Edited by Harvey Sachs,
Knopf $35.00
(528p)
ISBN 0-375-40405-8
Publishers
Weekly Review
When Sachs wrote the standard biography of the great conductor (Toscanini) 20 years ago, he said that Toscanini's letters were "relatively few and often uninformative. Years later Sachs unearthed hundreds of communications from Toscanini held by members of his family, private collectors and official archives. This collection, meticulously edited and spanning Toscanini's entire working life-from a letter of apology for an infraction at music school in Parma when he was 18 years old to the last feeble scratchings of a very old man in 1954-helps fill out a picture of this formidable personality in his very own words. That is particularly valuable as Toscanini (1867-1957) left no memoir, shunned interviews and was notoriously private for so public a figure. While everything that became familiar about him is here on extravagant display (e.g., his perfectionism, his ill temper), the impression that emerges above all from these pages is one of enormous vitality. A player in political events of the day, his stern anti-Facist stance put him at odds with many fellow musicians and ultimately exiled him from Bayreuth, Salzburg and eventually his beloved Italy, rules by what he called "the great Delinquent (Mussolini). He was also sexually voracious, and some of the most remarkable letters here are his passionate ones to Ada Mainardi, wife of a celebrated cellist, whom he pursued avidly through his early 70s, when she was half his age (and she was only one of countless liaisons). It goes without saying that as an observer of the musical scene between 1890 and 1950, the man who actually conducted the premier of La Boheme has remarkable riches to offer. This will be catnip to music lovers.
Forecast: Toscanini
has never lost his hold on the public imagination. Wide review attention,
as well as the sensational nature of some of the material here, should
insure sales above what such a volume might normally inspire.
The New York Review of
Books
November 7, 2002
Music, Maestro, Please!
By Michael
Kimmelman
The Letters of Arturo Toscanini
compiled,
edited, and translated from the Italian by Harvey Sachs
Knopf, 468
pp., $35.00
Arturo Toscanini: The NBC
Years
by Mortimer
H. Frank
Amadeus, 358
pp., $29.95
1.
"My God, what a life!" Arturo Toscanini wrote in 1936. "And to think that many people envy me! They see nothing but the exterior, which glitters in appearance, but a person's interior, soul, heart–what unknown, unexplored things they are!!!"
He was sixty-nine then, still on the verge of a long career leading the NBC Symphony. What a life, indeed. His fame belongs to another age, when classical music was not so remote from popular entertainment. Twice on the cover of Time magazine–inconceivable for an orchestra conductor today –Toscanini inspired a veneration in the press that mass-market magazines now lavish only on television or movie stars and pop musicians. "The greatest musical interpreter who ever lived," a critic wrote in the New York Herald Tribune in the 1930s.
The hyperbole was accompanied by an inevitable backlash, most interestingly, although somewhat eccentrically, from the philosopher Theodor Adorno and also from Virgil Thomson. Both heard him perform in New York and for different reasons disliked what they regarded as his mechanical perfection. Critics from later generations then came to know Toscanini through recordings and film and television appearances converted to videotapes, and they sometimes crudely extrapolated from what Adorno and Thomson thought. They blamed Toscanini for, among other things, embalming the classical repertory and, by virtue of his enormous success, establishing an economic model for the mass-marketing and commercialization of classical performers, which in turn precipitated a decline of serious musical culture in America. Toscanini became, like Picasso, the symbol and root of all things.
His alleged virtues–fanatical dedication, unprecedented standards of accuracy, utter commitment to canonical composers like Beethoven, Wagner, and Verdi, and perfectionist demands on orchestral players–became vices, depending on which side of the debate one was listening to. The argument was bound up with the myths surrounding his personality: he was seen from afar as the epitome of the egocentric artist–a description that his letters, now compiled, edited, and translated by Harvey Sachs, both confirm and undermine, since they make him seem more human and appealing.
The letters, many of which Sachs didn't even know existed when in 1978 he was writing what remains the standard Toscanini biography,[1] are immensely enjoyable to read and an exceptional record of a man and an era. Toscanini was not a stylish writer–he was often the reverse–but in his correspondence he was passionate, sometimes comically juvenile, often seething with rage, misanthropic, not intellectually sophisticated but widely curious, heroically principled about certain big issues, and wholly unprincipled when it came to issues like marital fidelity.
