ARTURO TOSCANINI
Arturo Toscanini was born in the city of Parma, in Italy’s fertile
Po plain, on March 25,1867. He was the oldest of four children and the
only son of Paola (née Montani) and Claudio Toscanini. Both parents
came from middle-class families, but Claudio had the temperament of an
adventurer and had gone off in his youth to fight in Garibaldi’s
forces during Italy’s wars of independence and reunification. Thereafter,
he never managed to settle down seriously to domestic life, and his drinking,
philandering, and general irresponsibility made life difficult for his
wife and children. Arturo entered Parma’s Royal School of Music at
the age of nine and graduated from it at eighteen, with maximum honors
in cello and composition and with a reputation, among local musicians,
not only for his virtually photographic memory and other remarkable talents
but also for his wide-ranging musical interests and passionately held
ideals. The following year, he was engaged as principal cellist and assistant
chorus master of an Italian opera company that was to tour South America,
and one evening, in Rio de Janeiro, the nineteen-year-old musician was
called upon at the last moment to replace the ensemble’s regular
conductor in Aida, which he led by heart. Thus began one of the
most extraordinary careers in the history of musical performance.
On his return to Italy, Toscanini immediately began to acquire experience
by conducting one short season after another in many of the country’s
opera houses. During one of those seasons, at Milan’s Teatro Dal
Verme in 1892, he conducted the world premiere of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci.
Three years later he became what would today be called artistic director
of Turin’s prestigious Teatro Regio, where he conducted – among
many works – the world premiere of Puccini’s La Boheme,
the first Italian production of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung,
the local premier of Tristan und Isolde, and a host of new or recent
symphonic pieces.
In 1898, at the age of thirty-one, he assumed the directorship of Milan’s
Teatro alla Scala, the most important opera ensemble in Italy. He spent
seven of the following ten seasons there (1898-1903, 1906-08), conducting
the first Italian production of Wagner’s Siegfried, Tchaikovsky’s
Eugene Onegin, Strauss’s Salome, Debussy’s
Pelléas et Mélisande, and symphonic works by some
of the most promising talents of his generation, including Debussy, Strauss
and Sibelius. He also introduced Tristan, Puccini’s Tosca,
Charpentier’s Louise, and works by Mascagni, Giordano,Cilea,
Franchetti, and other leading Italian composers of the day to the Milanese
public; initiated a series of revolutionary revivals of the Verdi repertoire;
and undertook many important reforms in the theatre’s artistic and
administrative sectors.
Toscanini quickly established himself as the first Italian conductor of
world-class talent who was as interested in foreign repertoire as in domestic
works, in symphonic music as in opera, in the classics as in the moderns.
He performed Wagner’s music with passion and intellectual rigor –
in Toscanini’s student days Wagner had embodied Europe’s musical
avant-garde – but he performed with equal passion and rigor the works
of many composers whom Wagner had detested, notably Verdi and Brahms.
In the lyric theatre, which had often been held hostage by star singers
and their caprices, Toscanini gradually imposed a system in which solo
voices, chorus, orchestra, stage movement, sets, costumes, and lighting
were all given maximum attention in order to create what Wagner had called
the Gesamtkunstwerk – the complete work of art. At the same time
he began to demand more highly skilled playing from orchestra musicians
than his predecessors had considered necessary. To his way of thinking,
the sense and spirit of a piece of music could not be expressed if the
notes were not played in tune, with their proper rhythmic values, at a
tempo close to the one indicated by the composer, and in correct textural
balance against all the other notes being played at the same time. All
of this was merely a point of departure for achieving something much deeper
and more valuable, but it was nevertheless a sine qua non. To achieve
all of these goals Toscanini fought great battles, and his terrifying
temper became a legend in the musical world. The result, however, is that
most professional musicians from his day to ours – even those who
disagree with his recorded interpretations – are direct beneficiaries
of his lifelong struggle.
Toscanini conducted four substantial seasons in Buenos Aires during the
first decade of the twentieth century – seasons that included the
Argentine premieres of Tristan, Berlioz’s The Damnation
of Faust, Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, Puccini’s Madama
Butterfly and many other works. From 1908 to 1915 he was in effect
principal conductor (together with Mahler, during the first two seasons)
of New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company, with which he led the world
premiere of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West, the American
premiere of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, and important revivals
of works that ranged from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice and Armide
and Weber’s Euryanthe through the best-known mid-and late-nineteenth-century
repertoire, to the most recent works of Giordano, Montemezzi, Wolf-Ferrari,
and Dukas.
During World War I, Toscanini stayed in Italy, conducting only military
bands at the front and special benefit events in the cities. In 1920-21
he took the Scala orchestra on a marathon tour of Italy, The United States,
and Canada,and masterminded the rebirth of his country’s most glorious
opera company, which had been virtually defunct since 1917. In December
1921 he inaugurated the overhauled Scala ensemble’s first season,
and he presided over the house’s fortunes with tremendous success
almost to the end of the decade. This period was in many ways the culmination
of his life as an opera conductor.
Toscanini made his first guest appearance with the New York Philharmonic
in 1926, and by 1930, when he took the ensemble on a history-making European
tour, he had become its principal conductor. Also in 1930, Toscanini became
the first non-German-school conductor to perform at the Bayreuth Festival,
to which he returned in 1931; he canceled a further scheduled return in
1933 because Hitler had come to power in Germany. From then until the
outbreak of the Second World War, Toscanini conducted a circle around
Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy (he had been attacked and hit in the face
by Facist thugs in his own country in 1931 for refusing to play the ruling
party’s official anthem at the start of a concert): He worked occasionally
as guest conductor with Paris’s Orchestre Walter-Straram beginning
in 1932, with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Stockholm Concert Society
Orchestra from 1935 to 1939, and with the Residentie-Orkest in the Hague
in 1937 and 1938. At the Salzburg Festivals of 1935 to 1937 he gave what
proved to be his last performances of complete, staged operas, and in
1938, when he withdrew from Salzburg for political reasons, he helped
to create the new Lucerne Festival by agreeing to conduct concerts in
the Swiss city. But his most celebrated political gesture was his trip
to Palestine, at his own expense, at the end of 1936, to conduct a new
orchestra (later known at the Israel Philharmonic), that was made up largely
of Jewish refugees from Central Europe.
In 1937, a year after his retirement from the New York Philharmonic, the
seventy-year-old Toscanini accepted an offer from the National Broadcasting
Company in New York to conduct a new orchestra made up of musicians of
the highest caliber, for weekly radio broadcast concerts and frequent
recordings. He remained in the United States throughout the Second World
War and returned to Europe only in 1946, to reconsecrate La Scala, which
had been heavily damaged by Allied bombs in 1943. Thereafter he returned
to Europe evey year, but his principal center of activity remained the
NBC Symphony. Toscanini retired for good in 1954, at the age of eighty-seven,
and died at his home in Riverdale (Bronx, New York) on January 16, 1957,
a few weeks before his ninetieth birthday.
Harvey Sachs
Reprinted by kind permission of Mr. Sachs from his book “The Letters
of Arturo Toscanini” published by Alfred A. Knopf
