Beatrice Venezi’s BLOG –
The phrase is by Dostoevsky – or rather, he puts it into the mouth of Prince Myshkin, the protagonist of *The Idiot*: a man whom the whole world regards as naive, perhaps even mad, precisely because of the purity with which he believes what he says. Dostoevsky does not present it to us as a calm certainty: he presents it as a wager, uttered by someone who has every reason to be proved wrong. And it is perhaps precisely for this reason that, more than a century later, that sentence continues to haunt us.
Why beauty?, as Dostoevsky understands it, has never been merely an aesthetic matter. Even the Greeks gave it a name that we have almost forgotten today: kalokagathía, from the union of kalós, lovely, and togathós, good. For them, beauty was never separate from goodness and justice: seeing something beautiful was not a pleasure in itself, but a way – albeit an indirect one – of catching a glimpse of the moral truth of the world. Beauty was not applied solely to the sensory aspect of things, but also to behaviour: an ideal of perfection that was both physical and moral, what we would today call nobility of spirit. Art, in this view, can represent the “beautiful” and, in the very same act, promote what is “good” and “right”: it does not merely adorn life, but guides it.
If beauty carries this ethical burden, So teaching children to recognise it – teaching music in schools from a very young age – has never been a pedagogical whim: it is, in fact, a civic duty. I have written at length about this in my books as well. An orchestra is perhaps the first real training ground in which a child learns that their own voice only counts in relation to that of others, that playing well does not mean standing out at all costs, but knowing how to fit in, listening to those beside them, giving way and taking the lead again when the time is right. Plato already knew this when, in *The Republic*, he entrusted music – the mousiké, which, for the Greeks, brought together poetry, dance and song – playing a central role in the upbringing of the citizen, not just the amateur: for him, educating people in the harmony of sounds meant educating them in the harmony of the soul, and from there, in the harmony of the city as a whole.
It’s no coincidence Let the word itself tell us.
After all, this dual nature It is inherent in the very word we use to describe making music together. “Concerto” comes from the Latin concertare, which is composed of cum-, “together”, and to check, “to compete”, “to vie”: literally, therefore, to compete together. But the word itself carries a second, equally recognised root, that of to preserve, “to weave together”, the idea of a harmonious union of several elements. Over the centuries, the meaning has shifted from conflict to cooperation, to the extent that Italian has also inherited the word “concerto” from the same root, in the legal sense of “pact” or ‘agreement’. And when, between the Renaissance and the Baroque periods – with Corelli and Vivaldi – the word finally came to denote a musical performance, it retained both aspects of its meaning: a friendly contest between the soloist and the orchestra, who nevertheless cooperate to create a single, perfect harmony.
Concentus, “harmony of voices, consonance”. “In unison”, in agreement.
So, playing together, then, It is never a purely musical matter. Classical music teaches us to wait, to respect roles and hierarchies, to modulate our own voice so as not to drown out that of others, and to understand that silences exist so that a voice can prepare itself, build up momentum and shine in its solo. It teaches us that only through self-discipline – by listening to one’s own sound and, at the same time, to the response we receive from others – can the perfect harmony of a concert be achieved. There, in a single word, lies the civic lesson of music: one can compete and intertwine at the same time, stand out without disrupting the whole. It is a grammar of mutual listening: the very same, exactly the same, that we will need as adults to live in a democracy.
An orchestra, after all, is a living organism. Dozens of people who, at the very moment the conductor lowers his baton, cease to be individuals and become a single entity: individual identities fade into the collective, all converging towards unity. And do they all play the same thing? Not exactly. Each has their own part, whether small or large; each has their own contribution to make to the beauty of the performance. We might think of it as a society, or as a family: standing shoulder to shoulder with dozens of other people, each capable of influencing, through their behaviour, the success of the performance. Where, if not here, can one best learn what it truly means to belong to something greater than ourselves, and the importance of the individual’s contribution to the collective result?
There is a sentence in one of my books that I often come back to: If sight gives us a sense of ourselves, our ears give us a sense of others. Learning to listen – truly listen, not merely hear – is learning to make room for those who are different from us. And it is more than just an exercise in good manners: listening means knowing, being aware, no longer being able to turn a blind eye. This is why the hollowing out of music education in our schools is not merely an aesthetic impoverishment. It is a silent civic loss: it deprives entire generations of one of the few safe spaces where they learn, almost as if through play, to listen to others and to create something beautiful together with them; and therefore, if the Greeks were right, also something good and just.
We live in an age in which violence, injustice and dehumanisation They seem to be advancing faster than we can comprehend them. In times like these, perhaps, beauty ceases to be a luxury and becomes a necessary testament: proof that ethical and universal values have not disappeared, even when everything seems to suggest the opposite. It does not console us by making us forget reality. If anything, it reminds us that within that very reality there is still something worth protecting.
It comes back to mind, whenever I think of this, a specific moment from a work I have discussed elsewhere: the Intermezzo from *Cavalleria rusticana*. In the heart of a tragedy of blood and revenge, Mascagni brings everything to a halt for a few minutes and lets the most serene and luminous music in the entire score flow, just a moment before the bloodshed actually begins. That beauty does not deny the tragedy that is about to unfold. If anything, it makes it all the more unbearable to witness, because it shows us clearly everything that is about to be lost. Perhaps this is the truest function of beauty: not to distract us from the darkness, but to illuminate it enough for us to recognise it for what it is.
I don’t think that beauty, on its own, may put an end to the violence in the world. But I believe that a world still capable of recognising it, of seeking it out, of pausing for a moment to listen to it, is a world that has not yet stopped believing that there is something worth fighting for. Perhaps this, rather than a promise of salvation, is the true meaning of that phrase: not that beauty alone will save us, but that as long as we continue to seek it, we are not yet entirely lost.
Beatrice Venezi