Riccardo Muti

By PAOLA BRIZZI

The 2001 Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples hosted the 19th Annual International Gold Medal Prize for Merit in Catholic Culture, sponsored by the School of Catholic Culture of Bassano del Grappa (Italy). The prize this year went to Riccardo Muti, Musical Director of the La Scala Orchestra in Milan, because, as the explanation for the award reads, “no matter whose music Muti is performing, giving his own personal and incomparable interpretation, the audience is placed in contact not only with the sublimity of the art, but also and even more with the religious language of the music, capable of revealing the mystery of existence together with the wonder of all creation and the most exalted of all creatures, man.” For Muti, music has been his greatest passion ever since the earliest years of his life when, still a little boy, he would accompany his father (a doctor) daily to visit the seminarians and young priests at the prestigious pontifical seminary of Molfetta. Within its walls, with his brothers, he learned to take his first steps, to play ball, to play music and sing, and, in his own words, he was born “physically, not only as a man but also as a musician.” There, at the age of seven, “violin in hand, in short pants, white socks, the shoes from my First Communion, and a little white shirt with lace collar,” he performed for the first time in front of a large choir of seminarians. His being Catholic is not manifested primarily in a list of moral principles to be respected (“I can say that I am not an exemplary Catholic,” he confessed in this regard), but in the humble and grateful recognition of an education and tradition he received as a child (“in those places of great culture”), of an atmosphere breathed–never “dull or heavy, but very lively”–which became the wellspring of his personality and inspiration. His is a gratitude for the Christian teaching which is able, even now, to lend a new awareness and breadth even to his gestures as he holds the orchestra together, and to his directions to them of how to express the music. How difficult it would be, he says, “to conduct the Requiem with Verdi’s invocation ‘Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna,’ thinking that this liberation is nothing more than the shattering and dissolving of our physicality, with nothing afterwards!” These words echo others he said to his musicians when they were to perform Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross: “My friends, you cannot play this music unless you look to the Crucifix. Here it is, watch Him. Hear His cry. Read the Gospel of Luke that introduces the seven adagios.” What, then, is the responsibility of the orchestra conductor, what is the challenge to which he is called? For Muti, music is “pure expression,” the highest of all arts, without which men would truly be bestial. It is not the bearer of messages, edicts, or proclamations, but rather it expresses a transcendence, since it is “ours, of the earth, stolen, taken, borrowed from a greater music which is the universal music.” The orchestra conductor is the one who reads, proposes, governs, and guides the performance, re-conducting always to the objectivity of the architecture of composition. This is a great task, as Cardinal Simonis, Archbishop of Utrecht and Primate of Holland acknowledged at the conclusion of the awards ceremony at the Meeting: “Serving music, he wanted and was able to serve men, who have a fundamental desire for beauty, beauty which reaches its zenith in music.”

At the end of the dinner, the city of Bassano del Grappa, led by Mayor Gian Paolo Bizzotto, offered the Maestro the most original and warm homage, which was a case of grappa with a personal label: “19th Annual International Gold Medal Prize for Merit in Catholic Culture to Riccardo Muti.” The presentation of the gift was accompanied by an unprecedented concert, led by Muti’s wife, who elegantly conducted a large choir composed of everyone present–the organizers of the Meeting, the citizens of Bassano who had come to Rimini for the occasion, and the Maestro himself–in a rendition of the song Sul ponte di Bassano (On Bassano Bridge), composed for the Alpine soldiers’ bridge over the Brenta. Muti’s final words of thanks, for the prize and the welcome he received, linger as a great wish for the people of the Meeting, whose presence, according to an image borrowed by the Maestro from the musical world, “in this city, in these years, has unceasingly given the cue to life with all its problems.”