No maestro was more revered—or more reviled. On the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth, it’s time to give him a fair hearing.
For generations, the Italian maestro was the most electrifying figure in classical music. Why did critics turn against him?Photograph from Popperfoto / Getty
What is the most familiar piece of classical music? The most thoroughly roasted chestnut? A piece so overplayed that it has passed into the automatic schlock-recognition zone of every American? Surely it is the final, galloping section of Rossini’s “William Tell” Overture—the Lone Ranger music, the musical image of righteousness on horseback. The music seems almost a joke. But there was one conductor who rode this piece as if his life, and the lives of his players, depended on it.
I remember my parents calling me out of my bedroom. The year was 1952, so I must have been eight. On our television, a tiny black-and-white screen sunk into a large mahogany console, an old man with a full head of white hair and an elegantly clipped mustache was beating time with his right arm and leading a furious performance of the horse music. I certainly knew the tune (“The Lone Ranger” TV series began running in 1949), but I didn’t know it could sound like this—the skittering string figures played with amazing speed and clean articulation, the entire piece brought off with precision and power, the muscular timpani strokes outlining phrases and asserting a blood-raising pressure under the crescendos. You can easily see this performance right now, exactly as I did, on YouTube: Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony in the televised concert of March 15, 1952. If you listen with good headphones, the sound, though hard-edged, is solid and clear, and the astonishing performance comes through. Toscanini was then two weeks shy of his eighty-fifth birthday.
For many years, Arturo Toscanini was the pinnacle of musical excitement for classical-music lovers in this country—and also for many casual listeners, who enjoyed the sensation of having their pulse rate raised. He was at the center of an American experiment in art and commerce that now scarcely seems credible: late in the Depression, in 1937, RCA, which owned two NBC radio networks, created a virtuoso orchestra especially for him, and kept it going until 1954. The NBC Symphony gave concerts in New York that were broadcast on national radio, and then, starting in 1948, on national television.
RCA hyped Toscanini, and the media responded gratefully, some would say shamelessly: Toscanini was widely profiled and photographed, lionized and domesticated by Life and countless other publications. His NBC years were probably the high-water mark of classical music’s popularity in America. Some of that popularity was doubtless swelled by the excruciating and often condescending music explainers ubiquitous on the radio, in books, in schools, all eager to sell great music to the masses. Still, it was not unusual for earnest middle-class children to struggle with an upright at home, to sing Handel in a school chorus, to play Mendelssohn in the school orchestra. At the time, both amateur and professional musicians, listening to the NBC Symphony broadcasts, did their best to play along.
RCA issued dozens of recordings made by Toscanini and the orchestra (most of them from broadcasts), as well as selected performances made with the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra, with Toscanini’s white face and hands emerging from solid black in Robert Hupka’s mystically glamorous album photographs. Toscanini’s way with music by Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms, Verdi, Wagner, and Debussy could make the work of other conductors seem dawdling, nerveless. He famously stuck to the score, ending arbitrary practices and interpretive excesses. He drove to the climax; lyrical details were suavely caressed but pressed into the onward rush. The sound he produced with any orchestra was lean, transparent, surging, radiant. “Architecture with passion” was what the young pianist Rudolf Serkin heard in a performance of the Brahms Second Symphony. Other celebrated conductors, including Bruno Walter, Pierre Monteux, and, at times, Wilhelm Furtwängler, acknowledged that he was the greatest of conductors—some said “incomparable.” Having played the cello in the first performance of Verdi’s “Otello,” in 1887, Toscanini is also the invaluable link between the nineteenth century, when so much of the operatic repertory was written, and the modern opera house.
In the nineteen-thirties and during the war period, admiration for him went well beyond music. Opera, always central to the culture of Europe, became at that time a matter of nationalist bluster and political maneuvering. After 1931, Toscanini refused to conduct in Italy, resisting Mussolini, who dangled honors and official posts; he was thereafter reviled in the Fascist press. Hitler pleaded with him to honor holy German art and preside over the Wagner rites at the Bayreuth Festival. When Toscanini turned him down, his recordings and broadcasts were banned in Nazi Germany. Instead of going to Bayreuth, he worked in 1936 and 1937 with the newly formed Palestine Orchestra (later the Israel Philharmonic), an ensemble largely composed of Jewish refugees. Toscanini did not make speeches; he stuck to business. But his sentiments were widely known, and he became a lodestar for anti-Fascists. After the war, Isaiah Berlin pronounced him “the most morally dignified and inspiring hero of our time—more than Einstein (to me), more than even the superhuman Winston.”
In recent decades, however, Toscanini’s musical reputation has faded badly. Some of his old fans have shifted their loyalty to the work of other conductors—to Furtwängler, say, whose soulful expressiveness and spontaneity have been held up as musically and emotionally superior to Toscanini’s fiery propulsiveness. In the revisionist view, Toscanini rushed through passages that other conductors would turn into contemplation or mystery or sheer loveliness. He offered a maximum of line, a minimum of texture; he was all athlete, no philosopher. Beethoven and Verdi formed his aesthetic, and he never moved into the twentieth century, ignoring the dazzling rhythmic and harmonic explorations of Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg, Berg.
The critic and composer Virgil Thomson complained of a lack of personal culture in Toscanini, which allegedly resulted in a “streamlining” of the classics. Theodor W. Adorno, the Marxist philosopher and theorist of twelve-tone music, appalled by Toscanini’s radio concerts and his employment by corporate America, tagged him as a proponent and victim of commodity-fetish capitalism. In effect, Adorno said, Toscanini turned every piece into a chestnut. Picking up from Adorno, the music historian Joseph Horowitz, while acknowledging Toscanini’s greatness in “Understanding Toscanini” (1987), ridiculed his temperament and public persona, casting him as the false messiah of the middlebrow music-appreciation racket. Both Adorno and Horowitz indulged in scathing contempt for radio listeners in the Toscanini era. It incensed them that classical music—for a brief period—became part of mass culture.
