May 27, 1992. In Sarajevo, where Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Jews had lived together peacefully for centuries, a grenade kills 22 people waiting in line for bread outside a bakery. The next day, cellist Vedran Smailović plays Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor at this site of horror and does so for 22 consecutive days. The performance is a lament and a hymn, a protest and a prayer. Word spreads throughout the city; it is broadcast on the radio, becomes the subject of a novel, and captures the imagination of humanity. Twenty-two days of music that are etched into the earth.
Susan Cain uses this story to open her book Bittersweet.1 In it, she explores how the transformative power of the soul thrives in pain, longing, and suffering. Just as Aristotle ennobled the human soul 2,500 years ago in De Anima, Cain ennobles it through her praise of melancholy, the temperament of introspection. She concludes the passage on Smailović’s performance by putting into words what music—the most soulful of the arts—has to say about war and violence: “We are not fighters,” the violins exclaim. “We are not victims,” the violas reply. “We are only human,” sing the cellos, “simply human: full of flaws and full of beauty—we all long for love.”
Translation Laura Liska
Image Vedran Smailović in the destroyed National Library, 1992. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev, CC BY-SA 3.0
