What Austrian music owes to Italy

Italian conductor Ricardo Muti, who quit the Milan Scala amid controversy, is now at work preparing the 2007 Salzburg Festival. It will be devoted to the music of eighteenth century Naples. In an interview with writer and journalist Leonetta Bantivoglio, Muti talks of the ties between Austrian and Italian music. "Mozart is stages life and the world. He is a human being talking to human beings, but his voice is divine because perfection is divine. There is an Italianness to him that emerges chiefly in his relationship with Lorenzo Da Ponte. ... Our language alone has that unbroken flow that can suddenly change into song. ... Even Schubert, that most Viennese of Viennese, owes much to Italian music."

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