You sense him playing a role, the Great Maestro. Life seems to have been a Puccini opera for Toscanini, in which he absorbed something of Cavaradossi, something of Mim": he saw himself as a hot-tempered lover, the last good man, a martyr–long-suffering, uncompromising. His ego clearly thrived on excess. Everything that happened to Toscanini and everyone important who crossed his path had to be either sublime or contemptible. Wagner was a "genius," Furtwängler was a "clown," Stokowski a "gangster" and a "charlatan." Sachs jokes in his introduction that Toscanini would probably be on Prozac today; but I suspect he needed to whip himself up into a frenzy in order to be productive for as long as he was and to make the kind of music he did.
That's how he courted women, too. The connection between sex and music is a leitmotif of his letters. "Music has the same effect on me that you have," he writes to a lover. "What you have given [me] comes from another sphere. It's like music." His tendency to create melodrama can be tiresome (I am referring now both to what you hear on some of his recordings as well as to what you read in the letters), but this, I suppose, also had much to do with his spectacular magnetism and energy.
"I have a nasty character, which makes me suffer a lot and makes others suffer," he also writes, typically self-dramatizing, although that description is not entirely fair. If he could be, as the letters show, merciless about people he considered fakes, cowards, or opportunists, musicians he didn't respect or who he thought didn't respect music enough, and politicians he despised, his generosity was extreme, too. As Sachs writes (his notes to the letters are exemplary), Toscanini left standing instructions with his wife to assist financially any member of the La Scala orchestra who came to her, no questions asked. More famously, in 1936 he paid his own way to fly to Palestine to conduct the inaugural concerts of an orchestra of Jewish refugees from Central Europe that became the Israel Philharmonic, an act that puts in perspective the conventional, offhand anti-Semitism in some letters, which seems akin to the jokes he makes about Germans or Italians. (After hearing Bruno Walter's rehearsal of the second-act love scene in Tristan, he turned to the stage director Margarete Wallmann and said, "If they were Italians, they would already have seven children; but they're Germans, so they're still talking.")
Toscanini was an egomaniac, but he could also write to a lover in 1938, "I don't know why, but this morning I looked at myself in the mirror, after I don't know how many months, and I looked old, ugly, and unwell." Theatrically depressive, relishing his misery, he enjoyed moaning to correspondents about his children, to whom he was, clearly, utterly devoted:
Ah, this eternal gnawing, this nightmare that never leaves me.... I'm a real wretch. I inherited from my mother the unhappiness that oppressed her all her life.
He passed this depressive trait on, he believed, to his daughter Wanda, who became engaged to Vladimir Horowitz:
Horowitz has asked to marry Wanda. What an idea–a foreigner, and of a different religion!! What should I do? Continue to suffer! My children certainly don't fill my life with joy!!
About Italian politics he was even more apoplectic. Like other bourgeois Italians, he supported Mussolini in 1919, sharing his anti-monarchic, anti-clerical views, but by 1923 had begun to change his mind. When the director of the Milan Conservatory, a friend, was fired by Mussolini's minister of education and jumped off a roof, Toscanini wrote to the ministry: "This suicide will weigh upon your consciences forever." He complained to Mussolini when another professor was fired from the conservatory for protesting the ministry's handling of the suicide. That letter was signed "with unchangeable devotion and affection."
In 1931, however, having repeatedly antagonized the Fascists by refusing to play their national hymn before concerts, he was assaulted by Fascist hooligans. This was a national scandal. Toscanini said he would not conduct in Italy until Mussolini was ousted. From then on he became an icon of anti-fascism. He scorned other musicians who continued to perform in Germany after 1933. Thomas Beecham, simply for defending Furtwängler, became "that nazi-sympathizer." Strauss, whose music Toscanini much admired, was obviously beneath contempt for cooperating with the Nazi regime.
When Victor Emmanuele III declared himself emperor of conquered Ethiopia, Toscanini wrote: "Cursed Rome. Mussolini, the Emperor-King, and the Pope. Pigs, all of them." To a lover who remained in Italy and traveled to Berlin, he wrote in 1941,
you are too poisoned by the atmos- phere that surrounds you, you are all living now too much amid shame and dishonor, without showing any sign of rebellion, to be able to value people like me, who have remained and will remain above the mud, not to give it a worse name, that is drowning the Italians!!!
