His hands gently rest on the piano keys, while the last note of Chopin’s Ballad n. 4 echoes in the air. A few seconds of silence and then the roar of applause fills the Dal Verme theater in Milan. Several people stand up, among the over 1,400 audience members. Kuok-Wai Lio, the 35-year old world renowned Chinese pianist, has just wrapped up the concert for peace in memory of Father Giussani, organized by the CLU (the university students in Communion and Liberation), open to all students and conceived as a missionary gesture to fundraise for the Holy Land. The artist expresses his thanks by bowing several times while looking at the audience, then he almost runs off the stage.

“He speaks more through his music than with words,” Maria Zagra tells me outside of the theater. She is a third-year philosophy student from Catholic University, herself a piano student at Milan’s Scuola Civica and among the organizers of the event. “The concert was also an attempt to make concrete the document some of us wrote in response to Pope Francis’s appeal to accompany him in the 'prophesy for peace.' This is why we will send all the money we raised to Cardinal Pizzaballa." The evening turned into an event that embraced the whole world: "a Chinese artist who lives in the US came to Italy to play for free,” she explains. But what made Kuok-Wai Lio decide to come? What happened to him? Let’s take a step back to better understand.


In March 2023, Kuok-Wai participated in a spiritual retreat at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, as part of his own search for meaning. There he met Br. Angelus, a Benedictine monk who, when he found out that he was a pianist, showed him some of Fr. Giussani’s books, including the Spirto Gentil commentaries to the works in the CD collection by the same name. The artist read them all in one breath because, he says “no one had ever managed to express what I was living through music as well as Father Giussani.” Through the monk, he met students from CLU and went to their vacation. It was an encounter that changed his life to the point that it contributed to his conversion to Catholicism.

In September, in Atchinson, CLU students organized their first Conference, a small weekend “meeting.” On Saturday night, Kuok-Wai held a concert in honor of Father Giussani and among the audience members was Maria who, together with three other Italian university students, had responded to the invitation to go to the Conference as a sign of friendship toward the American CLU students. The theater was overflowing and, just like during the Milanese concert, every musical piece was introduced by a short work of literature.

“The previous day, I had listened to him while he rehearsed in a classroom. I had asked him to play Chopin’s first Ballad, my favorite. And he played it immediately, without the sheet music. There I understood the greatness of the person I had in front of me, the fact that he communicated simply that way, by playing. And that’s when we became friends,” Maria says. They met again in January at the New York Encounter, where the musician played Beethoven’s Fifth sonata. Before getting back on the plane for Italy, Maria proposed something to him: to come and play in Italy. Kuok-Wai accepted immediately, curious to meet the Italian CLU students and, as he said later, with the desire in his heart to play in honor of Father Giussani in his own city.

At the end of October, he arrived in Italy, where he stayed for a week. We met him the day after the concert in a café near Catholic University, with David, an American friend who decided to take a week off from work to travel with him.

During our conversation, gradually, words take the place of notes, as his hands rise and fall as if on a piano keyboard.

What fascinated you about Giussani?
I felt a correspondence between what he says and what I live through music. I’ll try to explain. Music touches that point in which man is in relationship with God. A composer is always searching for communication and communion with God, regardless of his particular creed. As a musician I seek unity between body and spirit, and in Father Giussani I found this tension expressed. In this perspective, the work of School of Community helps me also from a professional point of view, as an artist, because it nurtures my curiosity toward everything that concerns the human.

Let’s try to go even deeper. How does this tension toward a relationship with God express itself in music?
Classical music originated from Gregorian chant, which is a question to God, a thirst for God. Great musical pieces are certainly born from the talent of their composers, which is a gift, but also from their experiences: the joy, the suffering, the uneasiness they have felt in their lives pours out in the notes. When I began to perceive this in the great composers I also turned to philosophy and theology, where I discovered the greatness of David’s Psalms and Jeremiah’s Lamentations. The Christian message consists in Christ’s cross that redeems man’s suffering. This redemption brings peace, I would add. This is what composers express, often without realizing it, in their works of music. This was Giussani’s discovery and also mine as I read him: he expressed in words what I have always experienced when playing.

Has this encounter changed the way you perform?
Yes (he smiles). It has been very enriching and inspiring. I finally found what I had been looking for in the study of music since I was very young.

Let’s talk about the concert. What did the evening mean to you?
It was the perfect combination of two languages: music and words. And this is very significant for me: “In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word became flesh,” the word is at the origin, and the creation of every true masterpiece has something to do with the original creation.

And the audience?
I perceived great understanding and attention. While I played, I realized that I was playing for someone, and that this someone was present. I felt free to the point that I tried some things out, during the performance, that I hadn’t tried before. And there’s something else that’s important to me. Opera, a typically Italian art form, was my first passion: when I was five years old, even though I didn’t understand a single word, I would listen, mesmerized, to it and so it was wonderful to play for an Italian audience, one to whom I am bound by deep affection in this case.

Why did you choose those specific musical pieces?
The first one, Beethoven’s Tempest, I chose precisely because of the genius commentary that Giussani makes, prophetically reading this piece in light of the German composer’s last works. I am personally very connected to Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Childhood scenes). Giussani again comes to mind, when he says that in prayer we must have the heart of a child. In those pieces I find the simplicity of the child and the wisdom of the adult. And finally Chopin…Chopin is my great love.