Fidelio Café’s Raffaello Morales in conversation with Christopher Sallon
‘It’s an amazing coincidence!’ exclaims Raffaello Morales, the 37- year-old, Italian-born owner, manager, conductor, and musical entrepreneur behind the Fidelio Café. From the small first floor office of his Farringdon premises, he points towards a small house located just across the road dedicated to the nineteenth-century Italian patriot, exile and father of the Risorgimento Giuseppe Mazzini. Morales regards Mazzini as an inspirational figure. Although these two men are separated by more than a century (Mazzini died in 1872 and Morales was born in 1987), there are uncanny coincidences which link them, beyond mere nationality and their connection to ‘Little Italy’, as this area of Clerkenwell is still known.
Mazzini was a passionate musician who revered Beethoven and who met and corresponded with Verdi, Wagner, Liszt, and with other great composers of his day. He was also a humanist, philosopher and writer who believed in the universal power of music to elevate the soul and promote unity, equality and virtue.
Like Mazzini, the Beethoven-loving Morales is also a man of many parts. A self-confessed humanist, scientist, mathematician, musician, writer and something of a philosopher too. He fervently believes classical music to be a unifying force rather than ‘an elitist high class entertainment product’, and is committed to making it accessible to everyone, ‘not just deep pocket music enthusiasts’. He considers that government-funded musical education in schools should be a top priority and likes to quote Stravinsky: ‘To listen is an effort, and just to hear has no merit. A duck hears also. But to listen needs a training … People are taught to have too much respect for music. They should be taught to love it instead’.
Born in Rome in 1987 to a family of academics – both his parents are physicists – Morales can trace his Sephardic roots to sixteenth-century Spanish dominated Sicily. He received piano lessons from the age of five and continued his musical studies at the Conservatorio Casella in Aquila, where, aged 20, he earned a diploma. He persevered with his studies in Vienna with a new teacher, and then with the distinguished pianist Adolfo Barabino in the UK. ‘If you want to build a professional career, we can do it!’ he was assured, but the decision was a difficult one. At the crossroads, Morales, a self-confessed dilletante whose intellectual curiosity and wide-ranging interests span the humanities and science, decided to reject the harsh demands of a narrow, lonely life which would have required many hours of practice a day. Instead, energized and encouraged by his parents ‘to look at the world as a bottomless well of opportunities’.
Morales moved to London and embarked on an MSc in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College, ultimately completing a PhD in Applied Mathematics at King’s College, London. In 2014, he published his doctoral thesis entitled Unwinding Financial Market Complexity. A tellingly predictive epigraph attributed to Immanuel Kant appears on the title page: ‘Science is organised knowledge. Wisdom is organised life.’ Having completed his dissertation, what did Morales decide to do next? ‘At this point’, he divulges with a wry smile, ‘I realised that there was only a certain amount of time I could postpone becoming an adult, so I started to apply for a variety of jobs, eventually joining J.P. Morgan as a risk manager’. Ever mindful of his responsibilities to the firm and his supportive team, he rose in the ranks becoming Vice President in 2018, but his heart lay elsewhere, and he decided to quit a year later.
Morales had long nursed the desire to write a novel and a passion to conduct. 2018 was a year of astonishing productivity. His fiction, The Earth and the Skies was well underway. Morales, a fervent Mahlerian, sets the story in Modernist Vienna between the wars after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a period of political turmoil and cultural creativity which fascinates him. It imagines an angst-ridden Gustav Mahler entrusting his new-born son Moses – whom he had abducted from his wife Alma – to Sigmund Freud, in the hope that psychoanalysis might shape him into the saviour of music. The book, published last month to general acclaim, has been described by the actor Simon Callow as ‘a noble work of historical hallucination’.