And he wrote in 1938:
I've never been and will never be involved in politics; that is, I became involved only once, in '19, and for Mussolini and I repented.... I've never taken part in Societies, either political or artistic. I've always been a loner. I've always believed only an individual can be a gentleman.... Everyone ought to express his own opinion honestly and courageously–then dictators, criminals, wouldn't last so long.
Shame (about having first embraced Mussolini, perhaps, certainly shame for his beloved Italy) seems to be behind much of Toscanini's ardor, a shame that evaporated when he turned to the task of seducing women, which in the letters is as great an obsession. About sex Toscanini was tireless; he had no gift for writing love letters, but he wrote literally thousands. (The artist Kiki Smith tells me that her mother, the actress and singer Jane Lawrence Smith, received several although she had never even met him. A student of a mistress of his, she sang for Toscanini over the telephone once and at his request sent him a photograph of herself, whereupon he began to write to her.)
"He cast his nets wide," his grandson, Walfredo, said. Cesira Ferrani, Lotte Lehmann, Lucrezia Bori, Rosina Storchio (with whom he had a son who died at sixteen), Geraldine Farrar (her ultimatum to choose between herself and Carla, his wife, hastened his departure from the Met in 1915), Herva Nelli, Alma Gluck–one could make up a Who's Who of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sopranos from the women with whom he had affairs. He often pursued more than one at a time, if not physically then by mail. His wife intercepted some of the letters but gave up asking him about them after a while. Their marriage, as it emerges through his correspondence, remains mysterious, but he writes that it was largely sexless, and his philandering must have been privately humiliating for her.
During the early 1980s Sachs first learned of several love letters: pornographic notes to Elsa Kurzbauer, the wife of a composer and pianist, Riccardo Pick-Mangiagalli (that is, until Pick-Mangiagalli learned of the affair and divorced Elsa). In one characteristic letter Toscanini writes (in broken English) to Kurzbauer that she "put on fire my blood which is stormful into my veins.... I am dying and lusting for every part nook–crevice–hole–holy hole of your lovely person." Kurzbauer, after the affair, befriended Carla; this did not stop Toscanini from occasionally propositioning her.
In 1995, Sachs learned of more amorous correspondence coming up at auction in Berlin: a trove of letters and telegrams mostly from the 1930s (more than 240,000 words), written to Ada Mainardi, an occasional pianist and the wife of a prominent Italian cellist, Enrico Mainardi. Ada Mainardi was thirty years younger than Toscanini. They met during the 1920s but their affair evidently began in 1933, when he was sixty-six and a towering personality in the music world.
"I decided to restrict the ravings to a few choice examples," Sachs writes in his introduction. Toscanini's letters to Mainardi still take up more than two hundred pages, the heart of the book. They are intermittently, embarrassingly, obscene. Toscanini pesters Mainardi about sending clippings of her pubic hair ("tiny flowers") and a handkerchief (his euphemism is "holy shroud") stained with her menstrual blood. "And the little red handkerchief?" he writes. "Since I can't quench my thirst directly at the delightful fount, I'm hoping for the surrogate. Don't forget."
The letters are also full of childish plots at subterfuge. (He was often this way with his lovers: to Rosina Storchio he wrote, "Send telegrams to poste restante at Valle di Cadore, to Mr. Icinio Artù-Rostan.") How often Toscanini and Mainardi actually saw each other is unclear since she lived in Milan and Berlin while he was mostly elsewhere. Much of their relationship consisted of his speculating about their getting together. He was either receiving or dashing off love notes, sometimes at the very instant he left the stage, as if he were channeling the overflow of his tremendous energy from the performance to the affair.
Toscanini writes to Mainardi about many other matters: politics, art, the weather, New York, aging, sightseeing, the NBC orchestra, his children. He tells her about suddenly discovering, when he was seventy-one, how to play a trill at the end of the andante in a Brandenburg concerto. "You can't imagine my joy at having discovered that I learn something every day," he exults. He laments his marriage at a point when Mainardi seems to think of leaving her own husband. (Perhaps Enrico had a lover, too. They never divorced. Before she died in 1979, Ada passed along Toscanini's letters to a woman named Sela Sommer-Mainardi, whom Sachs identifies as Enrico's companion in later years.)
