Taking the musical memory of Mozart, his elves and other illustrious figures of classicism for a walk through the City of San Juan is a neat madness that we San Juan residents began to experience a little more than four decades ago, at the hands of the renowned doctor and man of Culture , Carlos Fagale, and with the consent of the founder and president of Mozarteum in Buenos Aires, Jeannette Arata de Erize. For more than half a century, this pioneer of the dissemination and education of artistic music with an academic tradition worked intensely, so much so that at the beginning, in 1956, she had already set up her own house in the Federal Capital to start the first concerts, until , faced with the multiplication of adherents and interested in enjoying a program, their project moved to a special room in the center of the Autonomous City, formally birthing Mozarteum Argentino. And more than a century before, far from here, in Wolfang Amadeus Mozart’s Salzburg, another woman, Constanze, widow of the great musician, decided to create Mozarteum in 1841 as a higher music school, without imagining its immediate and brilliant international projection.
This work about the Mozarteum, which has just been presented, is a rhetorical gem that delights and moves the eyes with countless striking photographs of the artists, all outstanding, who passed through the stage of the “Victoria”, but also of the theater “ Sarmiento” and the Bicentennial theater.
Great managers of a dream
Returning to San Juan, we imagine that we San Juan residents had a powerful secret to convince Jeanette, added to Fagale’s happily obstinate management: the brand new “Juan Victoria” Auditorium.
Since its opening, we continue to express a closed glory towards its creators, first of all to the engineer Juan Victoria, manager of the financing and construction of the great building, together with the qualified architects Mario Pra Baldi, Carmen Renard and Eduardo Caputo Videla. They finalized the design and worked in unison with Victoria, and were joined by engineer Federico G. Malvares, responsible for the acoustics of the room which, at the time, surpassed that of the legendary Teatro Colón. This very important fact is mentioned in the book of the four decades of the institution, “Mozarteum Argentino, San Juan, 1982-2023”: “The reconstruction of the City after the 1944 earthquake did not neglect the place that music occupies in “the spirit of cultivated societies, and in this way a musical temple worthy of the new city that was being created was projected.”
A rhetorical gem that delights and moves
This work about the Mozarteum, which has just been presented, is a rhetorical gem that delights and moves the eyes with countless striking photographs of the artists, all outstanding, who passed through the stage of the “Victoria”, but also of the theater “ Sarmiento” and the Bicentennial theater.
We talk about orchestras, ballets, first dancers, on several occasions Julio Bocca and his dance group, great pianists, lyrical galas, recitals, impressive musical comedies, the UNSJ University Symphony Orchestra and Choir, Camerata San Juan, the most outstanding ballets Argentines, starting with the Estable del Teatro Colón, the Teatro San Martín; stars of classical music and jazz, the vast majority coming from Italy, France, Austria, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, the resurgent Czech and Slovakia republics, Russia , Canada, Taiwan, Brazil, Japan, Israel, China, Uzbekistan, Venezuela and Chile.
Beautiful pleiad of San Juan people
And if we talk about the 40 years, now 42, of Mozarteum San Juan, we must also talk about that beautiful group of people from San Juan who accompanied its foundation with such generosity and dedication, and all mentioned under the title of “The Bases”: Founding Members, Commissions Boards, Protective Partners and Sponsors.
At the end, a reference is made to the Scholarships, “a long-term investment, a stimulus for young talents, as well as another expression of Mozarteum’s commitment to society.”
At the same time, the brilliant prologue also explains that San Juan, “despite its more marginal and isolated condition from the great cosmopolitan panorama of Buenos Aires, sought to be at the height of this cultural progress, also knowing the certain evidence that music was present in the San Juan culture since the conquest itself and was consolidated during the colonial period.”
Harp, guitar and violin
And provincial history, precisely, records the testimonies of the existence and use of the three first musical instruments that arrived in San Juan and which were counted in 1810 with the first cry of Freedom: the harp, the guitar and the violin.
Of course, the institutional periods recorded so far and successively headed by Carlos Fagale (1982-2012), Eduardo Savastano (2013-2016), Sergio Gurguí (2017-2018), Patricia Aguilar de Marún (2019-2020), and Claudio Feldman (2021-2023).
“Mozarteum Argentino San Juan” was edited and printed thanks to the contribution of Patronage 2022, Law 2.197-F, Government of San Juan, Fundación Banco de San Juan and Banco de San Juan.
By Luis Eduardo Meglioli
Journalist