Why does all this matter? Why does one tempo or another, one way or another of balancing an orchestra or molding a phrase arouse worship or condemnation? Toscanini’s historical importance is beyond debate, but can we still experience the excitement and more, the sense of exaltation that he once produced? The rejection of him after his death represents a shift in musical taste. The question is whether that shift is also a retreat from public art.
In celebration of Toscanini’s hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, the music historian Harvey Sachs has brought out an enormous new biography, “Toscanini: Musician of Conscience” (Liveright). It’s a days-and-nights book, a detailed, sobersided, but very engaging and at times gripping chronicle of music and society, all of it devoted to the unending drive and conscientiousness that made Toscanini’s performances so riveting—and, to some, so repellent. Some of that drive can be heard in a new twenty-CD set, “Toscanini: The Essential Recordings,” issued by Sony Classical, which has taken over the old RCA catalogue. The collection, also timed for the hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, includes symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms; orchestral pieces by Mendelssohn, Berlioz, and Strauss; complete operas by Verdi and Puccini; and the Wagner opera excerpts that Toscanini conducted to such hair-raising effect. Listening again to many of Toscanini’s recordings (including those not in the new collection but easily available from music sites or on YouTube) has been, for me, both a thrilling and an alarming experience. Enthusiasms from decades ago, long folded into the back drawer of memory, came roaring back. Some of the performances, bursting from speakers and headphones, stagger belief.
Consider one of the most familiar yet daunting of all monuments, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Before rehearsing the work in London, in 1939, Toscanini wrote to Ada Mainardi, his longtime mistress and musical-political confidante, “That first movement of the ninth always makes me despair,” and he quoted some lines of Dante’s about the damned passing through the gates of Hell. “Dante and Beethoven! It’s enough to make you quake!” At the beginning of that movement’s recapitulation, Beethoven, returning to the blunt opening bars, splits open the heavens in waves of convulsive sound. In any conductor’s performance, this should be an apocalyptic moment; Toscanini does better. In his 1952 rendering with the NBC Symphony, he uncharacteristically departs from the score. Rather than instructing the kettledrums to play through the passage with continuous rolling thunder, as other conductors do (including Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan), he had the timpani peak at each of the three crescendos in the passage—releasing, all three times, an almost frightening charge of energy, as if the atom were being split again and again. And throughout the passage Toscanini holds to his rapid tempo for the entire movement. Playing with this kind of speed and force, the musicians of the NBC Symphony reach the limits of what human beings are capable of. But what is conveyed by this assault on possibility? Toscanini’s “despair”? Rage? Defiance of what has to be? Defiance of death, then?
The same heartrending stir and upset, the same questions, are produced by the extraordinary recording of the Verdi Requiem from 1951. In the “Dies Irae” section, the subject is most certainly death. The trumpets, summoning the souls to judgment from the corners of the earth, begin to sound, at first quietly and then with greater and greater insistence, and, as the rest of the brass enter, and then the chorus, Toscanini can be heard above the din (just barely) screaming, “Piu forte!” (or perhaps “Tutta forza!”), an enraged old man confronting the ultimate and demanding more of it. But there is no more. We have reached the end of human will, human desire, and fear. “In all my artistic life,” Toscanini told another conductor, “I have never had one moment of complete satisfaction.”
He was born in 1867, in Parma, a small city midway between Bologna and Milan that in the late nineteenth century had five opera houses of one sort or another, and he attended, at the state’s expense, a local conservatory. In 1886, he was serving as chorus master for an Italian opera company on tour in Rio de Janeiro. A Brazilian conductor flopped, and Toscanini, at the age of nineteen, took over a performance of “Aida,” leading the opera from memory. That season, he conducted seventeen other operas with the same company. In his early twenties, he rushed from one small city to another—Brescia, Verona, Turin, Novara, and so on—pulling together ragtag companies with their mixture of amateur and professional musicians, and producing performances the likes of which had never been heard in such places. In 1898, he became the principal conductor at Italy’s premier opera house, La Scala, in Milan, a company that he left (sometimes in disgust) and returned to again and again.
Sachs had fresh access to musical archives in Milan and New York; he has researched opera productions and administrative intrigues from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and made heavy use of Toscanini’s letters (which he edited in 2002) and reminiscences in old age. When Toscanini was young, a night at the opera was an occasion for sinful fun. The lights were on during performances—it was a place of social intercourse. Orchestra players could be lazy, favored singers would decorate their arias with additional high notes and take encores, and audiences responded with ovations and catcalls, and shouted at the singers or at the conductor. New works were produced all the time (as late as the nineteen-twenties, thirty-five to forty per cent of La Scala’s repertory was new), and were received with vociferous approval or disapproval. At La Scala and elsewhere, Toscanini gave twenty-four premières, including of Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” and Puccini’s “La Bohème,” “La Fanciulla del West,” and “Turandot.”
