Yesterday Paulina Lavista began to listen to Mozart’s Requiem after she learned of the death of Mario Lavista, her cousin, or rather her brother, as the composer and the photographer’s father (Raúl Lavista) created a bond that music maintained until the end. That piece, he said in a telephone conversation, was one of the composer’s favorites.
“When Mario was already a musician he got close to my father (the composer Raúl Lavista) and since he got close to my father they never separated; Mario was like his son. I have not lost a cousin, I have lost a brother, a great companion of my father. The whole world adored him. He was a man very faithful to his work, to his principles, an extraordinary father, an extraordinary son; his mother, my aunt, is 97 years old (María Luisa Camacho); it has been a terrible pain for her ”, expressed the photographer Paulina Lavista.
“Besides his importance in the creation of new music, Mario was also important in dance creation, probably due to this pairing with Claudia (his daughter). But also in thinking about music; he and Nacho Toscano founded the magazine Pauta, which is a line in the water, which is still valid, and which is one of the few spaces for thought and reflection and dissemination of music. And it had a great impact on El Colegio Nacional, this area of thought is something that must be pondered about it. His music seems to me of a very powerful and provocative intimacy. He was a very kind being, a man who could be loved easily. His elegance of treatment was reflected in his music and in how he imparted his knowledge “, expressed the artist Claudio Valdés Kuri, director of the company Teatro de C Links Inhabitants.
“Music is in mourning,” said the Secretary of Culture, Alejandra Frasuto. Today master Mario Lavista, a huge figure of art and a teacher of generations, says goodbye. Mexico and Latin America lose one of the most outstanding composers of the last century ”.
The National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL) pointed out that Lavista’s work “allowed the recognition of twentieth-century music in Mexico and the world,” and highlighted his work as a teacher and trainer of several generations at the National Conservatory of Music. . INBAL director Lucina Jiménez commented: “For Mario Lavista music was an infinite universe to discover. Huge musician, composer, generous teacher, popularizer of twentieth and twenty-first century music, warm in his treatment and clear in his words ”,
Iván López Reynoso, principal director of the Orchestra of the Fine Arts Theater, indicated that “music in Mexico has lost one of its greatest composers. Our concert music is one before and one after him ”.
For its part, the Coordination of Cultural Diffusion of the National Autonomous University of Mexico regretted his death and stressed that Mario Lavista “was convinced that music has the power to reach the world of the dead and that they probably listen.”
The condolences for the death of Mario Lavista were joined by the essayist and translator Hernán Bravo Varela, the Orchestra of the Fine Arts Theater, the poet Malva Flores, José Ramón Cossío Díaz, former minister of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation and a member of The National College; as well as the writer Alaín Derbez and TVUNAM.
On Facebook, the Chamber Orchestra of Fine Arts stated: “With great sadness we bid farewell to Maestro Mario Lavista: composer, teacher, intellectual and, above all, a great person. He leaves us an immense artistic legacy that is and will continue to be a pillar of contemporary culture in Mexico and Latin America ”.
The death of Mario Lavista was also mourned by the historian Enrique Krauze, a member of El Colegio Nacional, the singer Jaramar Soto, and José Luis Castillo, artistic director of Cepromusic.
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