The orchestra director died last Friday in Berlin at the age of 78.
The music director Jesus Lopez Cobos, who died last Friday in Berlin at the age of 78, asked in life that the money that people could spend on crowns and bouquets for his funeral was used to make contributions to a music school that carries his name in Toro.
The mayor of Toro, Tomás del Bien, has revealed the will of the teacher born in this town of Zamora, who communicated to the family before dying in order to improve the equipment of musical instruments and the facilities of the Jesús López Cobos music school .
The announcement was made by the mayor of Toro during the plenary session held this afternoon to award the city's gold medal to one of the most important Spanish conductors of the last century and with greater international fame. The baton that led to orchestras of the likes of the London Philharmonic, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the National Orchestra of Spain already carried out a similar initiative eight years ago, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.
On that occasion he offered a party in Lausanne (Switzerland) with about two hundred guests to which he requested that instead of a birthday gift they should deposit money in a bank account to allocate it to purchase instruments and assume operating expenses of the municipal music school Jesús López Cobos de Toro.
This initiative allowed the collection of 24,000 euros that were given to the Toro City Council as the manager of that school, while a bank account has also been set up for the purpose of the funeral. "Any person or entity that wants to show their mourning and respect for the deceased with the sending of flowers, they are asked to make the contribution equivalent to the cost of the same as a donation to the Municipal School of Music," said the mayor Of bull. Tomás del Bien has stressed that this was the desire of the "teacher" who has transferred the family.
Toro City Council has begun on Wednesday procedures to grant, posthumously, the gold medal to which he was musical director of the Royal Theater of Madrid, directed the Berlin Opera and was emeritus director of the Symphony Orchestra of Castilla y León.
The Toresano Consistory aims to promote an international music festival with an annual character that recalls the name of the most international Toresan "baton" and that in its first edition serves to deliver to its relatives that gold medal of the city of which it was also a favorite son Of bull. Tomás del Bien has also detailed that the details and the date of the funeral for López Cobos, whose mortal remains will be traveling from Berlin to Toro on Friday, March 16, have already been closed.
It is expected the arrival of the coffin to the town of Zamora at mid afternoon of that day and from then until noon the next day will install the burning chapel in the City of Toro. Half an hour later, the funeral mass will begin at the Collegiate Church of Santa María la Mayor, as it is the largest and most capacious temple of Toro. Later, in the strictest family intimacy, the funeral will be celebrated in the monastery of Sancti Spiritus of the town in which López Cobos was born in 1940.