After weeks of a theatrical power struggle that grabbed the opera world’s attention, what appears to be the final curtain has fallen on Riccardo Muti’s career as music director of La Scala, the famed opera house in Milan. The renowned conductor has resigned, citing an impossibly hostile environment.
In a letter tendering his resignation Saturday, Muti, who is widely considered one of the most talented but tempestuous personalities in Italian music, said he hit an impasse with musicians and other La Scala workers.
“The hostility manifested in such a coarse way by persons with whom I have worked for almost 20 years makes it really impossible to carry on with a relationship of collaboration, which ought to be based on harmony and trust,” Muti said in a statement issued by La Scala. “It was an obligatory choice.”
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La Scala has not named a replacement for Muti, 63, who resigned two days before he was to begin rehearsals with the theater’s orchestra, the Filarmonica Della Scala, for concerts scheduled to begin Thursday.
The first notes of discord were voiced in February over the firing of Carlo Fontana, the theater’s general manager, who had a difficult relationship with the conductor.
Angry orchestra members, stagehands and other workers began staging strikes that forced the cancellation of the first performance of each production and of the entire run of a new double bill.
Last month, more than 700 members of the theater’s 800-member staff demanded that Muti step down. After 19 years at the helm of Milan’s prestigious opera house, he was unable to withstand the tide of discontent prompted by the changes in the theater’s management. Union officials complained that Muti pulled the strings in replacing Fontana with an ally, Mauro Meli, who became director of the theater division in 2003.
The orchestra also sought Meli’s departure.
“We don’t want Meli because he was Muti’s page,” Sandro Malatesta, a longtime trumpeter in the orchestra, said Sunday. Meli said he has no plans to leave.
In Milan, where the house is a huge source of civic pride, the news of Muti’s resignation was met with dismay.
“We had hoped to avert this, and we had lobbied the maestro to talk to the orchestra,” said Gino Vezzini, vice president of the Amici del Loggione, an association of La Scala opera buffs.
The dissonance set in only a few months after the landmark reopening of the theater Dec. 7 after a three-year restoration.
Stefano Zecchi, Milan’s culture commissioner, said, “We had been hoping to arrive at a compromise before” the celebration of Mozart’s 250th birthday during next year’s season.
“And no one is better at conducting Mozart than Muti.
“But if a conductor doesn’t have the trust of the orchestra,” he said, “it is impossible for him to express himself.”