Riccardo Muti Addresses the Audience at Symphony Center

The past 20 months have been almost unbearable for performing artists. Like his 2011 speech to the audience at Rome Opera’s production of Verdi’s Nabucco (At the Brink, Alex Ross, The New Yorker), Muti, in the video below, reflects on what art and culture mean to civilized society. The impossibly brief but quietly, incisively passionate remarks to the Chicago audience — who came to hear the Chicago Symphony for the first time in almost two years — cut to the quick.

"You are not here tonight because you didn't know how to spend your evening. You are here tonight because you need music."

Veramente, maestro,