Nearly five months ago, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra settled the longest strike in its history, a battle over pensions and salary covered by news organizations around the world.
Everyone wondered what Riccardo Muti, the orchestra’s renowned music director, would do. For the strike’s first week coincided with the start of his March residency, when tickets are in far greater demand than when anyone else takes the podium.
On the second full day of the strike, the maestro made international headlines by appearing with the musicians at their press conference in front of Orchestra Hall.
“Some people, they want to read my position with the musicians as against the board,” the conductor told a swarm of TV, radio and print journalists as the CSO musicians stood alongside him.
“This is not true. I would just like them to listen more carefully to the musicians, who represent one of the great orchestras of the world.”
The hugs, kisses and handshakes that the musicians lavished upon their music director summed up their response to his appearance.
So it stands to reason that as Muti prepares to launch his 10th season at the helm with subscription concerts starting Sept. 19, the relationship between conductor and instrumentalists has tightened.
“No, no, I don’t think (so),” says Muti, speaking from his home in Ravenna, Italy.
“It was very close also before. That was the reason I went (to the press conference). I went because I followed my brain, my instinct.
“So I have been always a very, very, very, very free individual. Because as my teacher Antonino Votto said one day, when I was just starting my career, he said to me: ‘Don’t forget: Never compromise in music. And the musicians are your voice. Without the musicians, your baton is mute. Not Muti!’
“So I thought that was important. I didn’t think for a moment (about) the board. … I am a musician, and I believed that they (the musicians) were absolutely right.
“The Chicago Symphony is one of the greatest orchestras in the world, in my opinion, one of the two or three. Today I can say, for example, in certain repertoire, when I conduct them, today I can say the Chicago Symphony, for example, in Verdi, after the work that we have done, that is the best orchestra in the world.
“Because they have the spirit. They have the knowledge. And they don’t have all the bad defects that opera orchestras, even the most qualified, have in the past, with bad habits, all the bad things that destroy.
“But also it’s a fantastic Bruckner orchestra, Mahler orchestra and Prokofiev, Stravinsky. It’s a great instrument. So I think that musicians deserve to be treated like exceptional representatives in the world of art.”
Some of the commentary that arose during the seven-week strike showed a startling lack of understanding of what it means to be a world-class musician. Naysayers believed the players simply show up for rehearsals and concerts, saw away at their instruments for a couple hours, then come home and kick back. The decades of training, relentless practice and enormous performance pressures were lost on many who never have played an instrument at the highest level.
“You cannot say, ‘They don’t work enough,’ ‘What do they want?’ and all these kinds of phrases,” says Muti. “I think still in Chicago people have not realized what they have. What the world knows about the Chicago Symphony is still maybe – how do you say in English? – taken for granted.”
No one seems to admire the orchestra more than Muti, and he soon will have a new opportunity to test his faith in its achievements. During the subscription concerts starting Sept. 26, he’ll begin a cycle of the complete Beethoven symphonies, to honor the composer’s 250th birthday next year. These will be recorded live in concert.
Though Muti already has recorded Beethoven symphony cycles with the La Scala and Philadelphia orchestras, the prospect of hearing what he brings to them at age 78 piques interest, to say the least. That he’ll be revisiting this monument of the symphonic repertory with the CSO, an orchestra he has reshaped and refined through his hires and his Italianate sensibility, only heightens the project’s appeal.
To Muti, however, it’s about the composer, not the conductor.
“Because the world needs Beethoven,” says Muti. “There are some composers, also great composers, that if they had not existed, mankind would go on anyway. But there are some expressions among artists of the greatness of our nature: Bach, Beethoven, Verdi.
“In the music of Beethoven, there is such an ethical, moral integrity … and power and sufferance. And the desire to win against a very evil destiny against him,” adds Muti, referring in part to the deafness that tormented the composer but could not silence his art.
“Even so, he tried always to dedicate his music to the Creator – it doesn’t matter which religion,” continues Muti. “Like Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher, when he said two things really impressed him, and that was the sky full of stars outside him and the moral conscience inside him.”
Or, to quote Kant verbatim: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
As far as Muti is concerned, “We can say the same thing about Beethoven. His music – even in every sonata, in every quartetto, even in the bagatelles for piano, he, as you know, he always – there is a moment where you feel there is a moment of gratitude to the Creator, the father of the universe.
“We feel all these elements. And this music, even today, and will be always in the future, is capable to invade our heart, our soul, to come in and to make us feel that we are not animals or inferior species, but we belong to something.”
Meaning, presumably, something greater than ourselves.
No musically literate person would argue against the universality of Beethoven’s message, nor his profound hopes for humanity, articulated explicitly in the Ninth Symphony and more subtly in other works. But these are long-accepted truths about Beethoven’s music, which begs the question: Why record this music anew?
