The Long View | The conducting profession has changed, even if Riccardo Muti hasn’t

The 80-year-old Italian maestro – and yes, I use the word knowingly, provides living, breathing, well-coiffed proof that the old-school wing of the conducting profession is still with us, for good and bad.

An outstanding musician, Muti has long been known in the industry for his equally luminescent arrogance. But it was petulance that reared its head in May, when the conductor was reportedly involved in a backstage fracas with his successor at La Scala, the rather more easy-going Riccardo who now holds the house’s music directorship.

A month later Muti was moaning to the Milanese daily Corriere della Sera in a pre-birthday interview in which he claimed not to recognise his profession any more. ‘Conducting has become an occupation of convenience,’ Muti said to the journalist Aldo Cazzullo before tarring young conductors with the same brush: shallow, showy strangers to the nobility of great art (I paraphrase and Google translate).

Wherever you stand on Muti’s comments, they would have carried more weight coming from a musician who hadn’t allegedly acted so childishly a month before. It’s a curiosity of the profession that conductors don’t retire. But any conductor working in their eighties – even those of Muti’s huge standing, talent and achievements – would be better off giving constructive advice to those at the foot of the mountain than casting brickbats of generalised negative criticism down at them.

Muti’s central point, though, was bang on the money. Of course he doesn’t recognise the conducting profession: it has evolved while he, apparently, has not. Young conductors are better nurtured and supported by orchestras now than they have ever been. If that means some youngsters conduct Brahms 4 or Mahler 9 without the life experience and quiet authority of a Blomstedt, an Abbado or indeed a Muti, then so be it. You need only look at Finland to see that giving young conductors as much high-level experience, as early as possible, tends to reap rewards. 

At the risk of projecting, I sense Muti’s comment enshrined a bigger point. Essentially, it’s that the modern conductor – black, white, male, female – has descended Mount Parnassus and started to exist in the real world, one that has different ideas about leadership. That development threatens the institutional authority of a figure like Muti.

In June, just as Muti was pouring scorn on young conductors in his Corriere della Sera interview, I spent a week in the company of 24 young conductors from all over the world at the Malko Competition in Copenhagen. It became inescapably apparent that the next generation of great musicians feel their responsibilities to music and society in a different way.

Many of the conductors at the competition, all under 35, recognised the power of music played outside the concert hall. Many of them spoke of the power of music as a force for positive social change. Some protested against a stagnating repertoire and a general lack of regard for contemporary music. Others saw a future for themselves outside the traditional concert hall.

Most acknowledged the great opportunities presented by a world in which orchestral music is seen not so much as an ennobled tradition as a vital force. During the competition, some saw the art of conducting as that of facilitating and galvanizing – the bringing to reality of a shared vision. Others had their firm ideas and worked hard to orient the resident orchestra behind them.

Were any of them as good as Muti? I suspect a handful of them have the potential to be, but also that they will exercise a different sort of authority and wield a different sort of power (if ‘power’ is even the right word). Plenty of them have Instagram accounts and share their performances online. None seemed to care quite so much about their hair as Muti always has.

And perhaps, when they reach their ninth decade, these conductors will have the good grace – as many of their seniors do – to recognise that this most fascinating and fiendishly difficult of professions must be defined not by their own retrospective ideas of what has been lost, but by each generation’s brightest ideas of what it can encompass.