I listened to a lot of classical music while writing my new novel Concerto, set on Lake Como, but one modern track featured regularly in my playlists. For me, one of the most tender, moving and romantic songs of the past few years has been this, ‘All of Me’ by John Legend:

Did you know that this music video, featuring John Legend and his wife Chrissy Teigen, for whom he wrote the song, was filmed on location at Lake Como? The couple call this region of Italy their ‘home from home’. They even married here – the footage at the end of the music video is from their actual wedding day. Chrissy Teigen told Travel + Leisure: ‘For me, the most special place is Lake Como, Italy. There’s just something so picturesque and so quiet about it. When you look out on the lake it looks like a painting. It’s completely silent.’

In this interview, John Legend speaks about how ‘personal and yet universal’ the song is; how his wife cried when she first heard it; how when he performs the song live, men in the audience get down on one knee to propose marriage to their girlfriends.

In my new novel, Concerto, the hero Umberto has John Legend’s gift of writing music that truly moves and inspires. The pianist plays in the evenings in his home, Les Platanes, in Mont Boron, Nice, and the melody drifts on the air to the next-door property, Les Charmilles, where eighteen-year-old music student Catriona listens, completely enchanted. I write:

A few minutes more and there came to her strains of a melody she didn’t recognize, music unlike anything she had ever heard before. At first, it was so quiet that it might have been merely a sigh of the breeze or the far-off lapping of the sea on the shore. Then, without warning, it began to hum and swell like the ocean waves, growing louder, then louder still, until the notes seemed to leap across the garden, heading directly towards her. Catriona closed her eyes and now it was everywhere, falling out of the sky, surrounding her, embracing her in its powerful arms, clasping her against its throbbing heart. Then, as the music built and surged, she could almost imagine that the gates of Paradise had opened, giving passage to a chorus of angels, like the very ones guiding Adam and Eve that Umberto had told her about, their moving limpid voices flooding the night with a melody that was sweet and sad, yet at the same time brave and bold. Oh, and beautiful, so beautiful! It filled her ears, her head, and touched the deepest recesses of her soul, filling her with such emotion that tears welled up in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks in an endless stream.

Here, I hope to encapsulate the power of music – Umberto’s piano composition, John Legend’s ‘All of Me’ – to stir the deepest of emotional responses. So heady are the feelings the music stirs in Catriona that when Umberto’s fingers still and the piano falls silent, Catriona feels bereft:

… the music had ceased, taking with it all the enchantment, the elation, and the jumble of glorious feelings that had flooded her, leaving in its wake the most dreadful and desolate gulf Catriona had ever known.

I am reminded of the words of the Greek philosopher Plato: ‘Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.’

Where would romance be without music? For me, the ultimate romantic gesture is for a musician to write a song for a lover. John Legend’s raw honesty and devotion in ‘All of Me’ is surely why the song resonates with so many.

In Concerto, though, the story that unfolds centres around Umberto having lost his ability to write and perform after an accident leaves him blind. Can he find the courage, and the honesty, to make beautiful music once more, for Catriona?