by InTrieste
On Sunday, June 8, the solemn halls of the Civico Museo del Risorgimento will resonate with sounds not heard for over a century: the long-lost compositions of Cesare Nordio, a Triestine composer whose works lay buried in the shadows of the First World War.
The event, titled “Sur les ruines d’Ypres: Sounds and Echoes of the Great War. Unpublished Works by Cesare Nordio (1891–1977) at the Roots of a New Europe,” marks the culmination of an ambitious cultural project aimed at retracing the artistic and intellectual tremors left by the war on Europe’s shifting cultural landscape.
Admission is free to the 5 p.m. concert, though advance reservation is recommended due to limited seating at the museum, located at Via XXIV Maggio 4.
Organized by the Trieste-based ensemble and research group Lumen Harmonicum, in collaboration with the city’s Civic Museums, the Lega Nazionale, and the Giuliano Institute for History, Culture and Documentation, the performance will serve as the final chapter in the broader initiative “In the Eye of the Storm: Central European Intellectuals, Musicians, and Writers on the Gorizia Front.” The project, supported by the Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia, has brought together a coalition of Italian and international cultural institutions to examine how the First World War reshaped the cultural topography of Central Europe.
“The idea was to listen anew to a past that was never truly silent,” said Diego Redivo, one of the event’s historical curators. Together with historian Federica Fortunato, Redivo will provide the audience with historical context before the music begins.
The program includes Larghetto by Max Reger (1833–1897) in a rarely performed transcription for organ, two violins, viola, and cello by Nordio himself; Castelnuovo sul Carso 1915, a stark piano work by Sicilian composer and war veteran Gaspare Scuderi; and several previously unheard chamber works by Nordio—delicate, melancholic sketches that reflect the desolation of war and the fragile hope for a new Europe.
The musicians—Marco Favento and Silvia Pisana Reinotti on violins, Davide Prelaz on viola, Massimo Favento on cello, and Corrado Gulin on piano and organ—will lend voice to compositions written in the trenches and on the margins of conflict.
Though Nordio remained little known in his lifetime, the discovery and restoration of his manuscripts shed light on a forgotten corner of European musical history—one shaped not in concert halls, but in hospitals, bunkers, and bombed-out villages like Ypres.
More than a concert, Sunday’s event offers a poignant meditation on cultural resilience, memory, and the enduring human desire to create beauty in times of destruction.
For Trieste—a city long perched on the fault lines of empires—this return to the musical roots of a fractured continent may well serve as a timely reminder of both past sacrifices and the ever-fragile promise of unity.
