Time & Perspective Quote by Riccardo Muti

There is an old-world thrill in hearing Riccardo Muti call it "extraordinary" to have time. Conductors are supposed to be masters of time, yet their schedules are famously brutal, their relationship to repertoire often shaped by rehearsal scarcity and institutional pressure. So the first subtext here is relief: a rare pause in the machinery of performance long enough to do something almost radical in classical music - go back to a piece everyone thinks they already know and treat it as unknown again.

Choosing Le nozze di Figaro isn’t incidental. Figaro is Mozart at his most socially charged and structurally intricate: a comedy that runs on class anxiety, erotic bargaining, and moral whiplash, all stitched together by ensembles that behave like clockwork and like chaos at the same time. For a conductor, "discover new things" isn’t quaint humility; it’s a professional declaration that interpretation is never finished. He’s pushing against the museum mindset that turns canonical works into fixed products, where prestige comes from perfection rather than curiosity.

Context matters, too. Muti is a high-authority, tradition-associated figure - the kind of maestro often cast as guardian of the score. This line quietly revises that image. It positions seriousness not as rigidity but as continual re-reading, a discipline of listening. The intent is to remind us that great art doesn’t age into certainty; it stays alive precisely because even experts can be surprised by it, if the world finally gives them time to look.