2019 was the year in which Morales set up the Café as well as his own London-based ensemble, the Fidelio Orchestra, fulfilling his dream to conduct, while providing a springboard for young musicians, and helping to create ‘a channel of communication between the [established] music world and society in general’. Named after Beethoven’s operatic heroine, Morales claims it was intended to represent ‘something unshackled from the rules of the Establishment’. The band is run as a charity and brings together professional players, music students, recent graduates and amateurs with prestigious day jobs, all of whom want to play music to the highest standards. Concerts take place regularly throughout the year in glorious city churches such St Andrews, Holborn, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, in the recently restored St John the Evangelist, Waterloo, at the acoustically perfect Milton Court Concert Hall which is attached to the Guildhall School of Music or at the intimate LSO St Luke’s. In April 2025 the orchestra was joined there by Latvian violinist Kristine Balanas in a compelling account of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor. Under Morales’s steady baton, the opening Allegro brimmed with youthful energy, and the Andante was as tender and lyrical as any you are likely to hear from a top international orchestra. The performance was marked throughout by Balanas’s expressive vibrato and technical prowess, and her dazzling account of the cadenza in the final Allegro was expertly coordinated with the Fidelio’s enthusiastic players, making for a finely balanced and spirited finale. In the second half of the evening, the orchestra’s ranks swelled from approximately 50 to at least 90 for a monumental account of Richard Strauss’s hugely demanding Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life). Sweepingly romantic and rigorously structured, Morales unfurled Strauss’s rich and seamless tapestry with confidence and deep commitment. Each section excelled, but some very fine playing from the extended horns, brass and percussion was particularly noteworthy.
There are three further concerts scheduled for this year, culminating in Mahler’s mighty Symphony No.2, the Resurrection, when the orchestra will be partnered by the London Oriana Choir and two outstanding soloists, Australian mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts Dean and British-Russian soprano Betty Makharinsky. ‘Mahler or Strauss?’ I ask. ‘Which do you prefer?’ Morales does not answer directly but reminds me that when Mahler was asked by a friend to explain the differences between his work and that of Strauss, he said, ‘Strauss believed that music should be predictably beautiful, whereas I think it should be beautifully unpredictable!’
One would have thought that planning, rehearsing and staging concerts on such a scale would have been more than enough to occupy Morales full-time, but there is a further string to the cultural bow of Farringdon’s Renaissance man. The Fidelio Café is the only café/bar in London, if not Europe, dedicated to promoting and staging world-class classical music. ‘We are not trying to promote artists, but to give the audience a different experience from the traditional concert hall.’ insists Morales. It is also a sought-after venue for private events and parties. Like the Orchestra, the Café takes its name from Beethoven’s opera, but also serves as a subtle reference to Stanley Kubrick’s last film Eyes Wide Shut (an adaptation of a Schnitzler novel) in which the password ‘Fidelio’ is used by the hero to access secret and exotic parties. By day, Morales’s Café is a gemütlich coffee house and restaurant of the kind one might find in Paris or Vienna, but which on music nights is transformed into a magical candle-lit space where diners, seated at tables clustered around the soloist or chamber group can – for a reasonable price – eat a meal, meet the performers in a public context, chat to them before or after the concert and hear classical music at its finest and most intimate. Morales not only operates the business on a day-to-day basis. He is also responsible for bookings and to grow the network of Fidelio’s affiliates. In addition to an evolving roster of young and hugely talented artists, a veritable roll call of renowned soloists and chamber ensembles, sympathetic to the Fidelio’s cause, have also performed there. They include Nicola Benedetti, Imogen Cooper, Benjamin Grosvenor, Angela Hewitt, Steven Isserlis, Paul Lewis, the Doric String Quartet and many more.
Most recently, the American pianist and former winner of the Leeds Piano Competition Eric Lu – in a preview of a Wigmore Hall recital – gave pre-supper guests some musical fare of the highest order. To hear his powerful and luminously poetic account of Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor and Schubert’s 4 Impromptus, D.935, at such close quarters was a pleasure and a rare privilege.
But Morales does not seek to celebrate stardom or to perpetuate privilege. ‘Is that what Beethoven, Brahms, Verdi or Mahler had in mind for their creations?’ he asks. At its core, his mission centres on education and innovation. The battle is not only to liberate classical music performance from the commercial control of its traditional ‘handlers’ as he terms the coalition of agencies, promoters, critics and elite ‘top dollar benefactors’. It is also to bring together lesser-known artists and unite them with a wider audience. Morales is in the vanguard of this musical Risorgimento and Fidelio Café and Orchestra are its centres of command.
Chris Sallon
For more about the Fidelio Cafe click here.