Aging & Wisdom Quote by Ruggiero Ricci

Ricci’s sentence has the offhand bluntness of someone who’s spent a lifetime being judged in microscopic detail and is finally tired of polite myths. He starts by dodging a direct comparison - “easier to say” - then immediately makes one anyway, but on his terms: not nostalgia versus modernity, but style versus sound. That pivot matters. In classical music, reverence for “the old school” can calcify into a kind of cultural religion; Ricci punctures it with a technician’s heresy.

The subtext is a generational audit of what audiences think they’re hearing. He grants the old violinists “good technique,” which is a diplomatic concession: yes, they could play. Then he draws the knife: “they were not tonally as good.” Tone is the intimate part of violin playing, the part that’s hardest to quantify and easiest to mythologize. By privileging tonal quality, Ricci is implicitly crediting modern training, recording-era scrutiny, and changing expectations of sonic polish. Once microphones, high-fidelity recordings, and global competitions enter the picture, “good enough” becomes audible as not good enough.

There’s also a quiet self-portrait here. Ricci was a virtuoso forged in the 20th century’s hyper-professional pipeline, when precision became a baseline and individuality had to live inside it. His comment deflates romanticized talk of “authenticity” by suggesting that some of what we call authenticity is just historical limitation - gut strings, recording constraints, pedagogical gaps - repackaged as character. He’s not attacking the past; he’s refusing to let it win by default.