Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.
David Wilde's "The Cellist of Sarajevo"
On today's date in 1992, during the bloody civil wars that shattered the former Yugoslavia, a hand grenade was thrown into the midst of a bread line in Sarajevo. Twenty-two people died. To most around the world it appeared to be just one more cruel and senseless act of violence amidst the thousands of such acts that had and would take place in that unhappy part of the world. One Sarajevo resident thought otherwise. At four o'clock every day after the incident, Vedran Smailovic, a cellist with the orchestra of the Sarajevo Opera, went to the spot of the bombing in full evening dress and played his cello in memory of the dead, risking his own life amidst the continuing machine gun and mortar fire that surrounded him. A New York Times reporter wrote of the cellist's moving act of courage and faith in art and humanity—and the world took notice. The English-born composer David Wilde read about the cellist while riding a train in Germany, where he lived and worked. "As I sat in the train, deeply moved," Wilde later recalled, "I listened; and somewhere deep within me a cello began to play a circular melody like a lament without end." That theme developed into a piece titled "The Cellist of Sarajevo," dedicated to Vedran Smailovic, and which cellist Yo-Yo Ma was soon performing around the world.