Another instrument

By Carel Nolte

I went to Italy for the cars.

Well, sort of.

I was there with the Pablo Clark Racing team on the EasyEquities Maranello Ferrari trip, so there were certainly cars. Beautiful ones. Fast ones. Ridiculously valuable ones. Cars that make most humans stand quietly and stare.

But somewhere between Maranello, Modena and Rome, the soundtrack became at least as important as the machinery.

And perhaps that shouldn’t have surprised me.

At the Museo Enzo Ferrari in Modena, the exhibition Greatest Hits: Music Legends and their Ferraris brings together two worlds that at first seem quite different. Cars and music. Engineering and art. Precision and emotion.

Except they aren’t that different at all.

Enzo Ferrari himself loved music. The exhibition makes the point that Ferrari and music share the same creative tension: discipline and instinct, rigour and freedom. Innovation matters, but so does performance.

I love that.

The Pablo Clark team have a talk that argues that cars are people.

Not literally, obviously.

But a great car isn’t just metal, rubber and engineering. It carries stories. Who imagined it. Who designed it. Who built it. Who raced it. Who crashed it. Who loved it. Who owned it. Where it went. What it is worth – in cash, memories and potential.

That last bit interests me a lot. I spend a fair amount of my life thinking about investing and value, and this trip reminded me again that value isn’t always created on a spreadsheet. Scarcity matters. Provenance matters. Story matters. Emotion matters.

Sometimes a machine becomes culture and in Ferrari’s beloved Modena and surrounds, there are many wonderful examples.

Sonny Bono chose a Ferrari 250 LM for Cher in the 1960s: twelve cylinders, red paint and blue cloth inside. The car had competed internationally before becoming part of a completely different story involving two of the biggest names in American popular music.

John Lennon chose the rather more discreet 330 GT 2+2.

Kate Bush’s Ferrari journey went from a yellow 308 GTS to a 328 GTB, two 348 TBs and eventually a red F355 Berlinetta.

Eric Clapton went further still. He commissioned Ferrari to create the one-off SP12 EC, based on the 458 Italia but inspired by the 512 BB that he loved. His own Ferrari. Not simply bought, but interpreted.

Then Maria Callas.

At the height of her career, Aristotle Onassis gave her a silver Ferrari 250 GT 2+2. Even the colour apparently echoed her villa at Sirmione. I loved that detail. The Divina didn’t need a red Ferrari to announce herself. Silver would do.

Ferrari has elsewhere compared the sound of one of its great V12s to Callas singing La Traviata. That would be quite a claim from any other car company. But with Ferrari, it’s just a fact.

And then there was Herbert von Karajan.

One of the great conductors of the twentieth century, he led the Berlin Philharmonic for 35 years. His Ferrari was a silver-grey 250 GT Lusso with red leather.

Breathtakingly beautiful.

The museum describes how Karajan recognised in its engine a balance of precision, power and absolute control. The twelve cylinders produced a harmony that, to him, deserved to be listened to.

A conductor listening to a Ferrari.

My friend and colleague Helena from Satrix was with me – we share a love of music and now also cars. There we were, two people from the finance world, standing in front of a Ferrari talking about conductors, orchestras, music, money, value and emotion.

Enzo museum

Links everywhere, if you’re open to them …

Mozart is still messing with us

A few days later Rikus and I were in Rome.

Two South Africans sitting in the Teatro Costanzi watching Le nozze di Figaro.

Mozart’s opera premiered in Vienna in 1786.

Two hundred and forty years later, people were still lying, flirting, scheming, lusting, abusing power, changing clothes, misunderstanding each other, forgiving each other and generally making complete fools of themselves.

And not just in this opera.

So, basically, not much has changed!

What fascinated me was not simply that Figaro has survived. It was that it was being messed with.

Reworked. Reimagined. Interpreted by different artists for different people in a different century.

That is one of the things I love most about great art.

It doesn’t survive because we put it under glass and tell everyone not to touch it.

It survives because we keep touching it.

We perform it again. Argue with it. Change the staging. Hear different things in it. Find something Mozart couldn’t possibly have known would matter to two South Africans sitting in an opera house in Rome in 2026.

Nearly four hours of storytelling, music, singing, acting, movement and spectacle – and it holds you.

I love opera partly because it refuses to choose.

Music or theatre? Both.

Story or spectacle? Both.

Intellect or emotion? Both.

For an Enneagram Seven who isn’t particularly good at choosing only one thing when several will do, opera may be the perfect art form.

And there is the sheer physical madness of it. A human being walks onto a stage and fills a theatre with sound while acting a character, responding to an orchestra and telling a story.

How can one not love that?

And then Pavarotti sang again

Back in Modena, Pablo Clark had arranged something I won’t forget.

We visited Casa Museo Luciano Pavarotti, the house Pavarotti built in the Modena countryside and where he spent the final years of his life.

It wasn’t built as a museum.

It was his home.

