Back in Chicago at last, Muti heralds the CSO and the city for their heroism

“Mamma mia, a hundred papers!” exclaimed Riccardo Muti, by telephone from his home in Ravenna, shortly before returning here for three weeks of  Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts. The performances were to begin Sept. 23 with Beethoven’s mighty Eroica Symphony, or the “heroic,” which seemed apt in multiple ways. The effort to get Muti back into the States had required a mighty bureaucratic push of its own.

It has been nearly 20 months since Muti was last here. But with careful planning and “a hundred” government permissions in order, the CSO’s music director arrived in a joyful spirit, amid news that his tenure would be extended for another full season, until the summer 2023, to make up time lost to the pandemic. Yet during that long struggle, the maestro emphasized, the people of Chicago have themselves been heroic in their efforts to endure, a show of strength he wants to honor.

Beethoven’s Third Symphony opens with two mighty E-flat chords, attacked by the full orchestra, surely a startling sound in its day, penned by a composer of but 33 years in 1803. Even in rehearsal this week at Orchestra Hall, the work resounded with a brilliant force. The Eroica had enormous dimensions for its time. It is highly aggressive, daring in its dissonance, imbued with the tension of a composer trying to capture the inspiring heroism of Napoleon. But when the French military hero betrayed the tenets he had espoused by crowning himself emperor, the bitterly disillusioned Beethoven scratched out the dedication, declared Napoleon to be nothing but a common abuser of human rights and named his symphony for the heroic ideal instead, Eroica.

To reopen the CSO season with a work of such high aspiration, after such a long break, made perfect sense to the maestro: “I remember the war,” Muti said. "I was born in 1941. I remember my father in uniform as a doctor in the army, coming home at the end of it. Immediately two years before, Napoli [the city of Naples] was liberated by the Americans, and the first thing they did together with the English, after Napoli had been heavily bombed, was to reopen the Teatro San Carlo there.

“Now in a way this [coronavirus] has been much more dangerous than a war,” Muti said. "Why? Because a war is generally between two or three nations, and this COVID-19 war is a world war. In a few days, it impacted the entire world, bringing urgent, dramatic problems to everyone. No country has been free of this terrible virus. And it is very strange to think that the bomb killed people, created poverty and caused great populations to suffer, but during the wars, still culture could go on. The theaters were still operating. You had to physically destroy the theaters to stop the music, and even then the performances went on. People could assemble.

“But this time, we have all been put in the position that culture was killed, the economy was killed,” Muti said. “The people everywhere were in isolation. They could not gather. And when you kill the economy and the culture in a country after two years, it is not easy to put back together the things that have been left behind. That is why I am so glad to be with the orchestra, back together again.” That act honors the people who have struggled, Muti observed: “They are the ones who have been heroic through this difficult time.”

Over the last two summers, Muti found ways to work with young artists, a lifelong interest. He remains focused on the Luigi Cherubini Orchestra, which he founded in 2004 in Piacenza, a city in northern Italy about 145 miles northwest of his Ravenna home. The orchestra consists of select young musicians from all over Italy, who gather for summer sessions of training and performance. In Tokyo earlier this year, the maestro also led his Riccardo Muti Italian Opera Academy, founded in 2015, in a deep study of Verdi’s Macbeth.

Also for the first time, in March, direct from Ravenna to Chicago’s Orchestra Hall via Zoom, Muti coached young musicians from the Merit School of Music and the Chicago Musical Pathways Initiative. They were arrayed on the Orchestra Hall stage, albeit without an audience, a once- in-a-lifetime experience, with Muti on the big screen as their lively teacher, enthusiastically exhorting them to project all the way to the back of the hall.

“I know that in America, the COVID-19 has been a very dramatic situation, and so I am glad we were able to do those things,” Muti said. “And I am also glad that when I come back [to the CSO], it will be to do Beethoven and Brahms. It is the best choice in this moment, the best way to begin. We have to have this experience of coming together with music we love.”

But Muti also pointed out that he has also been studying some scores new to him, about which he is quite excited — works to to be performed later in the season, two by two women, including the CSO’s previous Mead Composer-in-Residence Missy Mazzoli, whom Muti appointed, and whose entire term, mostly obliterated by COVID-19, was such that two have not yet worked together to prepare one of her pieces for concert.

"I choose these scores without wanting even to know the composer’s name," Muti said. “I choose on the basis of what I read, and only afterward do I discover who it is, whether a man or a woman.” Mazzoli herself is, like Muti, active in both the symphonic and operatic realms, with several operas already under her belt, including one, based on Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War years, to debut eventually at the Metropolitan Opera.

Another composer he has been studying is Florence Price, a Chicago-based American composer of color, born in 1887, whose Symphony No. 1 was given its world premiere in 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, led by Frederick Stock, the CSO’s second music director, at the Chicago’s Century of Progress. “I am not conservative,” Muti said. "I am very open to the future. And as a musician, I question how relations will be in society, among mankind and music in the years to come. Looking at this world of easy travel, and the future integration of people from different cultures, also musically speaking, it is possible that these rivers of music will bring a new language, a mingled language for everybody. But I will not see this, because I have the age that I have.

“Still we have to prepare for the coming of these new prophets of music. We are now seeing various experiments, and it is fascinating. One of these pieces that I will conduct is the Andante moderato by Florence Price. It is so beautiful, the expression of a pure, fantastic mind, a fantastic soul who knew very well how to use the harmonies of her own culture to integrate with the cultural music of Western Europe. That is what we need. It is not old music, and not new only, just beautiful.”

One of Muti’s projects felled by COVID-19 was a performance of Beethoven’s enormous Missa solemnis, featuring the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus together with a stellar group of international soloists. It is a work that Muti had not yet performed in his life, because, as he explained, “So high is the message that I felt yet too small." When he finally pronounced himself ready, after decades of study, he decided to conduct it for the first time in Chicago, as a highlight of the 2020-21 season. That did not happen, of course, as the season went dark. Instead, Muti conducted it instead with the Vienna Philharmonic this summer at the Salzburg Festival.

“I was very proud. I felt happy that I had finally broken through the wall,” he said. And next season, with his directorship extended, Muti will indeed conduct Beethoven’s massive work in Chicago as well. "The Missa solemnis was the first score that I bought, and since then I have studied it and studied it" — and now the time has arrived.