The Legendary Maestro Arturo Toscanini

In this day and age we rarely see the type of dictatorial and colourful conductor on the podium such as the legendary Arturo Toscanini.  He was quite simply, one in a million; a true trailblazer who demanded nothing but the best from his musicians and from himself.

Legend has it he retired from conducting in the early 50s when he simply couldn't remember the entire score he was conducting from memory, something he seemingly had done for years.  He simply put his baton down, walked away and never took it up ever again.  Although he lived on for a time after that incident, passing away in 1957, his time was done and the world moved on to other, often less interesting orchestral and opera conductors.

While Toscanini has never been out of the public eye even in death, he is enjoying a bit of a revival of sorts at the moment, with a couple of nice box sets newly available.  More on those later, but first a little about the man himself.

He was born in Parma, Italy in March of 1867, and at the age of 19 graduated from the Parma Conservatory as a cellist.  The following year, 1886, the 20-year-old cellist was asked to take the baton for Verdi's Aida, and by the end of the tour he had led 26 performances of 11 different operas, all from memory.  He conducted many opera premieres, including the first Italian performances of Wagner's Gotterdammerung, Tristan and Isolde and Die Walkure, as well as the premiere of Puccini's La Boheme.  He was the principal conductor at La Scala, Milan, from 1900 to 1908 and first appeared at New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1915, where he conducted the premiere of Puccini's La fanciulla del West.

In 1937 Toscanini was invited by NBC to conduct a series of broadcast concerts in the United States with the newly-formed NBC Symphony Orchestra, specifically created for the purpose.  Toscanini also conducted a series of well-remembered concerts with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London from 1935 to 1939, many of which are newly released on a 5-disc box set from EMI Classics a couple of months ago.  The recordings show their age at times, but still hold up remarkably well today.

Many of his celebrated Wagner recordings are newly available this month on a RCA Victor 5-disc set at a very attractive price of just $ 30.00, and this material will be of great interest to those who love Wagner, and especially Wagner conducted by Toscanini.  Titled appropriately enough, Toscanini conducts Wagner, the set includes selections from Tristan, Die Meistersinger, Die Walkure, Parsifal and many others, with performances by soprano Helen Traubel and tenor Lauritz Melchoir among the gems  found inside the set.  The set will be released at the end of the month, and both it and the EMI Classics set mentioned earlier are available through my website at www.finemusic.ca, or emailing me directly at music@vaxxine.com.

As great a conductor as he was and revered for his opera recordings as he was, they only tell part of the story.  His opposition to Fascism in his native Italy and Nazism in Germany was legendary.  He refused to play the Giovanezza, a Fascist anthem in 1931 for example, and in 1938-39 conducted without fee at a festival in Lucerne, Switzerland, where the orchestra was made up of musicians who had fled Nazi persecution.

Toscanini was also a collector of all things musical, and descendants of the conductor auctioned off a lot of his cherished possessions last fall in London at Sothebys.  Included were his 1910 Steinway piano Model D, which was in good condition and still playable the auction house noted, along with several batons, a desk set, leather music case and more than 30 autographed scores of his own compositions.  Of particular interest were letters from Verdi, Wagner, Strauss and other composers of the day, as well as a handwritten score of a Mendelssohn overture and a self-caricature by Enrico Caruso.  The entire collection was expected to bring in an estimated 1.6 million, and not everyone seemed happy about that.  Some felt they should have been donated to the New York Public Library's Toscanini archive and I am inclined to agree, but what can you do?  It is believed to be the last substantial property expected to come directly from Toscanini.

Finally, no essay on the great conductor would be complete with some of his quotable quotes and stories, many of which include women, another of his famous passions.  He once said:  "I kissed my first woman and smoked my first cigarette on the same day; I have never had time for tobacco since."  But the famous story of an encounter with a certain unnamed soprano during rehearsals years ago showed nothing, not even a beautiful woman, could deter him from making music as he wanted it presented.  The story is vividly recounted in John Boyden's book Stick to the Music:  Clearly unable to understand The Maestro's instructions, the singer who also happened to be rather well endowed we're told, was victim of Toscanini's fury before too long.  Dashing onto the stage, he seized her by her largest assets and yelled "If only these were brains."  Certainly not proper decorum now or even then, but that was the measure of the man, it seems.

Still, his humility was evident in an interview when he said:  "I am no genius.  I have created nothing.  I play the music of other men.  I am just a musician."  Perhaps, but what a memorable musician!

April 13th, 2013.