James Bone - [RICCARDO Muti describes the moment->37379] when the audience in Rome rose as one to join in an encore of Verdi's Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves as a "magic moment".

For a conductor who served as musical director at La Scala in Milan for 19 years and now leads the acclaimed Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and who has just won two Grammys and the $US1 million Birgit Nilsson Prize, that is high praise indeed.

The moment came in the third act of Verdi's Nabucco at the Teatro dell'Opera in Rome on March 12. But it was not simply a passage of sublime music; it was a national catharsis in the maestro's native Italy and one that is likely to leave a lasting mark on the arts in a country racked with self-doubt. Ever-enthusiastic, and restored to glowing good health after a fall from the podium in Chicago last month and subsequent heart surgery to insert a pacemaker, Muti explains the remarkable turn of events that made headlines across Italy and changed the cultural policy of the Berlusconi government.

"We had 1300 people in the audience singing with the chorus," the maestro says with astonishment. "What struck me was this: 80 per cent of the people knew the words. That says a lot about opera in Italy."

Muti, 69, had ignored his doctors' warnings and agreed to conduct Nabucco to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Italian unification. The opera recounts the plight of the Jews in captivity in Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon as they pine for their lost homeland. Written in 1842, Verdi's work is often credited with helping to arouse Italy's national consciousness. The famous Va pensiero, also known as The Chorus of Hebrew Slaves, became an anthem for Italian patriots in the years leading up to unification in 1861. Recent polls suggest that many Italians wish Va pensiero were their national anthem.

Muti took to the podium at the Rome opera as the country lags behind other leading European countries in growth; Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi stands accused of "bunga-bunga" parties with 33 women, some of them prostitutes, and his government has slashed funding for culture so much that walls in Pompeii are falling down.

Before the performance of Nabucco, Gianni Alemanno, the mayor of Rome, set the scene with a short speech criticising the government's cuts to arts funding, which threaten the opera house - this despite Alemanno being a member of the ruling party and a former Berlusconi minister. His remarks found an echo in the audience, as Muti would discover.

"There was a big ovation in the audience. Then we started the opera," Muti recalls. "The opera went on well, but when we arrived at Va pensiero I immediately felt the atmosphere became tense in the audience. There is something you cannot describe, but you feel. Before, there was a silence of people listening to the opera. At the moment people realised Va pensiero was starting, the silence was filled with fervour," he says.

He could feel the audience's visceral reaction to the Hebrew slaves' lament: "Oh mia patria, si bella e perduta!" (Oh my country, so beautiful and lost!)

"They were thinking: everything that made our country great in the past is lost."

As Muti brought the chorus to an end, cries immediately erupted: "Bis!" (encore). Audience members started shouting "Viva Italia!" and "Viva Verdi!" People in the four tiers of private boxes began throwing papers with patriotic messages, including some demanding "Muti, Senator for Life".

Muti was hesitant to grant the encore, although he had once done so for Va pensiero at La Scala in 1986. "The opera should go from beginning to end," he says. "I did not want to do just an encore. It must have a special meaning."

However, the audience had awoken his national pride. In a dramatic gesture the maestro pivoted on the podium and faced the audience.

"I said, 'Nabucco on March 9, 1842, was the opera [that] pushed the Italians to start the revolution against the Austrians in the cause of freedom and independence. I hope that celebrating the 150th anniversary of the unity of Italy, Nabucco will not be tonight the funeral march of the culture."

He invited the audience to join the chorus in song. "I saw groups of people standing. The entire audience was standing. And the chorus was standing. It was a magic moment in the theatre."

Muti has been critical of Italian politicians whom, he believes, do not have the cultural education to understand what they are cutting. He says the crisis has got worse under Berlusconi. "In the past few years the situation has gone much more rapidly in the direction of disaster," he says.

Giulio Tremonti, the Treasury Minister, has been blamed for the cuts and is tipped as the likeliest successor if the Italian Prime Minister is felled by his imminent underage prostitution trial.

Two days after the performance of Nabucco, Muti says, Tremonti came to visit him. Muti describes him as "very cultivated".

"He came and we discussed. After an hour he gave me his word that he will solve the culture problem and give the necessary money for the culture . . . I think he is going to solve the problem with the theatres first," Muti says.

"The fact that he came here meant, I think, he had already decided. It's not like, as some people said, that I waved the magic wand."

Tremonti summed up their meeting by adapting Julius Caesar, with the words "Veni, vidi, capii": "I came, I saw, I understood."

Four nights after the Nabucco performance with its impromptu "Bis" by the audience, Muti conducted the opera on the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Italian nation for a house packed with virtually the whole of the country's political elite. He saw Berlusconi when the Prime Minister came backstage for a meeting with the stagehands union. The men have known each other since Berlusconi was a businessman in Milan and Muti was director at La Scala, so Muti felt no compunction about giving him what-for.

"I heard him saying, 'I will see what I can do.' I said, 'Mr Prime Minister, it's time to say, 'I will do' not 'I will see what I can do,' " Muti recounts. "He smiled at me in a positive way."

Muti recognises that Italy has a long tradition of heavy state subsidies for the arts. As the director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra he knows how American institutions thrive on private support. But he says that the problem is the tax law in Italy, which does not allow deductions for donations to arts organisations in the way that US tax law does.

"I think there is an obligation of the state to care for the education and culture of the nation. It should not be left in private hands," he argues. "What I do not understand is why in Italy it's not possible, like in the US, to have people who can give a lot of money to culture and deduct it from taxes. That is the only solution: to have the state and the private people."

The Times