Moto Eterno

The siege of Sarajevo lasted from April 5, 1992, through February 29, 1996. I was shocked at the fierceness, brutality, and ruthlessness of the siege I read in newspapers and saw on TV broadcasts. From the book, “Vedran Smailović: The Brave Cellist of Sarajevo Still Moves the World:” On May 27, 1992, a long line of people had queued up at one of the still functioning bakeries in Sarajevo. A mortar shell fell into the middle of the line, killing 22 people and creating a bloody mess of body parts and rubble. A cellist who lived close to the bakery and was appalled, and helped the wounded. He felt powerless as he was neither a politician nor a soldier—he was a musician, who could speak truth to the heart beyond any language. The cellist took his cello to the spot where those waiting for bread had been butchered and began to plaintively play. He played in a daze but in an incredibly evocative way. In spite of the risk, people gathered to listen. When he was finished he packed up his cello and went to a coffee shop. In later days he would go to other sites of where lives were taken or bodies were wounded by shelling.

After seeing this anonymous cellist on the news playing for the people of Sarajevo and for the dead, the impact of this man’s actions stayed with me. I finally felt the need to try to compose a piece of music, and composed a two-movement sonata for cello and piano, Sarajevo Cellist. The anonymity of the cellist helped to inspire me to compose the work, since I could use the figure as a universal character of a tremendously caring musician.

The first movement, the recording on this album, is my imagining, or really trying to imagine from the relative safety of Los Angeles, what this cellist went through. I have never been in a war setting, but using images from readings, movies, television, and news programs, I tried to create the machine of war: the brutality, the fear, bullets flying, rockets coming in, the loudness of war, and those strange moments when hostilities cease, and an unworldly quiet settles in until the next round of bullets, destruction, and death. This is my imaging of the cellist working his way around Sarajevo amidst the war and amongst the wounded and dead. The second movement (not recorded) is my idea of the balm of music the cellist gave to the wounded, and to the souls of the dead. Years later, while attending Mass at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, a visiting Jesuit priest talked about this Sarajevo Cellist, and the book by Daniel Bury. I now knew the cellist’s name. The impact of what he did has not diminished.

— Matthew Hetz