The Roads of Friendship: Ravenna-Redipuglia

In the Requiem Mass”, Massimo Mila writes, “the whole human race behaves like Verdi’s characters and is struck dead like shot waterfowl, suddenly passing from the heat of an intense life to the chill of death”. War finds its very essence in the useless, inexplicable, unbearable death it brings along. Death, which pervades all Verdi’s work, in the Requiem becomes a crystallized drama capable of crossing the boundaries between different faiths to address Man himself. In Riccardo Muti’s tense rendition, the Requiem becomes a meditation on spirituality which sees in Man, in his inescapable destiny and in the awareness of his strength, a possibility for consolation. “Twelve hundred steps, but they seem a lot more: one million, or maybe six hundred thousand, as many as the dead. And all of them speak, all of them shout a single word that sounds like the distant thunder of artillery: Present”. In Guido Ceronetti’s severe and dreamlike vision, the staircase of Redipuglia becomes a voice, a scream, a warning sent through time and history. And in the centenary of the Great War, the Paths of Friendship, which for years have been traced towards people tortured by war and torn by the madness of evil, could only lead us here, at the foot of a monument to pain and memory. The concert will see a symbolical gathering of musicians from the nations which took part in the massacre, united in a hymn to future that arises from the peace-making embrace of music.