In the past
years there have been a few biographies of musicians that shed special insight
into the life and art of these iconic musical figures – Richard Osborne’s
sympathetic portrayal of conductor Herbert von Karajan, Kevin Bazzana’s
magisterial Wondrous Strange: The Life
and Art of Glenn Gould, as well as Harvey Sachs’ Rubinstein: A Life, the story of pianist Arthur Rubinstein.
Sach’s latest
book, Toscanini – Musician of Conscience
(Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017) – is a magnificent, copiously
researched, well-written, and comprehensive overview of the great conductor’s
storied life and musical career. The present volume, weighing in at 923 pages,
supersedes the author’s previous biography of Toscanini, mainly because of
large number of testimonies by Toscanini family members, colleagues and
friends, fifteen hundred of his letters that came to light in the 1990’s, as
well as conversations between Toscanini and visiting friends and colleagues,
secretly recorded by son Walter in the conductor’s house in Riverdale, New
York. The result is a book that highlights not only the life of a great
musician, but a glimpse into the musical life of Europe, South America, and the
United States during the turbulent times of the first half of the 20th
century.
Toscanini’s
father, Claudio, was a patriot – just as his son would later turn out to be –
who was part of Garibaldi’s Sicilian expedition in 1860. In Sach’s words, Claudio would turn out to be
unreliable “as husband, father, and breadwinner.” His philandering ways seemed
to have been inherited by his talented son, but more about that later.
Arturo Toscanini
received his musical training at Parma’s Regia
Scuola di Musica (Royal School of Music), a school whose grandiose title is
not matched by its physical locale – a deconsecrated Carmelite convent whose
rooms “usually stank, and bedbugs were common.” In spite of the less than
luxurious conditions and the absence of immediate family, Toscanini loved
conservatory life, and his musical talents showed themselves early on.
According to the author, “Toscanini always remembered his student days as the
happiest period in his life”. At the beginning of his second year at the
conservatory, he was told that the cello was to be his instrument, even though
he would have preferred to learn the violin. One interesting fact shows how
much performance practice has changed within the last century, because when
Toscanini started cello lessons, cellos were not equipped with end pins, and
cellists would grip the instrument between their knees, something that cellists
specializing in Baroque performance would do today.
After
graduation, Toscanini became a freelance orchestral cellist, and thereby landed
himself in the situation of his unexpected conducting debut in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil. The story is too well known to merit repeating. Suffice it to say that
Toscanini’s conducting career took off after standing in as a last minute
replacement for the scheduled conductor, who had been shouted off the podium by
an irate audience. His conducting of Aida
was a great success, and he remained conductor for the travelling opera company
for the remainder of the tour.
On November 4th,
1886, Toscanini made his professional Italian conducting debut with Catalani’s Edmea, one of many operas, regularly
performed at the time, which was to fade into obscurity. Throughout the book,
we find names of operas performed, successfully at the time, that are totally
unknown today. Immediately he was recognized as a major conducting talent.
Toscanini moved to Milan at the beginning of La Scala’s 1886-87 season - the highlight being the world premiere
of Verdi’s Otello, his first opera in
sixteen years. He won the position as second cello in the Scala orchestra, mainly in order to observe how the 73-year-old
Verdi would prepare the production. For the rest of his life, the conductor
would refer to those Otello
rehearsals and performances as “one of his greatest learning experience.” At
the end of the season, Toscanini began to work as in itinerant conductor for
the next eight years, conducting in Genoa (where he stepped in to conduct the
world premiere of Franchetti’s Cristoforo
Colombo, again to great success, even though the opera is again a mere
historical footnote today), Rome, Palermo, Pisa, Ravenna (where the local
critic predicted that Toscanini was “predestined to occupy the conducting chair
at La Scala), and Turin, where he was
appointed maestro concertatore e
direttore d’orchestra in 1895.
Turin
represented an important chapter in Toscanini’s career. At the time, most
Italian theatres, including La Scala,
had the orchestra playing at ground-floor level, which does not work for the
more heavily scored works of Verdi and Wagner. Under Toscanini, Turin’s theatre
witnessed the construction of its first orchestra pit, an important chapter in
the evolution of opera theatres. Toscanini inaugurated his first season with
Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, probably
the most complex of the Ring operas. One of the performances was heard by
Arrigo Boito, who was hugely impressed by what he heard and saw. This began a
long friendship between conductor and composer, “that would have far-reaching
consequences for both men.” Boito returned to Turin for Toscanini’s performance
of Falstaff, of which he was the
librettist for Verdi, and approved of the young conductor’s interpretation of
the complex score. Perhaps even more importantly, Toscanini conducted the
premiere of Puccini’s La Bohème, at
first to lukewarm response, but subsequently to ever-growing popularity and
success. It was also in Turin that the conductor gave his first full-length
symphony concert. It wasn’t long before Toscanini’s talent became too big for
Turin, and Boito, who had been named vice-president of La Scala’s governing board, wanted the conductor, at the tender age
of thirty-one, to be artistic director of Italy’s most prestigious opera
theatres.
