RICCARDO MUTI

Riccardo Muti was music director of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan for nineteen years, from 1986 to 2005, and on 7 December 2004, the feast of Sant’Ambrogio, he reopened the restored theatre with Salieri’s L’Europa riconosciuta, the opera it had opened with in 1778. He has conducted at the Salzburg Festival since 1971. Both houses are on the Court’s calendar, and in each of them he has kept a tradition going rather than starting one.

The Training

He was born in Naples in 1941, studied the piano at the conservatory of San Pietro a Majella there, and then composition and conducting at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan, under Bruno Bettinelli and Antonino Votto. In 1967 the jury of the Guido Cantelli competition for conductors gave him first place unanimously, and the next year he became principal conductor of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence, a post he held until 1980. From 1973 he was principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, succeeding Otto Klemperer, and from 1980 to 1992 music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. There, he said, his approach was to stay faithful to what the composer intended.

The Scala Years

At La Scala he opened the season on 7 December again and again: Nabucco in 1986, Don Giovanni in 1987, Guglielmo Tell in 1988, I vespri siciliani in 1989, and Otello in 2001, among others. Alongside Verdi and Mozart he brought back Gluck, Alceste, Orfeo ed Euridice and Armide, and the operas of Cherubini and Spontini, Lodoïska and La vestale, that had fallen out of the repertory. When the orchestra struck before a performance of La traviata in June 1995, he went to the piano and accompanied the singers through the arias himself, and the house cheered.

His autobiography, published in 2010, appeared in English the next year under a title that serves as his creed: First the Music, Then the Words.

Salzburg and Vienna

He first conducted at the Salzburg Festival in 1971, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, and has returned through five decades, for Mozart above all: Così fan tutte, La clemenza di Tito, Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte, and later Otello, Macbeth and Aida. After Herbert von Karajan died in 1989 he took over the concert Karajan had given with the Vienna Philharmonic on 15 August, the Feast of the Assumption. From 2007 to 2011 he ran the Salzburg Whitsun Festival, with rare Italian operas of the eighteenth-century Neapolitan school. He has conducted the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert seven times, in 1993, 1997, 2000, 2004, 2018, 2021 and 2025.

The Young

In 2004 he founded the Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini, of young players chosen by an international jury, and he is its music director still. In 2015 he opened the Riccardo Muti Italian Opera Academy at the Teatro Alighieri in Ravenna, to train young conductors, répétiteurs and singers.

Chicago and After

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra named him its music director in 2008, from the season of 2010 to 2011, and he held the post until 2023, when he was named music director emeritus. In June 2026 the Orchestre National de France, which he first conducted in March 1980, named him its conductor emeritus.

The Season

La Scala Opening Night is on 7 December, at six in the evening, and in 2026 Myung-Whun Chung, in his first season as music director, conducts Verdi’s Otello: the opera Muti conducted on the opening night of 2001. The Salzburg Festival runs from the middle of July to the end of August. The Court values in him what both evenings depend on: the long apprenticeship, the repertory kept in good order, and the conviction, held for sixty years, that the score comes first.