Muti turns 80 and debuts Beethoven’s ‘Missa Solemnis’ in Salzburg

On 28 July Riccardo Muti turns 80. And he starts to celebrate them by facing for the first time an imposing and difficult score such as that of Beethoven’s ‘Missa Solemnis’, which he will conduct on 13, 15 and 16 August at the Salzburg Festival, at the helm of the Wiener Philharmoniker, an orchestra which is always tied. “I have been working on it for more than half a century, but I have never dared to conduct it. I will do it in August in Salzburg. It is the Sistine Chapel of music: the very idea of ​​approaching it has always given me great fear”, revealed the Neapolitan master in a recent interview with ‘Corriere della Sera’. Awarded more than 20 ‘Honoris causa’ degrees from the most important universities in the world, Muti has a career of extraordinary international successes behind him, supported by the continuity of a tireless search for the many meanings hidden in the scores of the great composers. Starting with Giuseppe Verdi. Son of a doctor from Molfetta, Domenico Muti, and of Gilda Peli Sellitto, despite the family living in Molfetta, Muti was born in Naples by the will of his mother, who imagining one day having to answer abroad where her children were born, believed that Molfetta was an unknown and difficult to explain place, while Naples is a city well known all over the world. Muti, however, grew up and studied in Molfetta in the same high school that Gaetano Salvemini attended, and then moved to Naples and studied piano with Vincenzo Vitale, graduating from the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella. Then he moved to Milan where he studied composition with Bruno Bettinelli and conducting with Antonino Votto, right arm of Arturo Toscanini and representative of that Italian opera tradition that Muti makes his own, and fully revealed it in 1971, when Herbert von Karajan invited him. conducting Donizetti’s ‘Don Pasquale’ at the Salzburg Festival at the helm of the Wiener Philharmoniker. On that occasion Muti divides the criticism by breaking the cliché that saw Donizetti’s masterpiece as a simple ‘opera’, and reveals its depth and intimate pathetic inflection. With the Wiener begins a long relationship of collaboration based on mutual “esteem”, which leads to Mozart’s interpretations and the fascinating reading of Schubert’s symphonies, up to the New Year’s concerts. The last, that of last January 1st, which was held in the hall of the Musikverein in Vienna without an audience due to the pandemic.During his long career Muti confronts the greatest orchestras, from that of the Maggio Fiorentino, of which he was conductor from his beginnings in 1968 to 1980, at La Scala (1985-2005), at the London Philharmonia Orchestra (1973-1982), the Philadelphia orchestra (1980-1992), at numerous meetings with the Berliner Philharmoniker and today at the helm of the Chicago Symphony, one of the most prestigious orchestras in the world on whose podium he arrived in 2010 as musical director. In these years Muti – married since 1969 to Cristina Mazzavillani, father of three children (Chiara, Francesco and Domenico) and grandfather of two grandchildren (Gilda, daughter of Chiara and Riccardo, son of Francesco) – has always tried to train the new generations of performers founding in Ravenna, the city where he lives with his family, the ‘Riccardo Muti Italian Opera Academy’, with the aim of transmitting his experience to young musicians, and the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra, made up of young instrumentalists chosen by an international commission named after one of his favorite composers, “unjustly neglected”, according to Muti, because he is considered “learned and boring classicist” and “musician for musicians”. In reality, Cherubini was among the composers most admired by Beethoven who considered him “the greatest living dramatic composer”. Meanwhile, Warner celebrates Muti’s birthday with a 91 cd box that collects all the recordings of symphonic and choral works directed by the Neapolitan master between 1973 and 2007 which include music by Berlioz, Bruckner, Beethoven, Cherubini, Dvorak, Mozart, Schubert, Rossini, Schumann, Scriabin, Verdi and many others. A collection that sheds light on an extraordinary career which, not surprisingly, makes Muti one of the most famous Italians in the world. And that next 29 July celebrates with a concert in the Quirinale Courtyard of Honor, at the helm of the Cherubini Youth Orchestra, the opening of the work of the G20 of Culture. A wish for a man who at the age of 80 appears disillusioned with the musical culture in Italy: “Sometimes I seem to speak to the deaf. Muti speaking to the deaf … Dejecting. It is not lack of will; it is atavistic ignorance – he says in the last interview with ‘Corriere’ – And to say that the roots of world music are in Italy: Palestrina, Monteverdi, Frescobaldi, Luca Marenzio, Scarlatti … “.