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History · ·6 min read

Sarajevo — the cellist played for 22 days at the massacre site, and the piece wasn't even by Albinoni

On 27 May 1992 a mortar shell landed on the queue outside a bakery on Vase Miskina Street. It killed 22 people. The next afternoon Vedran Smailović, principal cellist of the Sarajevo Opera Orchestra, brought his cello and a stool to the crater, sat down in full evening dress, and played what is known as Albinoni's Adagio in G minor. He came back for 21 more days. The piece he played, unusually for classical music, was not composed by Albinoni — it was written by Remo Giazotto and published in Milan in 1958.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Every serious book on the siege of Sarajevo has the same paragraph. It appears in Silber and Little’s The Death of Yugoslavia, in Ed Vulliamy’s Seasons in Hell, in Susan Sontag’s Where the Stress Falls, in every subsequent memoir and history for thirty years. On 27 May 1992 a mortar shell fell on the queue outside a bakery on Vase Miskina Street (now Ferhadija). It killed twenty-two people. The next afternoon a cellist in full evening dress carried his instrument and a stool to the crater, sat down, and began to play. He came back at the same time the following day. And the day after. Twenty-two consecutive days, one for each of the dead.

His name was Vedran Smailović. He was 36. He was the principal cellist of the Sarajevo Opera Orchestra.

The piece he played that afternoon, and every afternoon after, is known throughout the world as Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor. As a matter of scholarly fact, it was almost certainly not composed by Albinoni. It was written by the twentieth-century Italian musicologist Remo Giazotto and first published, under Ricordi’s imprint in Milan, in 1958.

What Smailović sat down to play

The Adagio is one of the most-recognised pieces of Western art music. Films use it (Gallipoli 1981, Manchester by the Sea 2016), memorial services play it, and nearly every classical compilation ever pressed includes it. Most listeners do not know that its authorship has been disputed since about 1970 and is now, in the scholarly consensus, considered a Giazotto original.

Giazotto’s own account was that he had discovered a fragment of an Albinoni manuscript, six bars of the bass line and a few melodic phrases, in the ruined library of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden after the Allied firebombing of February 1945. He said he had elaborated the fragment into a full piece by 1958. The fragment has never been produced. When the Landesbibliothek’s own librarians were asked in the 1990s and 2000s to confirm the story, they said no Albinoni fragment of that kind had ever been in their catalogue and no evidence of it survived the fire. Michael Talbot’s 2011 article in Musical Times, the definitive musicological treatment, concluded that Giazotto very likely composed the whole thing.

So the piece Smailović took to the crater on the afternoon of 28 May 1992 was, in scholarly terms, a twentieth-century composition by an Italian musicologist, presented for half a century as a Baroque original. Nothing about that fact reduces the piece’s power or Smailović’s act. It arguably heightens both. The most-performed twentieth-century requiem was played by a Sarajevan cellist in a mortar crater every afternoon for twenty-two days, at the specific place where twenty-two of his fellow-citizens had been killed the day before.

Who Smailović was

Vedran Smailović was born in Sarajevo on 11 November 1956. He trained at the Sarajevo Music Academy, the same academy the city’s Habsburg-era conservatoire tradition had produced since 1888, and by his mid-twenties was principal cellist of the Sarajevo Opera Orchestra, the resident orchestra of the National Theatre, and also played in the Sarajevo Philharmonic and the RTV Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra. He was one of a small number of Sarajevo string players whose Yugoslav-era career had reached a genuine international standard.

When the siege began on 5 April 1992, he was thirty-six years old, married, and at the height of his working career. He continued to play through the entire siege, not just at the bread-line site but at every important siege venue. He played at funerals in cemeteries where the mourners had to arrive in staggered groups to reduce sniper risk. He played in Kovači cemetery at least a dozen times. He played in shelled halls, in bombed classrooms, in the ruins of the National Library after the fire. He gave a charity concert in the Skenderija ruin in 1993.

He left Sarajevo in December 1993, twenty months into the siege, after his own family narrowly survived a shelling. He and his wife made it through the Tunnel of Hope with instruments in hand.

What David Wilde wrote for him

In late 1992 the English composer David Wilde, watching the BBC News footage of Smailović in the crater, sat down and wrote a piece for solo cello. He called it The Cellist of Sarajevo. It is a short, slow, structurally simple piece, cello alone, no accompaniment, and it takes about eight minutes to perform. Wilde dedicated it to Smailović.

In April 1994 the piece was performed by Yo-Yo Ma at the Manchester International Cello Festival. Smailović was in the audience. According to Wilde’s own account (the recording is at the BBC), when Ma finished the final chord, Smailović got up from his seat, walked onto the stage, and embraced the American cellist without speaking. Yo-Yo Ma later described the moment as one of the two or three most-moving of his professional life.

The Wilde score has been played hundreds of times since, at commemorations from Manhattan to Grozny to Aleppo. Smailović has performed it many times himself.

What happens now on Vase Miskina Street

The bread-line site is on Ferhadija, the same street the Habsburgs called Franz-Josef-Strasse, about three blocks west of the Latin Bridge. It is one of the eight or nine locations in central Sarajevo where a Sarajevo Rose was poured. You walk past it in ninety seconds of any Baščaršija-to-Vijećnica walk. The Rose is a red-resin fill in the pavement crater. Two doors down there is now a bakery that sells burek and somun.

Every 27 May since the mid-1990s, an evening service is held at the site. Musicians, usually cellists from the Sarajevo Opera, sometimes visiting international performers, play the Adagio. They play the David Wilde. They play a short arrangement of the Bosanska Sevdalinka. One of the small, quiet, recurring civic rituals of Sarajevo that most first-time visitors don’t know about, and that most locals attend at least once in their lives.

What Smailović is doing this evening

Vedran Smailović now lives in Warrenpoint, in Northern Ireland, with his second wife and their children. He is 69 years old at the time of writing (his 70th birthday falls in November 2026). He teaches at the Down Music School. He plays with a small chamber group. He returns to Sarajevo occasionally to perform at commemorative concerts. In interviews with the BBC and The Irish Times he has been consistently clear about one thing: he did not play in the crater to make a statement about war. He played to keep himself from despairing, and because, as he put it in a 2002 interview, “a cellist plays. That is what a cellist does.”

The recording of Giazotto’s Adagio he played from, the standard Ricordi score, is still in his working library. So is the Wilde. Both pieces are on his current concert programme.

When the citizens of a besieged city hold the line for years, through cultural continuity, radio, film, theatre, libraries, a cello in a crater, they are doing something that lasts long after the siege ends. The Adagio is played every 27 May. It will be played again this coming 27 May. The cellist is booked to come home.

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