Toscanini’s glasses and batons: The conductor was not above breaking the latter when he was upset with his orchestra.Photograph from Mondadori Portfolio / Getty
Wherever he was, Toscanini did his best to throttle the enjoyable high jinks; or, rather, he killed one kind of pleasure and created another. Any opera worth performing had to be treated not as a collection of arias and choruses but as an organic work, with sets, costumes, staging, and musical direction all supporting a dramatic idea of the piece—a notion then revolutionary. When Toscanini finally brought the La Scala company to Vienna, in 1929, the twenty-one-year-old Herbert von Karajan attended a performance of Verdi’s “Falstaff,” and later recalled, “From the first bar, it was as if I had been struck a blow. I was completely disconcerted by the perfection that had been achieved. The agreement between the music and the stage performance was something totally inconceivable for us.”
“Falstaff” was Toscanini’s favorite opera, but he also revealed the structural integrity and dramatic distinction of the mid-period Verdi works—“Rigoletto,” “Il Trovatore,” “La Traviata”—that were considered tired and old hat when he was young. After Toscanini, people stopped condescending to Verdi. One of the more remarkable reissues in the “Essential Recordings” collection is a 1944 performance of the final act of “Rigoletto,” recorded at a Red Cross fund-raiser held at Madison Square Garden with the combined forces of the NBC Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and a star cast surrounded by eighteen thousand people. On paper, it sounds like a circus. It wasn’t. The strictly disciplined but buoyant and expressive performance culminates in a “storm” scene that must have torn through the roof of the old Garden.
Producing performances like this could be tough on orchestras, and on Toscanini himself. Sachs recounts in great detail Toscanini’s rehearsal methods, which were notorious. He was usually gentle with singers, particularly singers learning a new role, but with orchestras he could be a terror, singling out individuals and sections, breaking batons, ripping his handkerchief, destroying his watch, throwing things, and shouting in his hoarse voice, “Pezzi di somari che siete perdio! Vergogna, matti! Vergogna!” (“What a bunch of dunces you are, by God! Shame on you, you crazy idiots! Shame!”) During a performance at La Scala in 1902, he was so upset by the audience’s shenanigans that he stormed off the podium and bashed his head through a glass door. There is something both comical and impressive about a time in which performance was a life-and-death matter. Sachs reports that the insulted musicians almost always forgave him—they knew he suffered—and many are on record as saying that playing with him was the greatest experience of their lives.
What comes through in Sachs’s long chronicle is the extent of Toscanini’s role, witting and unwitting, in transforming the way that classical music was produced and consumed in the twentieth century. In his seventy years as a performer, he moved opera, as Sachs says, from entertainment to culture. The nineteenth-century conductor—a necessary time beater, presiding over a mixed lot of players—by degrees metamorphosed, in the most talented examples, into a spiritual mentor and charismatic culture god. The mechanical reproduction of music, which became popular with such novelties as a foggy four-minute recording of Caruso singing “Celeste Aida,” from 1902, gave way to complete recordings of symphonies and operas transmitted through every available medium. We are now immersed: the entire recorded history of music lies open, much of it free, to any listener who has the curiosity to discover it. But if Adorno and Horowitz are descriptively correct in asserting that Toscanini became part of advanced consumer patterns in the monopoly phase of late capitalism, and the rest of that Marxist bad news, Toscanini never saw himself in world-historical terms. As a nineteenth-century man charging through the twentieth century, he certainly welcomed stardom and wanted his concerts broadcast in America and Europe. The quintessential performer, he seized on every opportunity to make music under the best conditions.
For years, he was known principally as a man of the theatre, but in 1926 he began conducting the New York Philharmonic, and became its music director in 1929. He was over sixty; he had trained the La Scala musicians in the nineteen-twenties and taken the company on tour as a concert orchestra, but this was the first time that he had an orchestra of his own. Those who heard his work with the Philharmonic speak of a mastery beyond anything they had ever encountered. The “Essential Recordings” collection has a few examples of extreme refinement without any loss of vitality. There is the extraordinary Beethoven’s Seventh, recorded in 1936, a performance that the conductor James Levine considers to be the most perfect orchestral recording he knew of. (It’s certainly more relaxed, with sweeter string tone, than the driving, almost angry Seventh that the NBC Symphony recorded in 1951.) The collection also includes two Rossini overtures with the Philharmonic, “L’Italiani in Algeri” and “Semiramide,” that are breathtakingly nuanced in their shading of color and emphasis. Sachs reports that, when Toscanini took the Philharmonic on tour in 1930, European audiences and critics were astonished by the virtuoso playing in every section, the evenness of stroke, the dynamics seamlessly matched from one phrase to the next.
By 1936, Toscanini had grown tired of presenting every program four times for the Philharmonic’s subscription concerts, and he resigned, returning to Milan and vowing never to be the music director of an orchestra again. That’s when the capitalist miracle occurred. The following year, the head of RCA, David Sarnoff, sent an emissary asking Toscanini to come back and conduct a handpicked ensemble. Like the Hollywood studio bosses, Sarnoff, born in Eastern Europe and with little formal education, became a hard-driving entrepreneur in America. A businessman and an inventor, he was eager to be recognized as a patron of culture. In the event, Toscanini demanded, and got, complete control over repertory and soloists, and the right to approve or veto any recordings that came out of the broadcasts.
