Tribute to Maestro Claudio Abbado

The sad news that Claudio Abbado has finally left the podium echoes beyond the world of music, which he filled for more than five decades with his brilliance - and modesty. Few in the ILO can comment on his artistic prowess with the authority of his colleagues and the music journalists and musicologists from whom tributes have poured in. We all know that he was, simply, among the greatest conductors of our age, a towering figure of the greatest artistic commitment and integrity. Just listing the orchestras he conducted, without even mentioning legendary individual performances, is a roll call of the greatest musical institutions of the last half century... La Scala, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic among others. In Switzerland he was – is – much loved for founding the Luzern Festival Orchestra. He was adored by the young musicians of the Orchestra Mozart in Bologna. And, of course, he was the founder of the European Community and the Gustav Mahler youth orchestras – symbols of his intertwined commitment to youth and music.

Children have the right to play, read and learn. They have the right to happiness. It is our duty to guarantee that for them", Maestro Claudio Abbado.

Maestro Abbado was a renowned humanitarian. He once told a journalist from the New York Times “My line is very clear. I am for freedom. Everything that is not for freedom, I protest”. During his time at La Scala, he performed concerts in the schools and factories of Milan. And, over the years, he dedicated several concerts to the struggle against child labour – his main link with the work of the ILO and of the SCREAM Programme (Supporting Child Rights through Education, the Arts and the Media) of the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour. In 2013, he co-founded, with ILO Director General, Guy Ryder, and with a number of the world’s most famous musicians –including José-Antonio Abreu and Daniel Barenboim - and major music organizations, the Music Against Child Labour Initiative. Most recently he had lent his support to the national schools competition launched by the Italian Ministry of Education as part of the Initiative.

Claudio Abbado’s commitment, as well as the proven success of the El Sistema network around the world, were much of what inspired this partnership, which also includes El Sistema, Musicians for Human Rights, Jeunesses Musicales international and the International Federation of Musicians (the musicians’ global union federation). As orchestras, choirs, groups, bands and musicians of all types, young and old, amateur and professional, respond to the call of the Initiative to dedicate a concert during 2014 to the struggle against child labour, many will also be paying tribute to the immeasurable contribution to that struggle – and to music – of a great man.

Claudio Abbado was, famously, a modest and gentle man of few words. Many have commented on how, as a conductor, he communicated with the orchestra through the performance, his right hand - and his eyes -rather than through speech. On 11 June 2013, on the eve of the World Day Against Child Labour, in what was to be his last concert with the Orchestra Mozart, he launched the Music Against Child Labour Initiative at a concert at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, and allowed himself to add a few words to the poem by Victor Hugo he had quoted in the programme. He wrote simply this: “Children have the right to play, read and learn. They have the right to happiness. It is our duty to guarantee that for them”.

168 million children remain in child labour today. Better schools for all, made more attractive and more child friendly by better arts and music education are one contribution to helping that number reach where it should be. Zero. Claudio Abbado would have appreciated that one simple word.