A lesson from Riccardo Muti: the Italian Opera Academy begins in Ravenna

There’s a buzz in the air as I make my way around the back of the stage to the dressing rooms. All around the boys, sitting here and there, tune their instruments, whose sounds mix in that typical, harmonious confusion that always precedes the opening of the curtain. Finally one last door opens and the master, awaited by everyone outside, spends a few minutes with us. The time for a short dialogue, a photo, then a look at the clock and the exit on stage. Riccardo Muti’s Italian Opera Academy opens in Ravennathe precious initiative that allows the master to re-propose a tradition that comes, intact in its charm, from afar.

“Old school,” as he calls it: that of his teacher Antonino Votto and, therefore, that of Toscanini of which Votto was assistant. It is like a window that opens and invites aspiring young conductors to look out over a fascinating and authoritative past, which Muti offers his pupils brief hands, while he stands by their side on that island of solitude – as he likes to define it – which it’s the podium. He corrects them, shows them individual gestures, sometimes scolds them, but always with that affectionate irony which is a typical trait of a teacher who, at a given moment in his boundless career, had a clear idea: “I considered it almost indispensable (…) to communicate to others, especially to the boys coming out of the conservatories, (…) my experience”. And this doesn’t happen in the private space of a classroom, but in the theatre. Thus Muti allows the public to witness that dizzying, potentially infinite process which is the staging of a musical work. Note after note, the audience is placed before the very delicate, mysterious relationship between conductor and orchestra. Thus, the same passage is repeated innumerable times, in a labor limae – colour, timbre, dynamics – which appears as an approximation to an infinite horizon. Several times he addresses the public, “because the future of music lies in the direct relationship between performer and listener: the public must be involved in this work”. The distance is suddenly eliminated and the audience feels involved hic et nunc in the event of the music, which in this case is Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem: “Often – recalls Muti – I have had the satisfaction of seeing the eyes of the spectators light up and of transforming them, together with me and the orchestra, into co-protagonists”.

The maestro is in no hurry and asks for the reasons for everything: even the smallest gesture of the hand, the wrist, the fingers has a reason and, therefore, consequences on the music. Every single passage is investigated and – one might say – illuminated. Because – and this is perhaps the most beautiful statement – ​​“every note is a world”. He explains these things with authority, but never in a harsh or imperious way: it is always – it seems to us – a proposal to the student’s freedom. In fact, as Muti likes to recall quoting Schoenberg, “the master must not show himself as an infallible individual who knows everything and is never wrong, but as the tireless one who is always on the lookout”. There is therefore no need, in this fundamental humility, to invent anything: it is enough for the interpreter and conductor to read exactly – another great legacy of Toscanini – what is written on the score; knowing full well, however, that “the signs of him are fatally inadequate and they have tried in vain for centuries to imprison the imponderable”.

He jokes with his pupils, skilfully alternates explanations and jokes, cordially scolds one of them who replies “ok”, reminding him that he is in the “beautiful country where the yes sounds” (Dante, Inf, XXXIII, 80). To the soprano, whose name is Veronica, she recalls – in an excursus that is only apparently extrinsic to the context – that her name means “true icon”: it is the icon of Christ, left imprinted on the cloth that a woman placed on his bloodied face during the passion. A gesture of extreme familiarity with the divine which, when you think about it, is an image that is anything but extraneous to this score by Verdi. Indeed, Muti explains: “the difference between Brahms’ Requiem, for example, and that of Verdi, lies in the fact that there is consolation for the living, while in Verdi we witness a true and proper battle of the man who, faced to the most dramatic mystery, it demands an answer from God”. “We – adds Muti suddenly – speak to God face to face. The important thing is therefore to identify the expression of this humanity, of the cry contained in this score, in this music. A music that, even today, addresses man to speak to him about man”.