"I'm not religious, but I believe!!" Toscanini tells Mainardi in the letter:
I have my strange superstitions. I had one father, one mother, they were there when I first saw the light of day. I've always thought that the companion I chose in life, like my father and mother, should never be replaced by any other woman. I realized immediately, after a few years, that I had made a mistake in my choice; the fault was entirely mine.
In another letter he adds:
I've been a good, honest, but unfaithful husband. C[arla] has never understood me, nor has she ever tried to improve, but she has always been good, honest, and faithful. In a life lived together, that's not everything.
Toscanini would be appalled that his love letters have been published. At one point he complains to Mainardi about a musicologist, Carlo Gatti, who was planning to write about Verdi's sex life. "These poor great men aren't left alone even when they're in their graves!" he tells her. "For pity's sake, [writers should] stop short at the bedroom threshold." But in the very same letter he recounts gossip he heard as a young man about Verdi's enjoying cunnilingus ("a certain kind of kiss"). He still has "an almost fetishistic love" for Verdi, he insists.
One turns pages wanting to learn what happens to the relationship with Mainardi. In 1940, he writes bitterly,
Shame!!! If my last letters didn't speak to your heart, it means that God, in creating your body sterile, also wanted your soul to be sterile.... I believe, in fact I'm sure, that we won't meet ever again during the few years of life left to me, but if the opposite were to happen I'm not the one who will have to blush!
In 1946, after Toscanini has returned triumphantly to Italy to perform at La Scala, he writes again, this time to "my dear friend of bygone times." He complains,
You didn't find a way of coming to greet me, at least as a friend!...I never heard anything about you during these long years of war.... If you want to give me your news, you will give me pleasure. In my heart there is nothing but goodness and simpatia for you.
She seems never to have replied.
2.
Toscanini owes his enduring fame above all to mechanical reproduction. Perhaps Hans von Bülow or Hans Richter would loom as large in our imagination had they lived into the age of recordings. Toscanini was wary of the new technology of recording for much of his life ("my aversion to this type of work is so great," he writes as late as 1930), and he made most of his records only during his last years, as conductor of the NBC Symphony, when he was already in his seventies. The letters show him frequently dissatisfied with the results. Contemporary accounts suggest his strongest, most consistent period as a musician may have been while he was conductor at La Scala, and as music director of the New York Philharmonic and at Salzburg during the Twenties and early Thirties. So to judge him from his later recordings may be unfair.
Neither recordings nor films can substitute for the real thing. Much of Toscanini's reputation derived from his charisma on the podium. Players in his orchestras described him as creating stress, as exhausting to play for, but a preternatural leader. His baton technique could be demonstrative (see the 1948 film of Toscanini conducting Beethoven's Ninth, for example) but his movements were generally sharp, specific, and elegant (as one can see from his 1949 film conducting Verdi).[2] "Almost all the conductors of the past stood absolutely still," said the English conductor Adrian Boult, who was old enough to have seen Richter conduct. Toscanini conveyed expression partly through the tautness of his body and the intensity of the gaze he directed at the musicians. Television hastened the era of Leonard Bernstein, who accustomed people to conductors conducting the audience, which Toscanini did not do.
Toscanini was born in 1867, while Rossini was still alive. Verdi was finishing Don Carlos and Wagner was finishing Meistersinger; Brahms was thirty- four; Puccini and Debussy were not yet ten. Linked with Furtwängler by critics who unthinkingly presume them to be contemporaries, Toscanini was actually a generation older (likewise with Klemperer and Stokowski). He belonged to the generation of Gustav Mahler. When Toscanini made his professional conducting debut in 1886, Furtwängler was five months old.
When he grew up, opera and orchestra audiences still expected to hear new music, as audiences for popular music do today. Throughout the early 1880s, when Toscanini played cello in the orchestra at the Teatro Regio in Turin, the repertory included not a single opera more than fifty years old. Toscanini led the world premières of I Pagliacci, La Bohème, La Fanciulla del West, and Turandot (by the end of his life he had qualms about Puccini's taste, however). He also conducted the first Italian productions of Wagner's Siegfried and G"tterdämmerung and of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. Stravinsky once said the turning point of his career was Toscanini's performance of his Petrushka in 1915. At the Met, Toscanini conducted the American première of Boris Godunov. At the New York Philharmonic he performed Kodály, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Morton Gould, and Samuel Barber.