Live music was all over the radio in the thirties. NBC had a large staff ensemble that played light classics and dance music and appeared in various shows. In September, 1937, the network turned over auditions for the new orchestra to no less an eminence than Artur Rodzinski, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, who selected the best players from the staff orchestra and added young string and woodwind players from around the country, raiding other orchestras, including his own. He rehearsed the musicians for weeks. Toscanini finally showed up in December, 1937. Samuel Antek, a violinist in the orchestra, recalled how the first rehearsal began:
He was dressed in a severely cut black alpaca jacket, with a high clerical collar, formal striped trousers, and pointed slipperlike shoes. As he stepped up to the podium, by prearranged signal, we all rose like puppets suddenly propelled to life by pent-up tension. . . . He looked around, apparently bewildered by our unexpected action, and gestured a faint greeting with both arms, a mechanical smile lighting his pale face for an instant. Somewhat embarrassed, we sat down again. Then in a rough voice he called out, “Brahms!” He looked at us piercingly for the briefest moment, then raised his arms. In one smashing stroke, the baton came down. A vibrant sound suddenly gushed forth from the tense players like blood from an artery. . . . “So! So! So!” he bellowed. “Cantare! Sostenere!” [“Sing! Sustain!”]
This kind of hero worship goes beyond irony. The NBC Symphony Orchestra, with its ninety-two players, never had the weight of the New York Philharmonic or the rounded, dark, burnished sound of, say, the Berlin Philharmonic. What it had was phenomenal accuracy, drive, and brilliance. It was the ideal instrument for Toscanini’s temperament.
There was a serious problem, however, with the way the orchestra sounded in its early recordings. RCA, asserting pride of place, staged the concerts in 30 Rockefeller Plaza, its corporate headquarters, transforming Studio 8-H—the same 8-H that later became the home of “Saturday Night Live”—into a notional concert hall. Seats were set up for fourteen hundred people, and tickets were given away on a first-come, first-served basis. It was a lovely arrangement, but 8-H, built to produce clarity, rather than resonance and warmth, was never the right venue for classical music. The orchestra performed some concerts in Carnegie Hall, but the early recordings made in 8-H often sound boxy, dry, and flat, even a little coarse, with blaring trumpets and insufficient solidity in the lower strings. This isn’t always a bad thing—the recordings are markedly intimate. The sound doesn’t bloom, but you hear everything (which Toscanini apparently liked). The complete Verdi “Otello,” starring Ramón Vinay, Herva Nelli, and Giuseppe Valdengo, recorded at two 8-H concerts in December, 1947, has been proposed by Levine as “an outstanding candidate for the title of Greatest Opera Recording Ever Made.” Tender and angry, in close-miked, unresonant sound, the performance is shockingly candid, the ultimate musical portrait of betrayal and marital turmoil. But the experience of listening to it, I have found, can’t be repeated more than once in a decade. It’s just too much.
The creation of the NBC Symphony was celebrated at the time as a victory for American culture—the New World coming into its own musically—but Sachs also sees it as a product of Europe’s disintegration in the authoritarian nineteen-thirties. A good portion of the book is devoted to the social and what might be called the geographic structure of musical high life—Toscanini’s restlessness, the endless ocean voyages, the meetings with celebrities, the shuffling of family and mistresses, the frequent retreats to Lago Maggiore for a peace that was beyond his reach. But, throughout the hard work and the periods of respite, the atmosphere in Europe grows menacing.
Back in 1931, in Bologna, Toscanini had been set upon by Fascist thugs on his way to a performance. “They are capable of anything,” he later said on the telephone to Ada Mainardi. (The secret police recorded his calls.) “Promises no longer exist. They don’t remember today what they said yesterday. It’s shameful!” Toscanini’s ultimate choice—exile in the New World—was shared by many others. Reading of such anti-Fascist or Jewish friends as Stefan Zweig, one gets a glimpse of the anguished, hesitant, but finally precipitate abandonment of Europe in the thirties by many people of spirit. In 1939, Toscanini was briefly back in Europe to conduct at the Lucerne Festival. In September, after war broke out, he and his wife scrambled to get out of France on the ocean liner Manhattan, quadrupling up in the staterooms. Hollywood couldn’t have staged it any better. His heart was in Italy, but he was comfortable living in the Riverdale section of New York City, conducting the NBC Symphony until he lost concentration at a concert in April, 1954. He died three years later, just short of his ninetieth birthday.
Adorno was another of Europe’s dispossessed, suffering the breakup of European culture under the assault of Fascism and Nazism. He settled in New York in 1938, around the same time as Toscanini, and he wrote several times about the conductor’s radio broadcasts and recordings, which he took as a sign of further cultural disintegration. Adorno was understandably furious at Toscanini’s indifference to what he considered the necessary direction of music post-Mahler—the movement toward the twelve-tone composition of the Second Viennese School, including the work of Adorno’s friend Alban Berg. (Sachs tells us that Toscanini was enraged after hearing some of Berg’s masterpiece, “Lulu.”) Toscanini, as far as Adorno was concerned, had literally joined what he called “the culture industry.” His performances lacked spontaneity: “There is iron discipline. But precisely iron. The new fetish is the flawlessly functioning, metallically brilliant apparatus as such. . . . The performance sounds like its own phonograph record.”This comes off as witty in a kind of wrathful Marxist way until you hear the sort of broadcast Adorno would have caught in his American exile—and hear it, as you now can, in sound that does some justice to the performance. For a revelation is at hand. A series of early Toscanini performances with the NBC Symphony, recorded in the dead 8-H, have been “restored down to the noise floor of the recording system” by the audio engineer Paul Howard, and are available on YouTube in a process he calls “Toscanini/3D sound.” Howard tells me that he painstakingly removes clicks, hiss, and a cloudy patina of effects from earlier attempts at improvement. The result? A restored Beethoven Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”) from 1939 is very recognizably a performance by the eager young NBC Symphony. The sound is lean, underweight in the lower strings, unreverberant; but individual sections and instruments are clear and beautiful, and the orchestra brings off Toscanini’s approach—sharpened attacks and imperious speed—with breathtaking accuracy and exhilaration. Some “flawlessly functioning fetish”! A relentless old man leads a young American orchestra, and danger is in the air. ♦Wars
No maestro was more revered—or more reviled. On the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth, it’s time to give him a fair hearing.
