Austria commemorates 442 years of friendship with Brazil with a Brasilia tribute to Stefan Zweig

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Exactly 80 years after the death of the great Austrian playwright, journalist, novelist, and cultural patron Stefan Zweig in Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro state, the Austrian ambassador to Brazil, Dr. Stefan Scholz, is hosting a concert in his memory and celebrating 442 years of Austro-Brazilian friendship, honoring the 200th anniversary of the independence of Brazil.

The performance by the Orquestra Sinfônica do Teatro Nacional Claudio Santoro under the direction of Master conductor Cláudio Cohen will take place on February 22 in Brasilia’s National Museum of the Republic.

Zweig is one of the most important visionaries, thinkers, and writers for Brazil to come from the outside.

Through his writings in “Brazil, pais do futuro,” he offered a glimpse of the potential of Brazil, helping establish the country in the minds of Brazilians and the world as a land of hopes and ambitions, projecting what it could be, and what it was not, especially in the context of European destruction amid racial tensions and strife.

He was indeed the man who dreamed the Brazilian dream, at least the first to put it into words, establishing a new possibility to build a civilization different from the then self-destructing Europe.

When he died in 1942 by his own hand in a suicide pact with his wife, like many important figures of Austrian culture of the time, it was news around the world; but it was also a last critique of the world itself and a paean to Brazil.

“All the angst and revolt of the world incarnated in the tragic death of Zweig!” wrote O Globo in a six-column headline that also carried his suicide note, “Every day I learned to love this country more, and I would not have asked to rebuild my life in any other place after the world of my own language sank and was lost to me and my spiritual homeland, Europe, destroyed itself.”

The man who had been so openly enchanted by Brazil was at the time one of the world’s most popular writers and the most translated author.

In 2017 Brazil honored Zweig with its highest award for foreign citizens, the National Order of the Southern Cross which counts as its other laureates Queen Elizabeth II and US President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

On Tuesday, ambassador Scholz, on behalf of the President of the Republic of Austria, will confer the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art upon the conductor of the concert honoring Zweig — Kapellmeister, acclaimed violinist, soloist, and chamber music player, master Cláudio Cohen, the Principal Conductor, Music Director and one of the founders of the Symphony Orchestra of the National Theatre of Brazil, OSTNCS.

Cohen is the former Conductor and Musical Director of the Brasília Philharmonic Orchestra and one of the most renowned conductors of Brazil, participating in the main Music Festivals of Brazil and abroad; he is also a tireless advocate for the National Theater.

He is a man widely recognized in the capital for this talent and stature. Born in the city of Belém in the state of Pará, Cohen is an honorary citizen of Brasilia and has been recognized as one of the most prominent personalities of the capital, receiving several orders of merit, the Silver Star da BPW, the Expression of Merit by the International Academy of Culture, the Peacemaker, and the Medal by the Brazilian Military among many others.

The maestro has conducted orchestras around the world including the Österreichische Symphoniker Linz and the Euro Symphony SFK in Austria the global epicenter of classical music, at the Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa in Portugal, the Vogtland Philarmonie Orchestra in Germany, and the Sinfônica de Roma in Italy along with orchestras in Mexico, Ecuador, Argentina, and throughout Brazil.

The celebration hosted by the Austrian embassy highlights as much the memory of Sweig as the ongoing work of Cohen, exalting and magnifying the potential of Brazil and its people and serving to expand the long and storied friendship between Austria and Brazil.

It is also doing the work of introducing Zweig to many Brazilians who may yet have to discover his work and projecting his vision on the current work of Cohen with its multicultural elements that combine to build the harmonious whole of Zweig’s romantic vision for the country.

In keeping with the Orchestra Symphonica’s traditional start time, the concert will begin at 8 pm.