Editor’s Note: The below is an expanded version of a piece that appears in the current issue of National Review.

Chicago

Many people, when they think of a conductor, think: “Muti.” He fits the popular conception of a conductor: in comportment, in knowledge, in charisma, in longevity. Born in 1941, he has conducted all over the world. He is essentially the same on the podium as he has always been. I have been watching him, listening to him, since at least 1980, when he became music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

In those days, the Philadelphians had a slogan: “Tutti per Muti” (“Everyone for Muti”). It was emblazoned on T-shirts, coffee mugs, and other things. In proper Italian, the phrase doesn’t really rhyme — as Muti has confirmed to me in the past — but people meant well.

Since 2010, Riccardo Muti has been the music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He is now in the final days of his tenure in Chicago. It’s not that he will never appear with the orchestra again. He is conducting the Chicagoans next season — for example, on the opening night of Carnegie Hall, in New York. But he is relinquishing the music directorship.

After a concert on a recent afternoon in Chicago, I sat down with Muti in his studio, at Orchestra Hall. The walls of the studio tell the story of his life, to an extent — their photos, their memorabilia.

You see the place, in Naples, where Muti was born. (I’m not talking Florida.) You see Toscanini, the model of an Italian conductor. There are also Muti’s cherished teachers, Nino Rota and Antonino Votto. (The former is best known for his music for The Godfather; the latter was the principal assistant to Toscanini at La Scala.)

On a table, I spot a small bust and say, “Verdi.” Muti responds, solemnly, “Always. Always.” Muti has had a very close relationship with this composer over the years.

Back to the walls: There is a picture of Muti with Queen Elizabeth II (and Prince Philip). She attended a performance at La Scala in 2000, when Muti was the music director there. Afterward, he did not go to the royal box; she came to him, backstage.

When Muti tells me this, I say, “The mountain came to Mohammed.” He says, “To the mouse.”

There is a letter, framed, from another Mohammed — Muhammad Ali. In it, the champ refers to music as “the heartbeat of the universe.” And he says to Muti, “You are the greatest and so am I.”

Muti comments, “Bellissimo, no? Commovente.” (“Moving.”)

This, too, is moving: There is a photo of the Castel del Monte, in Apulia, built by King Frederick II in the 1240s. Young Riccardo was taken to see it 700 years later. He was five or six years old. It is pretty much the first image he can remember — burned into his memory. It is a mysterious, alluring castle, octagonal.

Muti always wanted to buy a piece of land near it, so that he could sit in his retirement and gaze upon it. That is exactly what he has done.

Last season, Muti conducted a symphony of Philip Glass (No. 11). He told the composer about Castel del Monte and his intimate association with it. He asked Glass to write a piece for him to conduct, next season. Muti has not seen the score yet — but he knows the title of the piece that Glass will deliver: “The Triumph of the Octagon.”

This afternoon, Muti has conducted a program beginning with Mozart and ending with Respighi. The Respighi was Pines of Rome, the second installment of the composer’s Roman Triptych. Muti quotes Horace: “Alme Sol, possis nihil urbe Roma visere maius.” (“Kind Sun, may you look upon nothing greater than the city of Rome.”) Muti also refers to a conversation he had with Respighi’s widow, Elsa, in Milan. Born in 1894, Signora Respighi lived until 1996, a week shy of her 102nd birthday.

The concluding section of Pines of Rome — the big payoff — is “The Pines of the Appian Way.” This afternoon, Muti built it fabulously. But he didn’t look like he was doing much. His gestures were relatively small.

Technically speaking, all you have to do is beat in four for five minutes, says Muti. So conductors take the opportunity to make a big show on the podium. They move about like windmills. “I hate this attitude, which is becoming more and more common among conductors,” Muti says. “They’re like clowns — with due respect to clowns.”

As Muti points out, one of his predecessors in Chicago, Fritz Reiner, was famous for small gestures. And no one ever got more out of an orchestra.