What is the most familiar piece of classical music? The most thoroughly roasted chestnut? A piece so overplayed that it has passed into the automatic schlock-recognition zone of every American? Surely it is the final, galloping section of Rossini’s “William Tell” Overture—the Lone Ranger music, the musical image of righteousness on horseback. The music seems almost a joke. But there was one conductor who rode this piece as if his life, and the lives of his players, depended on it.
I remember my parents calling me out of my bedroom. The year was 1952, so I must have been eight. On our television, a tiny black-and-white screen sunk into a large mahogany console, an old man with a full head of white hair and an elegantly clipped mustache was beating time with his right arm and leading a furious performance of the horse music. I certainly knew the tune (“The Lone Ranger” TV series began running in 1949), but I didn’t know it could sound like this—the skittering string figures played with amazing speed and clean articulation, the entire piece brought off with precision and power, the muscular timpani strokes outlining phrases and asserting a blood-raising pressure under the crescendos. You can easily see this performance right now, exactly as I did, on YouTube: Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony in the televised concert of March 15, 1952. If you listen with good headphones, the sound, though hard-edged, is solid and clear, and the astonishing performance comes through. Toscanini was then two weeks shy of his eighty-fifth birthday.
For many years, Arturo Toscanini was the pinnacle of musical excitement for classical-music lovers in this country—and also for many casual listeners, who enjoyed the sensation of having their pulse rate raised. He was at the center of an American experiment in art and commerce that now scarcely seems credible: late in the Depression, in 1937, RCA, which owned two NBC radio networks, created a virtuoso orchestra especially for him, and kept it going until 1954. The NBC Symphony gave concerts in New York that were broadcast on national radio, and then, starting in 1948, on national television.
RCA hyped Toscanini, and the media responded gratefully, some would say shamelessly: Toscanini was widely profiled and photographed, lionized and domesticated by Life and countless other publications. His NBC years were probably the high-water mark of classical music’s popularity in America. Some of that popularity was doubtless swelled by the excruciating and often condescending music explainers ubiquitous on the radio, in books, in schools, all eager to sell great music to the masses. Still, it was not unusual for earnest middle-class children to struggle with an upright at home, to sing Handel in a school chorus, to play Mendelssohn in the school orchestra. At the time, both amateur and professional musicians, listening to the NBC Symphony broadcasts, did their best to play along.
RCA issued dozens of recordings made by Toscanini and the orchestra (most of them from broadcasts), as well as selected performances made with the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra, with Toscanini’s white face and hands emerging from solid black in Robert Hupka’s mystically glamorous album photographs. Toscanini’s way with music by Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms, Verdi, Wagner, and Debussy could make the work of other conductors seem dawdling, nerveless. He famously stuck to the score, ending arbitrary practices and interpretive excesses. He drove to the climax; lyrical details were suavely caressed but pressed into the onward rush. The sound he produced with any orchestra was lean, transparent, surging, radiant. “Architecture with passion” was what the young pianist Rudolf Serkin heard in a performance of the Brahms Second Symphony. Other celebrated conductors, including Bruno Walter, Pierre Monteux, and, at times, Wilhelm Furtwängler, acknowledged that he was the greatest of conductors—some said “incomparable.” Having played the cello in the first performance of Verdi’s “Otello,” in 1887, Toscanini is also the invaluable link between the nineteenth century, when so much of the operatic repertory was written, and the modern opera house.
In the nineteen-thirties and during the war period, admiration for him went well beyond music. Opera, always central to the culture of Europe, became at that time a matter of nationalist bluster and political maneuvering. After 1931, Toscanini refused to conduct in Italy, resisting Mussolini, who dangled honors and official posts; he was thereafter reviled in the Fascist press. Hitler pleaded with him to honor holy German art and preside over the Wagner rites at the Bayreuth Festival. When Toscanini turned him down, his recordings and broadcasts were banned in Nazi Germany. Instead of going to Bayreuth, he worked in 1936 and 1937 with the newly formed Palestine Orchestra (later the Israel Philharmonic), an ensemble largely composed of Jewish refugees. Toscanini did not make speeches; he stuck to business. But his sentiments were widely known, and he became a lodestar for anti-Fascists. After the war, Isaiah Berlin pronounced him “the most morally dignified and inspiring hero of our time—more than Einstein (to me), more than even the superhuman Winston.”
In recent decades, however, Toscanini’s musical reputation has faded badly. Some of his old fans have shifted their loyalty to the work of other conductors—to Furtwängler, say, whose soulful expressiveness and spontaneity have been held up as musically and emotionally superior to Toscanini’s fiery propulsiveness. In the revisionist view, Toscanini rushed through passages that other conductors would turn into contemplation or mystery or sheer loveliness. He offered a maximum of line, a minimum of texture; he was all athlete, no philosopher. Beethoven and Verdi formed his aesthetic, and he never moved into the twentieth century, ignoring the dazzling rhythmic and harmonic explorations of Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg, Berg.
The critic and composer Virgil Thomson complained of a lack of personal culture in Toscanini, which allegedly resulted in a “streamlining” of the classics. Theodor W. Adorno, the Marxist philosopher and theorist of twelve-tone music, appalled by Toscanini’s radio concerts and his employment by corporate America, tagged him as a proponent and victim of commodity-fetish capitalism. In effect, Adorno said, Toscanini turned every piece into a chestnut. Picking up from Adorno, the music historian Joseph Horowitz, while acknowledging Toscanini’s greatness in “Understanding Toscanini” (1987), ridiculed his temperament and public persona, casting him as the false messiah of the middlebrow music-appreciation racket. Both Adorno and Horowitz indulged in scathing contempt for radio listeners in the Toscanini era. It incensed them that classical music—for a brief period—became part of mass culture.
