09/03/2026
Concert pianist Yirui Weng grew up an atheist, but found Christian faith after hearing Vivaldi's Gloria.
For Yirui music had always expressed a kind of longing - but when she was in her twenties, that longing felt like a question, and she didn't have the answer.
"That's when I realised my question about life was bigger than that music itself," she says.
She was coming to the end of her university studies, and on the outside, everything looked fine. She was studying music, she had goals. But something was missing.
"Music had always been my language, but sometimes, when I couldn't find deeper meaning in what I was doing, when music felt like only technique or performance, I felt empty," she says.
Yirui grew up in Hangzhou, China. Her parents were teachers, and religion played little part in their lives.
"My mother went to temple to pray for us, but she always told me that you need to believe in yourself, not something else," she says.
She was a quiet, shy child, but when she played the piano, she felt as if she was in communion with the composer of the piece.
She moved to Italy to pursue her musical studies, and in walking past churches, she began to feel curious about the people sitting in silence inside.
In her final year of studies, she took a course in sacred music. "[It] carried an inexplicable feeling of holiness, as if time stood still," she says. "It was a feeling I'd never had before."
Through her studies, she came across the composer Antonio Vivaldi's piece, Gloria.
"[Playing it], I felt a sense of nakedness as if being exposed in broad daylight," she says.
And then she began to wonder about the composer's words.
"Who is the Son of the father? Why is he called the Lamb of God? Why is he able to take away the sins of the world?"
These questions led her to a Chinese priest in Milan, and she began to take classes in Christian teaching. In 2023, Yirui was baptised, and she now wants to be known as Eleanora to reflect her new life.
"The day after I woke up feeling very grateful. I felt accepted. I felt loved."
Now she feels the existence of music is a testimony to the existence of God.
"I believe through music people can find a kind of supernatural peace and presence of beauty. This for me is the presence of God," she says.
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