MEDIATHEK

Galileo. Opera for Violin and Scientist – each segment of the opera, written by five composers – Sergej Newski, Kuzma Bodrov, Dmitri Kourliandski, Kirill Chernegin, and Pavel Karmanov – presents a fragment of the life and work of Italian scientist Galileo Galilei, who is performed by the famous Russian physicist and mathematician Grigory Amosov.
 
 Galileo lived half his life struggling to provide a proof for heliocentrism – that is, the belief that the universe is centered around the Sun, with the Earth revolving around it.
 “I will die alone, virtually blind, surrounded by just a few disciples. But in this same year, 1,000 miles from Florence, in the English country of Lincolnshire, a young boy shall be born who shall be named for his recently deceased father Isaac. And this boy will believe me, and, having believed, he will be able to describe all of nature’s manifestations with a previously unheard-of precision. ‘If I have seen further,’ Newton will write to Robert Hooke in 1676, ‘it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.’ One of those giants was I, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei.”