The conference that the Friends of Music of Foligno propose for Tuesday 7 May, at 5pm, at the Oratorio del Crocifisso is dedicated to a special birthday. The event, with free admission, will be an opportunity to learn about the background and spirit of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the well-known music critic Guido Barbieri, on the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of its first performance, which took place in Vienna on 7 May 1824 .
Barbieri will talk about Beethoven’s masterpiece, in season in November for the closing concert, in “Night and storm become light. The ethics of brotherhood in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony”, a journey through the genesis of a work that has marked the history of music and beyond – the Ode to Joy is a symbol of the European Union – of all time. “The path that led Ludwig van Beethoven to conceive the design of Symphony no. 9 starts from afar” comments Barbieri, who adds: “The spark lights up in remote 1790, thirty-four years earlier when Ludwig Bartholomeus Fischenich, professor of law at the University of Bonn, introduces the young musician to an Ode by his friend Friedrich Schiller entitled An die Freude. It is the beginning of a long ethical, philosophical, literary and musical adventure that will lead to the birth of the most visionary, radical and revolutionary work of the entire nineteenth century”.
Guido Barbieri, thirty-five years of music criticism, twenty of which for the newspaper “La Repubblica”, today collaborates on the cultural pages of “Il Manifesto”. For him also forty years at Radio 3, for which he continues to present some programmes. Professor of History and Aesthetics of Music at the “Maderna” Conservatory in Cesena, he collaborated as a playwright in the “Colleges” of the Venice Music Biennale. And musical dramaturgy is the activity that he has practiced most assiduously for a quarter of a century. He has written texts, librettos and readings for some of the major Italian composers, often sharing the stage, as a narrator, with musicians of great value. His texts have been staged and interpreted, in Italy and sometimes abroad, by important theater personalities. He writes essays and holds conferences for the major Italian musical institutions. In 2009 he received the Feronia Prize for music criticism.