Sachs documents
the evolution, as well as the ups and downs, of the history of the great opera
house, as well as the intrigue and political machinations behind Toscanini’s
nomination as conductor of the house. Sachs devotes many pages documenting the
conductors’ years at La Scala.
Toscanini’s international career really began after his tenure at La Scala. The bulk of the biography
details the rise of Toscanini as international artist and star conductor – his
years at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, his second tenure at La Scala after World War One, music
directorship of the New York Philharmonic, his musical life between the two
world wars, and finally, and perhaps, most well known to contemporary music
lovers, his association with the NBC Symphony Orchestra.
Other than
Toscanini’s life, one of the interesting aspects of this volume is his
relationship with his contemporary musicians.
Verdi was
already a well-established composer when Toscanini began his career, and even
if the aged composer had heard positive reports about the young musician from
many quarters, it couldn’t be said that they had a close friendship. Toscanini
did visit Verdi on two occasions, the second one shortly before the composer’s
death in 1901. The conductor did have an uneasy friendship with Puccini. Part
of the tension between conductor and composer had to do with Toscanini’s close
friendship with Alfredo Catalani, known today almost solely for his opera La Wally. In Sach’s words, Toscanini
felt that Catalani, who died at thirty-nine, “never reached his full
professional and artistic stride.” Sachs adds that Toscanini, “was convinced
that Catalani was more gifted, especially as a melodist, than Puccini and their
contemporaries, but he also knew that Puccini had learned his musical materials
more skillfully and to choose more attractive subjects and libretti.”
Yet there is no
denying that Toscanini recognized Puccini as an important composer, and Puccini
always knew that under Toscanini, his creations would be in excellent hands. Puccini
entrusted Toscanini with the world premiere of his La Fanciulla del West at the Metropolitan Opera, and of course
Toscanini conducted the composer’s unfinished Turandot, even though the conductor personally found the latter
opera difficult to love. One of the two’s periodic falling out involved
Puccini’s triple bill Trittico, which
the conductor felt was unworthy of the composer’s talents.
Toscanini also
recognized the genius of Claude Debussy, and had conducted many of the
composer’s orchestral works, and conducted the successful Italian premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande, although it seems
inconceivable that the opera was sung in Italian. The composer wrote to Toscanini,
“I put Pelléas’s fate in your hands,
sure as I am that I could not wish for more loyal or more capable ones. For
this reason as well I would have liked to work on it with you; it is a joy that
one does not easily come across along the path of our art” - high praise indeed
coming from the creator of the work.
Toscanini also
conducted Busoni’s Berceuse Elégiaque,
Rachmaninoff’s The Isle of the Dead,
and excerpts from Stravinsky’s Petrushka.
Toscanini conducted Busoni’s work frequently throughout his career, but his
single performance of The Isle of the
Dead would be his first and last experience with Rachmaninoff’s music, even
though he genuinely admired the Russian composer as a great pianist and
musician. Vladimir Horowitz, Toscanini’s son-in-law, always regretted not
having performed the Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto – his signature piece
- with the conductor. According to Horowitz, Toscanini was uncomfortable with
Rachmaninoff’s gushing romanticism. Toscanini also disliked the playing (which
I find surprising) or the ultra-modern compositions (which I don’t) of Arthur
Schnabel. Perhaps he saw Schnabel as a competitor for his role as high priest
of music?
The author of
the present volume also sheds light on the presumed rivalry between Toscanini
and Gustav Mahler. According to Sachs, “[t]he fable of Toscanini’s forcing
Mahler to leave the Metropolitan is precisely that – a fable – and it was
largely constructed by Alma.” Although Mahler was only forty-eight at the time,
he already knew that – due to his heart disease – he would not be able to
physically take on the role of principal conductor or general manager of a
major opera house. The year before Toscanini’s arrival, Mahler only conducted
twenty-six performances of five different operas, hardly a heavy workload
compared to what he was doing in Vienna. Sachs quotes Julian Carr, one of
Mahler’s biographers, who writes that Mahler’s departure from the Metropolitan
Opera “was due neither to the new Italian regime nor (another legend) to hostile
critics. He went, as so often before, because he saw a more attractive post.”
Toscanini and Mahler were aware of each other’s talents and reputation, and
each held the other in high esteem.
