The Cellist of Sarajevo Lesson Plan

What song does the cellist play when he feels hopeless? Why does he find this piece so inspiring?
Students ought to have listened to the Adiago as a pre-reading activity: did they like the piece? Can they relate to why the cellist found hope in the music? Why or why not?

Normally, the act of playing his cello is enough to revive the cellist's hope. However, if after several hours of play, the cellist's hope does not return, he will turn to Tomaso Albinoni's Adagio. In 1945, an Italian musicologist found four bars of a sonata's bass line in the bombed-out remnants of the Dresden Music Library. The musicologist believed the bars to be the work of Albinoni and spent...