This afternoon’s concert began with a Mozart divertimento — the one in F major, K. 138 (which Mozart wrote when he was 16). Talking with Muti, I recall a conversation I had with a musician who said, “When I get to heaven, the first thing I’ll ask is, ‘Where’s Mozart?’” Muti has companioned with many composers throughout his life, but maybe especially with Mozart and Verdi. Would he like to see them and talk with them? Ask them questions?

First, says Muti, “I don’t think that I will meet them, because they are in paradise and I don’t think I will go in that direction.” But second, “I would be extremely afraid to ask a question. Because paradise is supposed to be the place of truth — Warheit, no? La verità — and if they say, ‘Muti, you got it all wrong,’ I would die a second time.”

Mozart and Verdi are similar in at least one respect, says Muti. In their operas, “they speak to us about us.” They expose our qualities, good and bad. They are not judgmental. They don’t wag a finger at us. But they show us who we are, often to our shame.

As we talk, I mention “Soave sia il vento,” that heavenly trio from Così fan tutte (Mozart). Muti mentions that he has asked his family to play this trio at his funeral — in a recording conducted by him.

Years ago, Mariss Jansons, the late, great Latvian, told me something about his tenure as the music director in Pittsburgh. “I had to conduct a new piece by an American composer every week. Otherwise, the critics would kill me.” “How about the audiences?” I said. “Oh,” Jansons smiled, “critics and audiences are two different things.”

Riccardo Muti has conducted a great deal of new music — American new music not least. In Italy, no one ever prods you to conduct new Italian music, and in Holland no one prods you to conduct new Dutch music. But in America? There is a “leitmotif,” says Muti, a “tired ritornello”: You don’t do enough American music. This suggests “a sort of inferiority complex.” (Count me as one American who could not agree with Muti more.)

The conductor proceeds to quote Robert Schumann — who once compared composers to shoemakers. In Mozart’s day, said Schumann, a composer made shoes that everyone could wear. In the present day, Schumann continued, we make shoes that only some can wear. And how about our own day? That is a question that Muti asks.

Much of the music of the 20th century, he notes, is gone. Just gone. Unplayed, unsung, unheard. Pizzetti, Malipiero, Nono, Berio (to name only Italians) — gone, for the most part. There has been a great distance between modern classical music and public taste. Composers haven’t given people many shoes to wear. They have not given people much music to warm to, or remember. (This is a generalization, mind you.)

What about popular music? Ever more “stupid,” says Muti. “Stupid and superficial.”

In sum (and once more, this is a generalization), modern classical music is impossibly cerebral and abstract, and pop music is dumber than dumb. And that leaves the poor public in the middle, says Muti.

Don’t get him started about opera productions. In fact, do. He is very candid on the subject, as on all. Stage directors often rule the roost, in opera houses. They call the shots. And their productions are often at odds with the operas being staged — that is, with the music, librettos, and stories.

Muti takes note of a strange dichotomy, even a laughable one. Some people insist on “historical correctness” in the pit. The operas have to be played in an “authentic” way, with “original” instruments, according to “period practice.” And on the stage? Anything goes, no matter how far out.

I bring up a recent production of Rigoletto (Verdi) at the Metropolitan Opera. The production set the opera in 1960s Las Vegas — the time of the Rat Pack (with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, et al.). This was an interesting and imaginative production, in some respects. But my view is: An opera set in 1960s Las Vegas is a very good idea. Someone ought to write one. Rigoletto is something else, set in 16th-century Mantua.

Yes, says Muti. And consider the Renaissance dance music at the start. It belongs to the court of that time. It does not go with 1960s Las Vegas.

Another thing: Rigoletto, the title character, is a court jester, and a hunchback. And yet some productions have him without a hunch, as Muti says. They have him walking upright. That is a kind gesture, maybe, but it makes no sense, because Rigoletto’s deformity is critical to the story. It is what drives him. He speaks of it, he is explicit about it: “O rabbia! esser difforme, esser buffone!” “What outrageous misery, to be deformed, to be a buffoon!” Other characters refer to him as a “gobbo,” a hunchback. And if he is walking around without this deformity . . .

