In 2015, Maestro Riccardo Muti founded the Italian Opera Academy to “preserve and spread the beauty and depth of Italian Opera in the world.”
From 2018 to 2022 the Raul Gardini Foundation – which includes among its objectives the scientific and cultural education of young people – has been the main sponsor of the Riccardo Muti Italian Opera Academy.
Through the Academy, the Maestro aims at passing on to young musicians what he himself learnt from his teachers, in a lineage that finds him connected in history to Giuseppe Verdi, through Arturo Toscanini and his great teacher Antonino Votto.
Each season, the famous orchestra conductor meets with five young conductors, and five accompanying teachers, selected from numerous applicants from all over the world, for a two-week training course, each course based on a different opera. The supporting laboratory is provided by the Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra (composed by musicians all under the age of 30), which Muti founded in 2005 and usually conducts, together with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Concerts and rehearsals are open to the public.
According to Maestro Muti, by teaching Italian opera to young musical talents from all over the world we not only offer to young conductors the opportunity of learning directly from the Verdi tradition, but we also teach and promote the beauty and depth of the Italian opera, showing methods and criteria that are disappearing. Indeed, the Riccardo Muti Italian Opera Academy shows the audience how an opera is built and prepared. Thus, the whole path from the first rehearsals at the piano and the stage orchestra rehearsals to the final performance occurs in the Theatre. All this, made to study the score in deep, from the musical and dramatic point of view.
Season 2022
From December 2nd to December 15th at the Teatro Alighieri in Ravenna, Maestro Riccardo Muti has presented and conducted Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa da Requiem, composed in 1874 and dedicated to Alessandro Manzoni. Accompanied by Riccardo Muti, the audience had the opportunity to totally immerse themselves in great music and experience all the preparatory stages of the concert up to the final performance.
Season 2021
The seventh edition of the Academy, organized for the first time in collaboration with Fondazione Prada, has taken place in Milan from 4 to 15 December 2021 in the wide and adaptable spaces of Deposito within Fondazione Prada’s venue. The public was able to take part to the whole rehearsal process and concerts focused this year on Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco.
Season 2020
From July 18th to 31st, Maestro Riccardo Muti has worked on selected pieces of “Cavalleria rusticana” by Pietro Mascagni and “Pagliacci” by Ruggero Leoncavallo.
Season 2019
After the first four seasons entirely dedicated to Verdi (with Falstaff, Aida, Traviata and Macbeth production), season 2019 was dedicated to Mozart. If the choice of the genius of Salzburg would seem to contradict the Italian vocation of the Academy, actually the chosen opera –Le Nozze di Figaro—was written and performed in 1786 with an Italian libretto by the poet Lorenzo da Ponte. In spite of many difficulties, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wanted at all costs to compose his first “Italian opera” and this has been the test bench in Ravenna for five world famous promising conductors.
Season 2018
The fourth edition of the Italian Opera Academy was dedicated to the study of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth and ended with two concerts at the Alighieri Theatre in Ravenna: on August 1st Maestro Riccardo Muti conducted his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra in a selection of pieces from the opera; on August 3rd young conductors alternated on the podium, to compete with the same program and conclude the path that once again has guided students and the public to the heart of Italian opera.