A place to live. To eat. To entertain. To teach. To make music.

And I think that is why it affected us as much as it did.

In his lounge, beside his piano, two young singers connected to his foundation sang for us.

A wonderful pianist accompanied them.

And I cried.

There isn’t a cleverer way to put that.

I heard Pavarotti live twice in South Africa. His voice has been part of the soundtrack of my life and, like millions of people around the world, I think he did something extraordinary for opera.

He opened the door.

He didn’t make opera less serious. He made people less frightened of it.

And now, years after his death, young voices were singing in his home, accompanied on his piano, in a place where he himself had worked with young singers.

On the walls hung paintings he had made himself (something I didn’t know – and one in particular reminded me of Matisse – maybe even David Hockey). Stunning.

The man wasn’t there.

Except, somehow, he was everywhere. You could feel it.

(And if you missed it, the ugly mural of him outside was a slap-in-the-face reminder!)

Later we had dinner at the restaurant next door.

That also felt wonderfully Italian.

A house. A piano. Some food. A few people singing.

All so ordinary.

And completely extraordinary.

Looking up

Then Rome again.

The Vatican Museums.

I first visited roughly 30 years ago with my friend Nadine Meyer when we were poor students on a serious budget. This time there seemed to be way more humans – everywhere.

E-very-where.

Tour groups. Phones. Flags held above heads. Queues. People photographing things before they had actually looked at them.

At moments I wondered whether we have made some of these places too touristy to experience properly.

And then I caught myself.

What exactly is the alternative?

That fewer people get to see them? Only some of us allowed access?

There is a tension there. Access can diminish intimacy. But access also means that someone from Johannesburg or Manila or Modena can stand underneath something made centuries ago and encounter a completely different idea of what human beings are capable of.

Art shouldn’t belong only to the people lucky enough to get the room to themselves.

And it teaches us.

Paintings, sculpture, architecture, books, theatre and music carry information in ways spreadsheets never will.

They tell us what people feared and what they loved. What they worshipped. Who had the money. Who had the power. What they thought was beautiful. What they were prepared to spend a lifetime making.

Gazing up in the Sistine Chapel at Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and that almost-touching finger of God, you cannot help but be mesmerised.

I didn’t cry at that.

The man next to me did.

And sometimes these artists also dared to imagine what might come next.

Which is perhaps why I’ve also been watching the current controversy around the Kennedy Center in Washington with interest. Courts and politicians are arguing about names, control, renovation and the future of a building created as a memorial to John F. Kennedy with materials and art donated by numerous nations and individuals.

A federal judge has ruled that the Center cannot add President Donald Trump’s name without congressional authority and, amid the fight over its closure and renovation, has now required at least 30 days’ notice before any steps are taken to demolish the building.

Whatever one’s politics, it raises an interesting question about cultural institutions.

Who owns them?

The people who build them? The politicians who fund them? The donors? The artists? The audience? The person whose name happens to be on the building?

Perhaps none of us completely.

The Vatican rather spectacularly proves that money, power, politics, ego and art have been sharing buildings for centuries.

But the art somehow has to remain bigger than the people temporarily in charge of the building.

Mozart has survived emperors.

Callas survived critics (and Onassis!)

Pavarotti took opera out of the opera house and gave some of it to millions.

Maybe that’s part of the deal.

We are custodians for a while.

The music has a much longer life.

Perhaps all great art does.

Bring it home

And I think that’s why this particular, short Italian trip got under my skin.

Ferrari reminded me that engineering can have soul.

Mozart reminded me that something can be 240 years old without being remotely dead.

Pavarotti reminded me that making something accessible doesn’t necessarily diminish it. Sometimes sharing it is the greatest gift you can give it.

And the Vatican reminded me that preservation without people rather misses the point.

Which made me excited to come home. After doing the Otter walk (an annual privilege thanks to EasyEquities being the presenting partner of the Grail of Trails) it is Woordfees time!

One person I’m particularly looking forward to seeing at this year’s Woordfees is conductor and cellist Kutlwano Masote. His Imperfect Harmony is part of the EasyEquities Writers’ Festival: a conversation about music and family, love, loss, addiction, redemption and the discord and harmony of a life.

And, wonderfully, he will also play Bach and Saint-Saëns on the cello – a rare treat!

There’s that refusal to fit neatly into a box again.

Conductor. Cellist. Writer. Storyteller.

Woordfees runs from 3 to 11 October this year and EasyEquities is again involved through the Writers’ Festival. And I’m looking forward to Hessequa Harmonie too, another place where people, words and music get to bump into one another.

Different places.

Different people.

Different sounds.

I went to Italy for Ferrari and ended up thinking about music.

Or perhaps they were never that far apart.

A conductor doesn’t make the sound. The musicians do.

The conductor listens, interprets, creates space and helps different instruments, histories, personalities and moments find one another.

Perhaps that’s not a bad way to think about life either.

Not everything and everyone has to sound and be the same.

Thank bloody goodness.