“The question is: Do we need another cycle of Beethoven symphonies? The answer is no!” says Muti forthrightly.
“But because I think that my relationship with the Chicago Symphony is one of the gifts that I’ve received from God in the late years of my life. Because this year will be 10 years of our relationship, and 10 years of happiness.
“In not one day I had a friction with the musicians. I’m talking about the orchestra – not the rest,” he says with a laugh, perhaps referring to management.
“And so, because Beethoven is a milestone in the life of a musician, to have for me and for the people a document of my relationship with the Chicago Symphony. This is, I think, not the statement of Muti wants to put a final word on Beethoven. It’s less pompous, the idea. It’s much more an idea of affection with my musicians.”
Which lends poignancy to the fact that Muti’s time as music director is winding down: His contract ends in 2022, meaning he has but three seasons left to complete his tenure here.
He prefers, however, to view his collaboration with the orchestra much as he did in his first season: as a continuum, not a journey with an inevitable end.
“It’s not that I am thinking that this is the limit,” says Muti. “I think that I will work deeply with the musicians and with the organization to improve certain things … that work should be done until the last day.
“Because if you feel at a certain point: I have done what I have done, then the orchestra goes down. Because the orchestra is the most delicate instrument. The music director has to take care until the last day.
“But I’m sure that my heart will remain near, close to the orchestra. … So I will work until the last day. And that doesn’t mean that if they want that in the future I (can’t) continue to (collaborate), why not? I don’t think that after the three years as music director my relationship will be broken; there is no reason.”
By July 28, 2022, the conductor will be 81, not that old in a profession where maestros sometimes work into their 90s. Nevertheless, Muti says he has specific thoughts on where his life and music might lead him after he steps down from his CSO post.
“After 2022, I will not take any other engagement as music director, because it’s enough – too many responsibilities, if you want to be a real music director, not just a principal conductor,” he says.
“A real music director should take care of many things and to have also the energy to fight against certain things that can happen around the orchestra, but not in the orchestra,” he adds, perhaps again alluding to administrative issues.
“Certainly (I) will continue with the Vienna Philharmonic,” which he led in Verdi’s Requiem with the Vienna State Opera Chorus in sold-out concerts at the Salzburg Festival last month.
“The two orchestras really today that are very close to my heart (are) the Chicago Symphony and the Vienna Philharmonic. Can you imagine – next year for me will be 50 continuous years with the Vienna Philharmonic. That means next year for Salzburg (Festival) will be 250 years of Beethoven, 100 years of the Salzburg Festival, and half of the 100 years I have been participating (in) the festival!
“Maybe somebody will say, ‘Maestro Muti, now it’s better that you retire.’ But until I can jump and walk, I will continue.
“If I realize that to go from the entrance onstage – the door – to the podium, if I take more than 5, 6 seconds, maybe it’s time to retire. Because the view of a conductor that cannot reach the podium because he’s too old, it’s pathetic, I think.”
More presently, Muti contemplates the monolith that awaits: Beethoven’s symphonies.
“Maybe we can do something that will be certainly different from the Philadelphia (Orchestra) recordings,” says the conductor.
“Because many years have gone since that. So I had many more experiences in my artistic life, and in my human life. So I’ve lost relatives, brothers, you know, tragedies, happiness, as this life of everyone, fortunately and unfortunately.
“Also I have conducted so much more music since that time of the Philadelphia Orchestra,” which he served as music director from 1980-92.
“Maybe my approach will be enriched by all these experiences. Or maybe it will be a disaster,” he quips.
And what will happen with the CSO after Muti leaves?
“Certainly the future is difficult for every orchestra,” says Muti.
“Because to find in the future a very, very international, important conductor – to be the pilot of a Lamborghini or a Ferrari is much, much, much more difficult than to be a pilot of a simple Fiat,” he says, by metaphor addressing the CSO board’s challenge in selecting his replacement.
Conductors of his stature remain in perilously short supply.
“When you have an orchestra of that caliber, you need really a great pilot,” says Muti. “So I will try, until the end, to keep higher and higher the standards of the orchestra.”
He realizes it’s not easy to champion a great symphonic orchestra’s values and standards in an era when pop culture consumes ever more bandwidth and technology rules all.
“Now the people don’t talk to each other anymore,” says Muti. “You go in a restaurant, all the children are in front of the parents with the eyes in these terrible computers. So what is that? So the people don’t talk anymore. And so this will be a disaster for the future.
“We have the obligation to correct this, and music is the most important thing,” adds Muti.
“This is a battle of my life. Because, you know, success, yes, I had the success. It’s not that. And I have been lucky enough. I worked very hard.
“But now to teach, to teach, to teach.”
In Chicago, the lessons continue soon.
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
hreich@chicagotribune.com