Toscanini could never see the virtues of Schoenberg or Mahler, but many musicians at the time also failed to see them. In 1905, he wrote in a letter to Enrico Polo, a friend from his conservatory days, that while reading through Mahler's Fifth Symphony,
My initial joy and curiosity gradually waned, and by the end they were transformed into sad, very sad hilarity.
No, dear Enrico, believe me, Mahler is not a genuine artist.
On the other hand, he was ahead of other conductors in admiring Debussy, a composer "of whose very name I was barely aware," he told Pietro Sormani, an assistant conductor at La Scala, also in 1905. "His art overthrows everything that has been done up to now."
Toscanini's contributions to modernizing Italian theater standards are easy to forget because an earlier time is hard to imagine. He installed the first orchestra pit at La Scala in 1907; the orchestra previously played at the main-floor level. He darkened the house during performances. He made audiences refrain from talking, eating, playing cards, and wandering around. The situation at La Scala when he arrived was hardly changed from what in 1824 Stendhal described in Life of Rossini as people "perpetually coming and going all evening," using the theater "as a general rendez-vous."[3]
Toscanini's greatest campaign was for players to stick to the score, a self-evident task, you might think, but orchestras, singers, and conductors were notoriously sloppy in Italy before the turn of the century, as his letters repeatedly lament. Toscanini's detractors saw his preaching of fidelity to the text as an excuse for his keeping music on a leash and for playing fast. His late recordings, when he was already in his eighties, do sound occasionally metronomic and brusque. But generalizations about Toscanini's views on tempi are liable to be contradicted by other recordings and by his own words. He chastised the conductor Henry Wood in a letter in 1937 for playing the Scherzo of Beethoven's Ninth at a exceptionally swift speed (equal on the metronome to 138 beats per minute): "It's all very well not to stick strictly to the letter," he writes, "but at 138 you go completely off the rails!"
In any case, the issue was never speed for its own sake, but elasticity and drive. As Mortimer Frank writes, with only some exaggeration, in his fine, meticulous survey of Toscanini's NBC years,
Toscanini's tempos, rather than being unusually fast, were simply unorthodox in that they did not conform to typical parameters. In this regard he was no different from other conductors of his time, especially Wilhelm Furtwängler, who is often thought to be Toscanini's interpretive opposite.
Listening to the recordings, you hear Toscanini, far from being mechanical, changing his mind repeatedly about the same composition. Frank, who has listened to virtually everything available by Toscanini on record and film–something few people have done–points out how Toscanini's 1951 telecast and his studio recording of Brahms's First Symphony, "though but a few days apart," differ from each other, as they do from his recordings in the 1930s and 1940s. He was accused of literalism and pedantry but, as Frank shows, he made cuts to scores, doubled voices, and rearranged orchestrations when he thought it was useful. In his recording of Schumann's Second Symphony, you hear the change he made in the trumpet part for the coda of the first movement as well as a trumpet flourish he added to the last movement in order to fill out a thin texture.
Frank also cites a rehearsal during which Toscanini admonished an NBC player for not playing "piano," i.e., softly, to which the man protested that the music said "forte." "What?" said Toscanini. "Forte? Forte?... What means forte?...Is a thousand fortes–all kinds of fortes. Sometimes a forte is a pia-a-a-no, piano is a forte." Every thinking player knows exactly what he meant.
Far from unbending, and well aware of the value of theater, Toscanini could forgive a singer whose stage presence made up for weaknesses in her voice. "Nor does Sedelmayer make me forget Pasini," he writes in a letter in 1896:
She has a better voice than the latter, but she lacks her grace, her flirtatiousness and the natural verve that's necessary for bringing to life a character like Musetta.
In his performances he strove for drama, for constant propulsion even in slow music, and for sustained inner voices and layered textures. One hears these inner voices and clear textures when Toscanini conducts, and they are what make him seem so modern. The acoustics of Studio 8H, where the NBC orchestra played, were infamously dry, but that suited his desire for a secco sonority. He wanted little vibrato in the strings, crisp timpani (he told Karl Glassman, the NBC timpanist, to use hard sticks), and he gave prominence to winds and brass.