Why does all this matter? Why does one tempo or another, one way or another of balancing an orchestra or molding a phrase arouse worship or condemnation? Toscanini’s historical importance is beyond debate, but can we still experience the excitement and more, the sense of exaltation that he once produced? The rejection of him after his death represents a shift in musical taste. The question is whether that shift is also a retreat from public art.
In celebration of Toscanini’s hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, the music historian Harvey Sachs has brought out an enormous new biography, “Toscanini: Musician of Conscience” (Liveright). It’s a days-and-nights book, a detailed, sobersided, but very engaging and at times gripping chronicle of music and society, all of it devoted to the unending drive and conscientiousness that made Toscanini’s performances so riveting—and, to some, so repellent. Some of that drive can be heard in a new twenty-CD set, “Toscanini: The Essential Recordings,” issued by Sony Classical, which has taken over the old RCA catalogue. The collection, also timed for the hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, includes symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms; orchestral pieces by Mendelssohn, Berlioz, and Strauss; complete operas by Verdi and Puccini; and the Wagner opera excerpts that Toscanini conducted to such hair-raising effect. Listening again to many of Toscanini’s recordings (including those not in the new collection but easily available from music sites or on YouTube) has been, for me, both a thrilling and an alarming experience. Enthusiasms from decades ago, long folded into the back drawer of memory, came roaring back. Some of the performances, bursting from speakers and headphones, stagger belief.
Consider one of the most familiar yet daunting of all monuments, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Before rehearsing the work in London, in 1939, Toscanini wrote to Ada Mainardi, his longtime mistress and musical-political confidante, “That first movement of the ninth always makes me despair,” and he quoted some lines of Dante’s about the damned passing through the gates of Hell. “Dante and Beethoven! It’s enough to make you quake!” At the beginning of that movement’s recapitulation, Beethoven, returning to the blunt opening bars, splits open the heavens in waves of convulsive sound. In any conductor’s performance, this should be an apocalyptic moment; Toscanini does better. In his 1952 rendering with the NBC Symphony, he uncharacteristically departs from the score. Rather than instructing the kettledrums to play through the passage with continuous rolling thunder, as other conductors do (including Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan), he had the timpani peak at each of the three crescendos in the passage—releasing, all three times, an almost frightening charge of energy, as if the atom were being split again and again. And throughout the passage Toscanini holds to his rapid tempo for the entire movement. Playing with this kind of speed and force, the musicians of the NBC Symphony reach the limits of what human beings are capable of. But what is conveyed by this assault on possibility? Toscanini’s “despair”? Rage? Defiance of what has to be? Defiance of death, then?
The same heartrending stir and upset, the same questions, are produced by the extraordinary recording of the Verdi Requiem from 1951. In the “Dies Irae” section, the subject is most certainly death. The trumpets, summoning the souls to judgment from the corners of the earth, begin to sound, at first quietly and then with greater and greater insistence, and, as the rest of the brass enter, and then the chorus, Toscanini can be heard above the din (just barely) screaming, “Piu forte!” (or perhaps “Tutta forza!”), an enraged old man confronting the ultimate and demanding more of it. But there is no more. We have reached the end of human will, human desire, and fear. “In all my artistic life,” Toscanini told another conductor, “I have never had one moment of complete satisfaction.”
He was born in 1867, in Parma, a small city midway between Bologna and Milan that in the late nineteenth century had five opera houses of one sort or another, and he attended, at the state’s expense, a local conservatory. In 1886, he was serving as chorus master for an Italian opera company on tour in Rio de Janeiro. A Brazilian conductor flopped, and Toscanini, at the age of nineteen, took over a performance of “Aida,” leading the opera from memory. That season, he conducted seventeen other operas with the same company. In his early twenties, he rushed from one small city to another—Brescia, Verona, Turin, Novara, and so on—pulling together ragtag companies with their mixture of amateur and professional musicians, and producing performances the likes of which had never been heard in such places. In 1898, he became the principal conductor at Italy’s premier opera house, La Scala, in Milan, a company that he left (sometimes in disgust) and returned to again and again.
Sachs had fresh access to musical archives in Milan and New York; he has researched opera productions and administrative intrigues from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and made heavy use of Toscanini’s letters (which he edited in 2002) and reminiscences in old age. When Toscanini was young, a night at the opera was an occasion for sinful fun. The lights were on during performances—it was a place of social intercourse. Orchestra players could be lazy, favored singers would decorate their arias with additional high notes and take encores, and audiences responded with ovations and catcalls, and shouted at the singers or at the conductor. New works were produced all the time (as late as the nineteen-twenties, thirty-five to forty per cent of La Scala’s repertory was new), and were received with vociferous approval or disapproval. At La Scala and elsewhere, Toscanini gave twenty-four premières, including of Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” and Puccini’s “La Bohème,” “La Fanciulla del West,” and “Turandot.”
Toscanini’s glasses and batons: The conductor was not above breaking the latter when he was upset with his orchestra.Photograph from Mondadori Portfolio / Getty
Wherever he was, Toscanini did his best to throttle the enjoyable high jinks; or, rather, he killed one kind of pleasure and created another. Any opera worth performing had to be treated not as a collection of arias and choruses but as an organic work, with sets, costumes, staging, and musical direction all supporting a dramatic idea of the piece—a notion then revolutionary. When Toscanini finally brought the La Scala company to Vienna, in 1929, the twenty-one-year-old Herbert von Karajan attended a performance of Verdi’s “Falstaff,” and later recalled, “From the first bar, it was as if I had been struck a blow. I was completely disconcerted by the perfection that had been achieved. The agreement between the music and the stage performance was something totally inconceivable for us.”
