Requiem from Sarajevo

In June 1994, the indian conductor Zubin Mehta performed the Mozart Requiem with an international cast and members of the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra and Chorus at the ruins of Sarajevo’s National Library, in a fundraising concert for the victims of armed conflict and remembrance of the thousands of people killed in the Yugoslav Wars. On 29 August 1999, he conducted Mahler’s Symphony N°2 (Resurrection), at the vicinity of Buchenwald concentration camp in Weimar, with the Bavarian State Orchestra and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra sitting alongside each other.

In 2021, for an university symposium in Sarajevo, Zubin Mehta looks back with Amaury Du Closel on these two significant moments in his political commitment.