If this sounds familiar today, part of the explanation may be found in a letter in which he praises the performance of the Virtuosi di Roma at Town Hall in New York in November 1950 ("a group of magnificent Italian musicians who play early music," he writes). Like the well-known I Musici, I Virtuosi was participating in what became by the 1960s and 1970s the period instrument movement, with its celebration of textual fidelity, its generally brisk tempi, conspicuous winds and brass, and smaller numbers of strings with reduced vibrato.
Toscanini was prescient in this respect and others; he was also exasperating, inspiring, endlessly striving and dissatisfied. His large, cranky humanity comes alive throughout his letters, as it does in his best recordings. "The antidote to my perfidy is to fling onto paper all that's ugly, the worst of my ego," he writes.
I tried to achieve the maximum, and I couldn't do it, and I still can't do it today–which is why neither your dear words of praise and enthusiasm nor the audience's applause, not to mention exaggerated newspaper articles, can ever free me from the discontent and the torment that I have in me eternally!"
Notes
[1] Harvey Sachs, Toscanini (J.B. Lippincott, 1978).
[2] RCA has issued various videocassettes and laserdiscs of NBC broadcasts. For more about the videos see Mortimer Frank's appendix in Arturo Toscanini: The NBC Years, pp. 285ff; also, see Sachs's chapter called "Watching Toscanini" in his Reflections on Toscanini (Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), pp. 148ff.
[3] Stendhal, Life of Rossini, translated by Richard N. Coe (Criterion, 1957).
From reviews
of THE LETTERS OF ARTURO TOSCANINI,
compiled,
edited, and translated by Harvey Sachs
The Wall Street Journal, New York (Jamie James): "Mr. Sachs was the obvious choice to edit the growing body of Toscanini correspondence, and this book is the fruit of his labors. It is an impressive contribution to the field of 20th-century classical-music studies, edited with scru-pulous care and wide-ranging erudition". Toscanini's candid, sometimes gleeful, descriptions of his [amorous] ardor" give a human dimension to a man who was admired to the point of being revered during his lifetime. Yet the principal pleasure of reading Toscanini's letters is the intimate, first-hand view it affords of the North Atlantic music culture in the final days of its direct, personal connection with the great composers of the Romantic era". [The book is] a mighty contribution to the source literature of modern music.
BBC Music Magazine, London (Max Loppert): "Harvey Sachs's edition of Arturo Toscanini's letters, wisely introduced, carefully presented and finely annotated, is one of the most absorbing books of its kind that I have read in years. Sachs is the author of a 1978 biography of the conductor that remains a monument of erudition, judicious judgment and aptly focused sympathy for the subject in hand". The Toscanini depicted in his own words emerges a figure of near-tragic grandeur, part Dionysus, part Apollo; in fiction he would require a Thomas Mann to do him justice, tormented as he was by tempests of rage, by unrealizable artistic goals and drives and by (as he saw it) his incorrigible inadequacy in making relationships". he could be staggeringly honest, cruelly self-critical. A lament for Îmy unpleasant personality' and the pain it caused others runs through the collection like a leitmotif. In truth, the salacious aspects of the collection are no more remarkable than all the other insights into Toscanini here provided. His cultural range is revealed as infinitely wider than generally recognized; references to his involvements with poetry, art, philosophy and, of course, politics are constant. Comments on other musicians are never less than incisive, and often drily witty. Musical aperçus abound". This is, in sum, a splendid achievement, and a timely one. In recent years Toscanini, whose nonpareil recreative genius was stamped with (in David Cairns's fine phrase) Îexceptional feeling for large-scale musical architecture" for the singing line and the wide-spanned arch of melody', has in the writings of Joseph Horowitz and Norman Lebrecht been caricatured as an artistically barren, even malign figure, even a mon-ster. It was past time to reclaim the other, the real Toscanini, warts; and greatness; and all, and Sachs's collections will help us all do so.
Opera News, New York (John W. Freeman): "Contrary to the received image of Toscanini as a man of action, simple and primary in his musical motivation, he was not only well-read but an expressive writer". Anyone tracing the fortunes of La Scala, the Met, New York Phil-harmonic, Bayreuth and Salzburg, as well as sundry other cities and institutions, will find plenty about artists, administrators, problems and performances. Toscanini was an acute ob-server of his colleagues at work. Beyond the light these letters shed on his personality and working methods, they unfold a fascinating era when the emergent Maestro was a pioneer in orchestra building and theater organization; arts ill understood and chaotically practiced in the world as he found it.
