Twelve years at the head of an opera house. Then an initiation in Bali.

The beginning

I was twelve when I first sang in the choir in Haydn’s Creation. At the passage where God creates the light, something happened to me that I had no words for. I sank into an endless sea of sound and arrived at the essence of music. From then on I knew that this was where I wanted to go.

What grew out of that was a life in music. Flute and dance, literature and musicology, and economics and business alongside them. I wanted both: the work and the responsibility for it.

The first world

I became the youngest general director in Italy. For twelve years I led the Haydn Foundation, an orchestra and an opera house. In that time I doubled the budget, carried through a merger that was considered politically impossible, and built a transnational orchestra. Then the Fondazione INDA, Italy’s most renowned theatre festival, held in the Greek theatre of Syracuse, with 450,000 visitors a year. And I founded Fortissimo Education, Europe’s leading digital platform for classical music, out of a network of 23 institutions in 14 countries.

I know how to run a company, how to convince a supervisory board, and how to bring a house through a crisis.

That is the reason I can work today on houses where a great deal is at stake.

The break

In the middle of success there was an emptiness that nothing from outside could fill. I had achieved what I had set out to achieve. It was not enough.

The second world

What followed I did not plan. Retreats, silence, sound, ceremonies. In one of them something opened that never closed again. I had contact with the dead, access to lives that came before this one, and I travelled into non-physical spaces.

In Bali I was initiated by an energetic healer and taken into his lineage. Since then I can call on that healing power and let it work, as a force that works through me.

Devinaya is the name of my channel to the non-physical. With Devinaya I wrote Mehr als diese Welt, which became an Amazon bestseller.

Why houses

For a long time I thought my work was work with people. Until I noticed that almost everything I perceive in a person begins in their rooms.

A transformation needs safety, as in trauma healing. No one lets go completely while the ground is unsteady. The house is that ground.

It was exactly like that for me. Safety in my profession opened the way to a merger. Safety in my career to a relationship. Safety in the relationship to a new place to live. Safety in that place to a new calling. Every step needed firm ground for the next.

That is why I begin with the place.

How I work

• I measure. Before and after.
• I work on few houses each year.
• I name no house and no name without consent.

I am MMMag. Valeria Told MAS, born in Merano and at home today in the Algarve. I have written two books and lived two lives that have since become one.