Here is my Monday August 16, 2010, Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com initial feature on Riccardo Muti at the 2010 Salzburg Festival.
Muti, fighting for his art
SALZBURG FEST | After opera struggles, maestro eager to get 'serious' in Chicago
SALZBURG -- At T minus one month and counting, Riccardo Muti is spending a lot of time preparing for his new position as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He has built in some downtime next month, but he's also fulfilling longstanding commitments such as a Brahms German Requiem in Stockholm on September 2, and keeping up historic institutional relationships, especially here in this culture-driven and picturesque Austrian town.
This month marks Muti's 40th consecutive summer as an opera and orchestral conductor at the prestigious Salzburg Festival, a unique record in the world today and one unlikely ever to be matched. And on Tuesday morning he will conduct his 200th Salzburg performance with the famed Vienna Philharmonic, the last of three performances of Prokofiev's score for the classic 1944 Soviet film Ivan the Terrible.
"When I came here," Muti said in an interview last week in a rehearsal room above the Large Festival Hall where the Philharmonic gives its concerts, "I was 30 years old. There were musicians in the orchestra who had played under Bruno Walter, Wilhelm Furtwängler, under the giants. I called the members of the orchestra 'professors.'
"In these 40 years, I have seen not only that generation of players pass away, but also a whole new generation join the orchestra and retire -- they go to pension at 65 in Vienna -- and new ones come in each year. Now I am the professor, and they seem like my children."
The passage of time has its drawbacks. "I was trying to get the players to capture the excitement of the score. 'Think of the film, think of the drama, think of the fear that the great actor Nikolai Cherkasov instills in every scene as Ivan -- the Terrible.'
"They were blank-faced. Silent. 'You know. The film, a masterpiece of the cinema, by Sergei Eisenstein.' No, it seems they did not know it. As one is older, one has to teach more and more, it seems."
[Conducting the Gluck opera Orfeo ed Euridice at the Salzburg Festival, Muti found the director unreceptive to his ideas. (Getty Images)]
Then there are the battles that characterize life in European festivals, especially here in Austria. For the Gluck opera Orfeo ed Euridice ("Orpheus and Eurydice") that Muti is conducting here this year, the festival assigned him a senior German stage director, Dieter Dorn.
"I start from the text in any piece I work on," Muti said, over lunch at his summer home in Anif, a nearby village. "For this first version of the opera, from 1762, Gluck chose an Italian text, by Ranieri de' Calzabigi -- a Neapolitan, as I am -- and a great poet, as I am not. This was not just a man who prepared libretti [texts] to order for operas, he was a great man of letters.
"Well, Mr. Dorn did not seem to know this or to care. He had arrived at our first meeting without indicating that he had ever even looked at the Italian. When you sing, a word determines everything. 'Prima le parole e poi la musica' ('first the words and then the music') not because the words are more important but because this takes us to how the composer himself worked.
"And he had no interest in what my ideas, as the conductor of the piece, might be. From there it went even further downhill."
Many critics found Dorn's staging merely dull. Some Americans, including Anthony Tommasini of The New York Timesand myself, were just happy that the modern German stage tradition of nonsensical time changes and gratuitous nudity, sex, and violence added to productions was absent here. But Muti can -- and did -- cite literal measure and verse as to where he saw the director straying from his proper task.
"They say I am hard. Uncompromising. Inflexible," he said with a slap of his hand on the table. "No. I am serious, yes. Serious about the art I make. Why else should I be doing this work at the age of 69?
"I am looking so much forward to Chicago. A city where people speak directly and an orchestra where I do not see a lot of intrigue, but a seriousness. And one that knows that being serious about art and music does not in any way exclude feeling, experiencing, and communicating the great joy that is in the works that we play and the love that we have for what we do."
And with that, the pastas was served, and another day was crossed off the calendar before Muti arrives in Chicago on September 15.
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