Opera requires the suspension of disbelief, granted. But, as I see it, you’ve got to give Rigoletto some deformity, some handicap, some wretched physical misfortune, or you have no story.

Eventually, I get to the subject of decline — cultural decline. I am perfectly aware that older people in every generation think that the society or culture around them is undergoing decline. It is a cliché, a stereotype. But I can’t help seeing signs of decline. “Tutto declina,” says Falstaff (in the Verdi opera of the same name). “Everything declines.”

Riccardo Muti sees what I see too. Part of the problem, he says, is ignorance of the past — the golden past, including our artistic heritage. “We are cut off from our roots, and without roots, the tree falls.”

Nevertheless, he feels he is doing his part, and he puts it this way: “I will continue to fight because I think that the ocean is made by drops. Even one drop — a single drop — can help, along with the other drops.”

Muti has a nice engagement in Vienna next May: He will conduct the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, which is nothing new — he has conducted the VPO in 53 straight seasons. But next May is something special in that it will mark the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which premiered in Vienna. The VPO has chosen Muti to conduct the work on the anniversary.

He is moved by this, he says, “because they didn’t ask an Austrian or German conductor to do it, but an Italian.” As a rule, music is music, without nationality.

Over a leisurely hour, Muti and I discuss a variety of subjects and personalities — personalities he has encountered, over the years. These include popes: from Paul VI to Francis. Benedict XVI, Muti says, was a “wonderful musician.”

In addition to popes, we discuss film directors — Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini. Muti once asked Fellini to stage an opera for him. The great director gave him a very interesting answer, and an honest one. “Caro Muti,” he said — “Dear Muti” — “I will never do an opera production because la parola cantata [the sung word] doesn’t tell me anything.” He needed la parola parlata, the spoken word.

Muti further relates a story about Maria Callas. He very much wanted her to appear in a production of Macbeth (again, Verdi) over which he was presiding. The year was 1974. Callas was in steep decline (speaking of that). The great soprano reached Muti by phone. At first she was coy, playful: “Maestro Muti, you know my name. But we have never met. I know you are interested in me.” On it went like this. In time, however, she identified herself and turned very serious. It was an honor, she said, to be asked by him to sing Lady Macbeth. “Ma è tardi.” “But it’s late.” That is a line laced with pain. It comes from another Verdi opera, La traviata. The title character speaks it at the end, when she is dying. “It’s late.”

“This is something I always carry with me,” says Muti — the memory of his phone call with Callas. “The more distant this event becomes, the more it seems in my brain like a dream.”

Before we part, he reflects on his career, his calling. “If you take this profession seriously, it is a torment all your life. I’ve never gone to the podium thinking, ‘Oh, I’m so happy to conduct a concert.’ Never. Never. Because every time you go to the podium” — whether it’s in a big musical capital, such as Vienna or New York, or a small place, such as Wuppertal or Taranto — “you put yourself in front of the composer, in front of the music, in front of the orchestra, in front of the audience. It’s a big, big responsibility.”

After the performance is over, says Muti, you smile at the audience. (He does not always smile. Sometimes, yes. He even exults. But sometimes he is somber.) Inwardly, however, you are thinking of all the things you could have done better.

In Milan, Muti talked with Toscanini’s daughter Wally. She told him about the day her father came home from a rehearsal of La traviata, which he had conducted countless times. He had known Verdi personally, and had worked with him. As his wife prepared the risotto, Toscanini went to the score, once more, to search its pages, trying to figure out how to do the opera greater justice.

Muti and I chuckle over a story recounted by Harvey Sachs, our mutual friend, in his marvelous, mammoth biography of Toscanini. Before a concert, Toscanini is backstage pacing the floor. His concerto soloist, Gregor Piatigorsky, the great cellist, is warming up and practicing. Toscanini keeps muttering, “You are no good, I am no good.” Piatigorsky implores him to stop, because otherwise “I will be a complete wreck.”

As they stand in the wings, waiting to go on, Toscanini says to Piatigorsky, “We are no good — but the others are worse. Come on, dear fellow, let’s go.”