The Economist, London (unsigned): "The letters read well in English, and there are many an-notations and footnotes. As their editor, Harvey Sachs, alerts us, more material is waiting to emerge. But we have here plenty enough already to reveal Toscanini as an artist full of doubts and questions; and as someone also of considerable perception in emotional and psy-chological matters. He had enormous pride, Mr Sachs tells us, but also a strong distaste for anything that smacked of servility or opportunism.
The Globe and Mail, Toronto (Lawrie Cherniack): ""Harvey Sachs, his great biographer; and compiler, translator and editor of this fascinating book". has unearthed thousands of hitherto unknown letters from Toscanini to a number of people, and has assembled many of those letters in this large, well-designed, beautifully translated and utterly absorbing book. In them, Toscanini reveals a lyrical side which was only hinted at by his tremendous interest in literature and painting; and a sexual side the explicitness of which is relatively shocking. And they greatly expand what was already known about his music thoughts". [They] provide a picture of a great man that shows all his qualities, complete with warts. Although [he was] continuously unfaithful to his wife", the letters reveal a very caring and loving man. There is hardly a love letter that does not sparkle with insights into music or politics. There is hardly a letter about music or politics that does not provide insight into his life. Sachs's translations are lively, lyrical and sensuous". Sachs's editing is as meticulous as his biography and other writings about Toscanini have been. His notes after almost every letter provide the details we need to understand the context of the letter. With the notes, the book is almost an autobiography". The great man comes alive in this book, just as his music comes alive in his recordings. This book is a gem.
The Independent,
London (Douglas Kennedy): "if this wonderfully readable collection
of his letters proves anything, it's that the passion he brought to the
podium was mirrored by a similar offstage intensity. As can be gathered,
The Letters of Arturo Toscanini are hugely entertaining; because,
like any wildly opinionated individual, aesthetic positions spewed forth
from him with scatter-gun intensity". Throughout this fascinating
compendium, you see a man caught between his deeply entrenched amour-propre,
and the realisation that he could also be preposterously difficult".
This is a constantly compelling volume. It is pieced together with great
narrative clarity, and with substantial footnotes, by Toscanini's biogra-pher,
Harvey Sachs. And by the end of the book, you begin to sense that, for
Toscanini, all life (public and private) was a performance; all moments
of self-doubt had to be tempered by the next rehearsal, the next concert,
the next political argument, the next liaison interdit.
The Plain Dealer, Cleveland (Donald Rosenberg): ""a treasure trove that helps round out the portrait of a conductor of uncompromising standards and often elusive personality". Virtu-ally every page of the new book tells us something new about Toscanini. Much is surprising and even astonishing. In the end, these letters are crucial to our understanding of a man whose complex personal life affected his art deeply. Toscanini never gave an interview, so his letters are the only true entry points into his opinions and feelings, which is to say his mind and his heart". Music lovers will savor the references to immortal works and musicians, as well as telling observations about tempo, repertoire, orchestral players and operatic production". Sachs' meticulous annotations clarify the people, situations and musical works Toscanini mentions". the letters are required reading for anyone who wants to know how a towering master ticks.
The Times Literary Supplement, London (Patrick Carnegy): "The collection as a whole gives a fair conspectus of his life from 1885, when he was a seventeen-year-old student at the Royal School of Music in Parma, right through to 1956, the year before his death just short of his ninetieth birthday. On the podium, he blazed with authority and conviction. But in private, Toscanini was often racked by despair that he was falling short of his ideals, and by despair for humanity in general.
Publishers Weekly, USA (unsigned): "This collection, meticulously edited and spanning Toscanini's entire working life" helps fill out a picture of this formidable personality in his very own words. That is particularly valuable as Toscanini (1867-1957) left no memoir, shunned interviews and was notoriously private for so public a figure. While everything that became familiar about him is here on extravagant display (e.g., his perfectionism, his ill tem-per), the impression that emerges above all from these pages is one of enormous vitality". This will be catnip to music lovers.
Kirkus Reveiws, USA (unsigned): "A rich and vivid collection of the great conductor's corre-spondence. Music historian Sachs (Rubinstein, 1995, etc.) learned of these letters after pub-lishing his definitive biography (Toscanini, 1978), and while they contain no startling revela-tions, they give us a much better understanding of a man who famously refused all interviews and wrote no memoirs.
