Utopia and the Nevada Desert

by Francesco Lotoro

The musician, the only true Homo Universalis, fundamentally believes in a world without borders and is the first to demonstrate this even in the most tragic moments of history; in the 18th century, when Europe was a vague geographical expression, the violinist Giuseppe Tartini founded the European violin academy, the Scuola delle Nazioni, in Padua.

Musicians shocked the most rational minds of the 19th century. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel canceled his university lectures, while the hypochondriac philosopher Søren Kierkegaard left Copenhagen and both of them went to Berlin: Gioacchino Rossini was in the Prussian capital.

The greatest followers of a universalist thought built on Peace were Ludwig van Beethoven and Béla Bartók, immense musicians; their musical activity was capable of unleashing veritable humanitarian tsunamis in ghettos, concentration camps, gulags, and prisoner-of-war camps.

In Viktor Ullmann's opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis, written in Theresienstadt, Emperor Overall demands that his subjects live perpetually unhappily; his excessive and absurd confidence in his own misdeeds will mark the end of the Kaiser in Ullmann's opera.

Creating music while deported means acknowledging the futility of words; musical language is similar to brewing coffee: you can measure out the best blend, but if you mess up the roasting in the final minutes, the coffee will taste burnt and the aroma will evaporate.

Long and exhausting wars against endemic ignorance and cerebral flat-eartherism await us; challenges that can only be fought with the only winning weapons: artistic and cultural ones.

Art is the greatest political exercise; when in 1935 George Gershwin, a Jewish son of Ukrainians, wrote the opera Porgy and Bess, in which the protagonists were African Americans, he not only wrote the most important modern American opera but also created the highest form of democracy.

Recent history has unfortunately reshuffled the deck; the present has become a future that hasn't made it, and when people fail to improve themselves, they unleash wars or plot.

Good old "space" conspiracy theories used to simply assert that man never landed on the Moon and that the Apollo missions all "landed" in the Nevada desert; today they'd claim the Moon doesn't exist and that thing up there in the sky is nothing more than a holographic trick to throw us off course.

The most effective response to war may not be peace but a more sophisticated war: opening theaters and libraries, founding orchestras and holding concerts everywhere, a carpet bombing under which the conscious ignoramus or the social media cannibal would hardly survive.

Just because art is democratic by definition, doesn't mean it should become an optional part of social life, relegated to the generic category of leisure; the barbarians of the new millennium would have an excuse for not educating themselves, and those in government wouldn't allocate a cent to culture.

Those who produced music in captivity and deportation had no intention of enchanting their audience with a Violin Sonata, but were firmly drafting the Testament of the Twentieth Century, laying the cornerstone of future edifices of thought; all for the good and development of the human race.

The immense literary, musical, and theatrical heritage that comes to us from ghettos, concentration camps, and gulags compels us to embark on a new, profound Copernican revolution; we will no longer rewrite the past, but the future.

The hope is that a new Humanism will finally bring humanity back to the center of history; this should be the concern of scientific research, philosophical thought, spirituality, and art.

It's not a generic atheism that should concern us; it's man's lack of belief in man that is the world's true evil, the worm that devours the pulp from the apple of human ingenuity and its universal primacy.

Believing in humanity doesn't mean believing in the materiality that surrounds us, otherwise it would be easier to be born a cow or even a radiator; believing immensely in what doesn't yet exist so that it can materialize before our eyes—that, indeed, is wonderfully real.

Man's greatness lies in his imagination; nothing is more real than utopia.