“Falstaff” was Toscanini’s favorite opera, but he also revealed the structural integrity and dramatic distinction of the mid-period Verdi works—“Rigoletto,” “Il Trovatore,” “La Traviata”—that were considered tired and old hat when he was young. After Toscanini, people stopped condescending to Verdi. One of the more remarkable reissues in the “Essential Recordings” collection is a 1944 performance of the final act of “Rigoletto,” recorded at a Red Cross fund-raiser held at Madison Square Garden with the combined forces of the NBC Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and a star cast surrounded by eighteen thousand people. On paper, it sounds like a circus. It wasn’t. The strictly disciplined but buoyant and expressive performance culminates in a “storm” scene that must have torn through the roof of the old Garden.
Producing performances like this could be tough on orchestras, and on Toscanini himself. Sachs recounts in great detail Toscanini’s rehearsal methods, which were notorious. He was usually gentle with singers, particularly singers learning a new role, but with orchestras he could be a terror, singling out individuals and sections, breaking batons, ripping his handkerchief, destroying his watch, throwing things, and shouting in his hoarse voice, “Pezzi di somari che siete perdio! Vergogna, matti! Vergogna!” (“What a bunch of dunces you are, by God! Shame on you, you crazy idiots! Shame!”) During a performance at La Scala in 1902, he was so upset by the audience’s shenanigans that he stormed off the podium and bashed his head through a glass door. There is something both comical and impressive about a time in which performance was a life-and-death matter. Sachs reports that the insulted musicians almost always forgave him—they knew he suffered—and many are on record as saying that playing with him was the greatest experience of their lives.
What comes through in Sachs’s long chronicle is the extent of Toscanini’s role, witting and unwitting, in transforming the way that classical music was produced and consumed in the twentieth century. In his seventy years as a performer, he moved opera, as Sachs says, from entertainment to culture. The nineteenth-century conductor—a necessary time beater, presiding over a mixed lot of players—by degrees metamorphosed, in the most talented examples, into a spiritual mentor and charismatic culture god. The mechanical reproduction of music, which became popular with such novelties as a foggy four-minute recording of Caruso singing “Celeste Aida,” from 1902, gave way to complete recordings of symphonies and operas transmitted through every available medium. We are now immersed: the entire recorded history of music lies open, much of it free, to any listener who has the curiosity to discover it. But if Adorno and Horowitz are descriptively correct in asserting that Toscanini became part of advanced consumer patterns in the monopoly phase of late capitalism, and the rest of that Marxist bad news, Toscanini never saw himself in world-historical terms. As a nineteenth-century man charging through the twentieth century, he certainly welcomed stardom and wanted his concerts broadcast in America and Europe. The quintessential performer, he seized on every opportunity to make music under the best conditions.
For years, he was known principally as a man of the theatre, but in 1926 he began conducting the New York Philharmonic, and became its music director in 1929. He was over sixty; he had trained the La Scala musicians in the nineteen-twenties and taken the company on tour as a concert orchestra, but this was the first time that he had an orchestra of his own. Those who heard his work with the Philharmonic speak of a mastery beyond anything they had ever encountered. The “Essential Recordings” collection has a few examples of extreme refinement without any loss of vitality. There is the extraordinary Beethoven’s Seventh, recorded in 1936, a performance that the conductor James Levine considers to be the most perfect orchestral recording he knew of. (It’s certainly more relaxed, with sweeter string tone, than the driving, almost angry Seventh that the NBC Symphony recorded in 1951.) The collection also includes two Rossini overtures with the Philharmonic, “L’Italiani in Algeri” and “Semiramide,” that are breathtakingly nuanced in their shading of color and emphasis. Sachs reports that, when Toscanini took the Philharmonic on tour in 1930, European audiences and critics were astonished by the virtuoso playing in every section, the evenness of stroke, the dynamics seamlessly matched from one phrase to the next.
By 1936, Toscanini had grown tired of presenting every program four times for the Philharmonic’s subscription concerts, and he resigned, returning to Milan and vowing never to be the music director of an orchestra again. That’s when the capitalist miracle occurred. The following year, the head of RCA, David Sarnoff, sent an emissary asking Toscanini to come back and conduct a handpicked ensemble. Like the Hollywood studio bosses, Sarnoff, born in Eastern Europe and with little formal education, became a hard-driving entrepreneur in America. A businessman and an inventor, he was eager to be recognized as a patron of culture. In the event, Toscanini demanded, and got, complete control over repertory and soloists, and the right to approve or veto any recordings that came out of the broadcasts.
Live music was all over the radio in the thirties. NBC had a large staff ensemble that played light classics and dance music and appeared in various shows. In September, 1937, the network turned over auditions for the new orchestra to no less an eminence than Artur Rodzinski, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, who selected the best players from the staff orchestra and added young string and woodwind players from around the country, raiding other orchestras, including his own. He rehearsed the musicians for weeks. Toscanini finally showed up in December, 1937. Samuel Antek, a violinist in the orchestra, recalled how the first rehearsal began:
He was dressed in a severely cut black alpaca jacket, with a high clerical collar, formal striped trousers, and pointed slipperlike shoes. As he stepped up to the podium, by prearranged signal, we all rose like puppets suddenly propelled to life by pent-up tension. . . . He looked around, apparently bewildered by our unexpected action, and gestured a faint greeting with both arms, a mechanical smile lighting his pale face for an instant. Somewhat embarrassed, we sat down again. Then in a rough voice he called out, “Brahms!” He looked at us piercingly for the briefest moment, then raised his arms. In one smashing stroke, the baton came down. A vibrant sound suddenly gushed forth from the tense players like blood from an artery. . . . “So! So! So!” he bellowed. “Cantare! Sostenere!” [“Sing! Sustain!”]
