the right hand and long fast arpeggios in the left. There is a distinctive chord pattern which repeats throughout the arpeggios. In the chorus there is a key change and the arpeggios change to incorporate new melodies and motifs.
Einaudi has also released a number of solo albums for piano and other instruments, notably I Giorni in 2001, Nightbook in 2009, and In a Time Lapse in 2013. On 1 March 2019, Einaudi announced a seven-part project named Seven Days Walking, which was released over the course of seven months in 2019. In 2005, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.
