Pavarotti Lifts Voice For Peace Renowned Tenor Helps Build Music Center In Bosnia To Heal Wounds Of War

Gordan Kranjcic, a 20-year-old aspiring rock musician, says that plucking at an old guitar saved his sanity during the years he was captive in a wartime prison camp.

“It helped me escape a reality that was pretty cruel,” the pony-tailed youth said Sunday.

So Kranjcic watched in awe as one of the world’s greatest operatic tenors, Luciano Pavarotti, joined him and a host of dignitaries and local residents amid the ruins of this war-shattered southern Bosnian city to inaugurate a $5.6 million cultural center - one designed to use music and therapy to nurture a new generation of Bosnian artists.

Pavarotti - the center’s principal financial backer - braved a fierce rainstorm to fly into Mostar, accompanied by Bono, lead singer of the Irish rock group U2, and other notables of the European entertainment scene.

After a quick tour of the city that included a stop at its ancient Ottoman-era bridge, Maestro Pavarotti, as he was called, arrived at the center and was serenaded by a group of wide-eyed children, some so small they were clearly born during the war.

“Today we are here, you are singing, and you have touched my heart,” the Italian virtuoso said.

The 32,670-square-foot Pavarotti Music Centre, built on the ruins of an elementary school, will offer music workshops, a first-class recording studio, dance classes and, in a New Age twist, acupuncture, meditation and aromatherapy.

“My hope is to see all people coming here to make music together,” Pavarotti said.

But, for all the fanfare of Sunday’s opening, music has not yet proved up to the task of overcoming ethnic differences in this divided city.

Mostar suffered through two wars: Muslims and Croats fought against Bosnian Serb nationalists, then turned on one another in an especially vicious door-to-door battle that ended in 1994 with U.S. mediation. Muslim and Croatian politicians remain at tense odds.