Library Journal, USA (Larry Lipkis): "The author of a biography of Toscanini", Sachs has now compiled and translated this valuable collection of the" letters of the great maestro". Sachs provides helpful commentary that places the letters in their proper context". Carefully researched and edited, this collection will greatly advance the cause of Toscanini scholarship and entertain lay readers interested in knowing more about the man and his times. Recommended for all collections.
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (Mark Kanny): "Toscanini's letters are especially important because he never gave a media interview". ÎThe Letters' lets us hear his own words at far greater length than ever before". The early letters provide some flavor of Italian operatic life at the end of the 19th century. Throughout the book, there are notes to family and friends, fa-mous musicians and other historical figures". The hundreds of letters to his principal lovers of the 1920s and '30s, who were musicians, mix comments about music, poetry and other arts with amorous prose of sometimes explicitly erotic appeal. These are highly personal docu-ments never intended for publication, but they add [a] dimension to our understanding of the man.
International Record Review, UK (Christopher Breunig): "[This is] a portrait which, for me certainly, has more presence than the many past biographies and commentaries provide. And in a way, it brings alive the period itself". I found this a fascinating collection and even felt a strange kind of affection developing for the man". Sachs has divided the correspondence chronologically into seven chapters, from 1885 to 1956, with a coded heading to each entry; when and where written, to whom, and where the original is now lodged. Much better than footnote references, short explanatory paragraphs follow where necessary, which provide continuity.
The State, Columbia, South Carolina (William W. Starr): "The discovery of hundreds of the conductor's letters, assembled from a variety of sources, offers us rich insights that affirm some beliefs about Toscanini and refute others. The notion that he was a provincial, for in-stance, is given the lie in reading through these letters with their numerous literary and his-torical references". the letters will enable readers to discover a larger personality than we have known, even through Sachs' splendid biography.
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Mortimer Frank's
Arturo Toscanini: The NBC Years details Toscanini's magnificent and heroic
17 years (1937; 1954) conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra
was created for him when he was 70, and he stayed at its helm into his
87th year.
The archival
broadcast recordings documented and reassessed in this lively account comprise
the most complete recorded legacy of Toscanini's orchestral conducting
career. But they are also something more, for they provide ample evidence
that Toscanini's work before an audience was often more compelling than
his efforts in the recording studio. In all, Mortimer Frank's sympathetic
yet honest work adds much to what is known about Toscanini's years at NBC
and in so doing corrects misconceptions about the period and the man.
The concerts
and broadcasts were immensely popular; for generations Toscanini's name
became synonymous with conducting. His legendary art and feisty personality
also engendered controversy that has yet to subside, but this account takes
on the challengers, accepting neither hero worship nor criticism that ignores
the evidence.
For Toscanini's
fans, partisans and critics alike, Toscanini: The NBC Years is a magnificent
resource, the first complete compilation of the maestro's broadcast achievements;with
season-by-season analysis, repertoire lists, videography and discography,
including non-NBC recordings and unreleased recordings, rare photos of
Toscanini during his NBC years, and a detailed portrait of the great man
and his musicianship at close range. The volume is a resounding testimony
to Toscanini's art and spirit.
"Toscanini's
passionate devotion was to music first; other things came next, including
self, authority, the love of women, and whatever else made up his individual
humanity. The primacy of music and the rule of conscience menat absolute
respect for the musical work... In his own assuming words, his task was
"to come as close as possible to expressing the composer's ideas. He put
on no misplaced modesty of manner, but he was humble when in the face of
the text. He sought out its minutest details; he coached and complelled
the performaers to see and observe them; his role was to reassemble them
into a coherent whole;the composer's, not his.
-Jacques Barzun,
from the foreword
Mortimer Frank served for many years as the curator of the Toscanini acrchive at Wave Hill, the maestro's New York homefrom 1941 to 1945. In that capacity he organized symposiumsdevoted to the conductor and was a consultant for the television broadcast and subsequent video Toscanini: The Maestro. A longtime contributing editor toFanfare, Mortimer Frank has written on music and literature for Opera News, and many other periodicals. He has served as historical recordings critic for National Public Radio and currently teaches at the Julliard School of Music in New York City.
