About us

The "Riccardo Muti Italian Opera Academy" is for Riccardo Muti one of the most important project: teaching the Italian Opera to young conductors from all over the world.

The reasons are:

– Give the chance to young musicians willing to learn lessons that go back directly to the world of Giuseppe Verdi through Arturo Toscanini and great teachers of Riccardo Muti, like Antonino Votto.
– Keep the audience's cultural level high, showing how an opera is built and prepared directly in front of it. Running in theatre the complex journey from the first rehearsal at the piano untill the stage orchestra rehearsals with singers through the deep study of the score from the musical and dramatic point of view, to the final performance.
– Safeguard, therefore popularise, the strictness and depth of the Italian Opera in the world, according to methods and criteria now disappearing.
Riccardo Muti feels the need to pass on his expertise to young musicians, who don't know how to approach the Italian opera.

Maestro's project is addressed not only to young musicians from all over the world, but also to an audience of all ages that can attend all his rehearsing sessions in the theatre: rehearsals become real and actual concert-lessons.

For over forty years, Riccardo Muti has been insisting on the importance of classical music in each individual’s development and human growth. During the rehearsal sessions, Muti teaches music and passes on his method of approach speaking in a simple and direct language. This way, Maestro inspires the general public to feel consciously involved and ready for listening.

Using his own words:
“In the Italian schools, Music is practically absent, if not worse. Music should be mandatory, like the Italian language.
I’m a musician because my father believed that private teaching of music, compensating for the defects of the school, was fundamental for the education of young people.
At the age of seven, they handed me a small, two-quarter violin and not to make me become a musician. Instead of a train toy or a water gun, I received an instrument and now I’m here, that’s where this life of mine was born.
Even as a teenager, when I was studying not to enter the profession but to have a complementary education, I felt that teaching music is unavoidable for the education of young people, of a European citizen or a citizen of the world.
Populations that are from our culture are understanding this. We are less and less.
Instead, a Country with such an important musical past like ours, can’t overlook the knowledge of this history, of its history.

Already when I was a high school student (so, going back in time), together with other schoolmates who shared the same need to learn as I felt, we perceived as an impairment of general knowledge that a student could end his studies at the classical lyceum knowing who Mantegna and Il Sassetta were, but knowing absolutely nothing about Pergolesi, Cimarosa, Verdi, Puccini… not to mention Monteverdi.
Having a rough idea of art history and removing music was already a mistake back then. What is the point of listening to Beethoven knowing absolutely nothing about him?
Having some sort of historical and general knowledge of the subject means listening and enjoying it in a different way, more vivid and profound. Whereas listening without any awareness, just like hearing, is something else.”

• July 2015: Falstaff – Teatro Aligheri, Ravenna
• July 2016: La Traviata – Teatro Aligheri, Ravenna
• September 2017: Aida – Teatro Aligheri, Ravenna
• July 2018: Macbeth – Teatro Aligheri, Ravenna
• July 2019: Le nozze di Figaro – Teatro Aligheri, Ravenna
• July 2020: Cavalleria rusticana/Pagliacci – Teatro Aligheri, Ravenna
• December 2021: Nabucco – Fondazione Prada, Milano
• December 2022: Messa da Requiem – Teatro Alighieri, Ravenna
• November 2023: Norma - Fondazione Prada, Milano
  

The Riccardo Muti Italian Opera Academy project took place also in Seoul in 2016 and has been organised in Tokyo since 2019, thanks to a multi-year collaboration with one of the most important Japanese musical organization: the Spring Festival. Discover more.