The Chicago Symphony
Orchestra directed by Riccardo Muti on Thursday will perform for
the first time the Symphony N. 9 by American composer William
Schuman called 'Le Fosse Ardeatine' - an homage to the victims
of the massacre by Nazis at the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome on
March 24, 1944.
Muti in an interview to the Chicago Tribune spoke about the
little-known symphony, explaining that the brutality of the WWII
mass killing "is still an open wound for Italians" because of
the way it happened and its brutality.
The conductor said he was unacquainted with Schuman's work
before becoming the musical director of the CSO.
He told the newspaper that a broadcaster at a local radio in
Chicago first spoke to him about the symphony, saying "you
Italians should know it".
"When I saw the title I was immediately impressed that an
American composer had written" it, Muti said.
The man was Steven Robinson, the former general manager of a
local radio and the president of podcasting company New Media
Productions.
Schuman, a Pulitzer Prize winner, composed the symphony in
1968, the year after he visited the Ardeatine Caves.
Schuman, who died in 1992 aged 81, later explained he had
used that title for his symphony "not for a musical but for a
philosophical reason".
"You have to come to terms with the past in order to build
the future", the composer said.
"But in this exercise, I am an enemy of oblivion".
"Regardless of the future my symphony will have, wherever it
will be played, the public will remember", he explained.
Muti spoke about the terrible revenge perpetrated by German
occupying forces, who killed 335 Italians in retaliation to a
partisan attack in Rome the previous day against German SS
police forces.
"They needed 10 Italians for one German" victim in the
retaliatory killing, noted Muti . "It wasn't a military action,
it was a terrorist action".
"In the heart and memory of Italians, the Ardeatine Caves
represent one of the most cruel things, because poor children
were taken overnight and brutally killed", he said.
"Through music we want to make people aware of the danger and
the possibility of disasters and human cruelty at any time",
Muti said.
The conductor added that, although musicians are not
politicians, any choice, even a musical one "is a political
action in any case".
Muti has chosen Mozart's Requiem for the second part of the
concert.
"It is a requiem for poor people who were killed in the
Ardeatine caves and for all people suffering every day due to
the cruelty and brutality of some dictators in Syria, for the
Taliban", he noted.
The concert, which will be attended by the Italian ambassador
to the US, Armando Varricchio, will be preceded by a debate with
material presented in cooperation with the Consulate General and
the Italian Cultural Institute in Chicago.
The symphony will also be performed on February 22 and 23,
the days preceding the anniversary of the mass killing.
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