This kind of hero worship goes beyond irony. The NBC Symphony Orchestra, with its ninety-two players, never had the weight of the New York Philharmonic or the rounded, dark, burnished sound of, say, the Berlin Philharmonic. What it had was phenomenal accuracy, drive, and brilliance. It was the ideal instrument for Toscanini’s temperament.
There was a serious problem, however, with the way the orchestra sounded in its early recordings. RCA, asserting pride of place, staged the concerts in 30 Rockefeller Plaza, its corporate headquarters, transforming Studio 8-H—the same 8-H that later became the home of “Saturday Night Live”—into a notional concert hall. Seats were set up for fourteen hundred people, and tickets were given away on a first-come, first-served basis. It was a lovely arrangement, but 8-H, built to produce clarity, rather than resonance and warmth, was never the right venue for classical music. The orchestra performed some concerts in Carnegie Hall, but the early recordings made in 8-H often sound boxy, dry, and flat, even a little coarse, with blaring trumpets and insufficient solidity in the lower strings. This isn’t always a bad thing—the recordings are markedly intimate. The sound doesn’t bloom, but you hear everything (which Toscanini apparently liked). The complete Verdi “Otello,” starring Ramón Vinay, Herva Nelli, and Giuseppe Valdengo, recorded at two 8-H concerts in December, 1947, has been proposed by Levine as “an outstanding candidate for the title of Greatest Opera Recording Ever Made.” Tender and angry, in close-miked, unresonant sound, the performance is shockingly candid, the ultimate musical portrait of betrayal and marital turmoil. But the experience of listening to it, I have found, can’t be repeated more than once in a decade. It’s just too much.
The creation of the NBC Symphony was celebrated at the time as a victory for American culture—the New World coming into its own musically—but Sachs also sees it as a product of Europe’s disintegration in the authoritarian nineteen-thirties. A good portion of the book is devoted to the social and what might be called the geographic structure of musical high life—Toscanini’s restlessness, the endless ocean voyages, the meetings with celebrities, the shuffling of family and mistresses, the frequent retreats to Lago Maggiore for a peace that was beyond his reach. But, throughout the hard work and the periods of respite, the atmosphere in Europe grows menacing.
Back in 1931, in Bologna, Toscanini had been set upon by Fascist thugs on his way to a performance. “They are capable of anything,” he later said on the telephone to Ada Mainardi. (The secret police recorded his calls.) “Promises no longer exist. They don’t remember today what they said yesterday. It’s shameful!” Toscanini’s ultimate choice—exile in the New World—was shared by many others. Reading of such anti-Fascist or Jewish friends as Stefan Zweig, one gets a glimpse of the anguished, hesitant, but finally precipitate abandonment of Europe in the thirties by many people of spirit. In 1939, Toscanini was briefly back in Europe to conduct at the Lucerne Festival. In September, after war broke out, he and his wife scrambled to get out of France on the ocean liner Manhattan, quadrupling up in the staterooms. Hollywood couldn’t have staged it any better. His heart was in Italy, but he was comfortable living in the Riverdale section of New York City, conducting the NBC Symphony until he lost concentration at a concert in April, 1954. He died three years later, just short of his ninetieth birthday.
Adorno was another of Europe’s dispossessed, suffering the breakup of European culture under the assault of Fascism and Nazism. He settled in New York in 1938, around the same time as Toscanini, and he wrote several times about the conductor’s radio broadcasts and recordings, which he took as a sign of further cultural disintegration. Adorno was understandably furious at Toscanini’s indifference to what he considered the necessary direction of music post-Mahler—the movement toward the twelve-tone composition of the Second Viennese School, including the work of Adorno’s friend Alban Berg. (Sachs tells us that Toscanini was enraged after hearing some of Berg’s masterpiece, “Lulu.”) Toscanini, as far as Adorno was concerned, had literally joined what he called “the culture industry.” His performances lacked spontaneity: “There is iron discipline. But precisely iron. The new fetish is the flawlessly functioning, metallically brilliant apparatus as such. . . . The performance sounds like its own phonograph record.”
This comes off as witty in a kind of wrathful Marxist way until you hear the sort of broadcast Adorno would have caught in his American exile—and hear it, as you now can, in sound that does some justice to the performance. For a revelation is at hand. A series of early Toscanini performances with the NBC Symphony, recorded in the dead 8-H, have been “restored down to the noise floor of the recording system” by the audio engineer Paul Howard, and are available on YouTube in a process he calls “Toscanini/3D sound.” Howard tells me that he painstakingly removes clicks, hiss, and a cloudy patina of effects from earlier attempts at improvement. The result? A restored Beethoven Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”) from 1939 is very recognizably a performance by the eager young NBC Symphony. The sound is lean, underweight in the lower strings, unreverberant; but individual sections and instruments are clear and beautiful, and the orchestra brings off Toscanini’s approach—sharpened attacks and imperious speed—with breathtaking accuracy and exhilaration. Some “flawlessly functioning fetish”! A relentless old man leads a young American orchestra, and danger is in the air. ♦
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