This concert presents one of the most singular testimonies of the encounter between European culture and Chinese musical tradition in the eighteenth century: the Prières mises en musique chinoise by Joseph‑Marie Amiot (1718–1793), Jesuit, missionary, and one of the principal cultural mediators between France and China during the reign of Emperor Qianlong.

Amiot spent more than forty years in Beijing, where he studied the language, musical theory, and traditional Chinese instruments in depth. His thirteen “prayers” – Chinese melodies adapted to Christian texts – were published in Europe by the editor Picard and represent a rare example of intercultural musical transmission in the pre‑colonial era. They are not original compositions, but Chinese melodies notated according to the Western system, with the aim of showing European readers the structure, modality, and phrasing of local music.

The project presented at San Fedele stems from a work of contemporary reinterpretation curated by Nicola Scaldaferri, who chose not to reconstruct philologically an execution “as it might have been,” but to reactivate this material through a dialogue between Chinese and Italian musicians. The Dong Xun ensemble, formed by some of the finest Chinese instrumentalists residing in Italy, brings to the concert traditional instruments such as erhu, pipa, dizi, and guzheng, restoring the timbral dimension that Amiot could hear in Beijing.

Alongside them, the ITER Research Ensemble, composed of young singers and musicologists, approaches the vocal part from a historically informed perspective that is nonetheless not bound to a museum‑like idea of the repertoire. The solo voice of Jing Tan allows the melodic line to approach the inflections of Chinese vocality while maintaining the Christian textual structure.

The result is a form of “interpretive recomposition”: the melodies notated by Amiot are returned to their original sonic dimension, yet they also pass through the sensibility of contemporary musicians, balancing respect for the source with creativity. The project, carried out in collaboration with the Confucius Institute of the University of Milan, also includes a complete recording of the thirteen prayers and an in‑depth booklet to be published soon.

This concert therefore offers a rare opportunity to listen to a repertoire that belongs neither fully to the Western tradition nor to the Chinese one, but that bears witness to a historical moment in which music became a tool for mutual understanding. Amiot’s Prières are a precious document of the history of Jesuit missions, but also an example of how music can cross languages, cultures, and different aesthetic systems, generating new forms of dialogue.