I find it ironic
that Toscanini only conducted Mozart’s Don
Giovanni for one season in South America, because to list the conductor’s
many “conquests” would make a list longer than Don Juan in his famous
“Catalogue Aria.” Women who shared a bed with the maestro included (of course)
opera singers, wives of musical colleagues, as well as various female admirers
who bowed to the conductor’s charms. Sachs writes that by today’s standards,
Toscanini would probably have been labeled a sexual predator. Indeed,
Toscanini’s philandering ways were a great source of pain for his wife and
family. According to Sachs, some of the letters Toscanini sent to his many
lovers throughout the years bordered on the pornographic. Although Toscanini
felt a great antipathy toward the Catholic Church, he seriously frowned upon
divorce, and was somehow able to rationalize his womanizing as separate from
being married for life.
In addition to
Toscanini’s musical integrity, I believe that we can admire him unreservedly
for his opposition to any form of tyranny. Although (briefly) an early admirer
of Mussolini, who initially branded himself as a socialist, Toscanini quickly
saw the dictator for what he was, and took a stand against Italy’s descend into
the darkness of totalitarianism. As
early as 1922, Toscanini forbade the La
Scala orchestra to play Giovinezza,
the Fascist anthem. When the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra (today’s Israel
Philharmonic) was founded by Bronislaw Huberman to give a musical home to the
Jews displaced from European orchestras and opera houses, Toscanini volunteered
his services and conducted the orchestra’s first concerts. Toscanini antipathy
towards Mussolini put him in dangerous situations within Italy – his telephone
calls were wiretapped, and his letters opened. At one point, Mussolini
confiscated his passport, and it was only because of his high profile and the
intervention of NBC that he was able to leave Italy before hostilities broke
out.
That said, it
tells us something of Toscanini’s sense of fairness that he did not join in the
chorus of protest to prevent Wilhelm Furtwängler, whose wartime record
continues to be a matter for debate, from performing in the United States.
In these nine
hundred-plus pages, Harvey Sachs vividly re-creates the musical environment of
the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When Toscanini
was growing up, music, opera especially, was probably more entertainment than
culture. This was particularly true in Italy, where every moderate size town
had an opera house. People clamored for the newest operas, and revival of older
operas was relatively rare. Today, even the world’s largest opera houses would
have perhaps one or two world premieres, if that, per season. In the last years
of the 19th century, we witnessed the evolution of opera from
entertainment to high culture.
It has often
been said that Toscanini memorized all his scores – something that influenced
the subsequent generations of podium titans – because of his poor eyesight. I
believe that for Toscanini, memorizing a score was not a matter of rote, but
part of a process of internalizing the music before he could let it come out in
his gestures. As Sachs shows in his book, Toscanini was always studying before
a performance, always looking for new discoveries between the notes, even with
works that he knew intimately.
In the early
20th century, because of advances in electronic media, radio and then
television gradually played more of an important role in competing for our
hours for leisure. We should remember that when Toscanini was growing up,
Brahms was still alive and active, and Verdi had not yet composed his final
masterpieces. For someone whose formative years were steeped in the 19th
century, Toscanini was surprisingly receptive and opened towards using
electronic media to disseminate art. His years as conductor of the NBC Symphony
Orchestra were significant in that radio and television made classical music
available to millions of listeners who would otherwise have no opportunity to
be anywhere near a major orchestra. Of course, this significant exposure also
firmly planted the name of Arturo Toscanini in the consciousness of millions of
music lovers. Those early broadcasts, with unbelievably crude sounds by today’s
standards, laid the foundation for today’s hugely popular simulcasts of operas
on television and in movie theatres.
One fact that
surprised me was how varied Toscanini’s programmes were during his NBC years.
Of course there were the standard symphonic works we associate him with, but
there were also, surprisingly, works by composers like Castelnuono-Tedesco, Roy
Harris, Shostakovich, Henry F. Gilbert, Kent Kennan, Charles Tomlinson Griffes,
Ferde Grofé, Kurt Atterberg, George Gershwin and Anatoly Liadov, just to name a
few. His concerts include such diverse bedfellows as Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and Essay for Orchestra, Ravel’s La Valse, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7,
Kabalevsky’s Symphony No. 2 and Gershwin’s An
American in Paris and Piano Concerto
in F. In his years with the New York Philharmonic and the NBC Symphony
Orchestra, Toscanini was diligent in seeking out worthy works by American
composers.
The impression I
got from reading this volume is that Toscanini in his NBC years was quite a
different conductor than in his younger years. The broadcasts of the NBC
Symphony Orchestra, recorded in the “dry as dust” acoustics of NBC’s Studio 8H,
came off as rather driven and devoid of poetry, and probably gave people the
impression of Toscanini being a conductor that preferred rapid tempi. In Sachs’
opinion, this impression, “is a gross, indeed grotesque, distortion of the
truth, but, like so many other handed-down opinions, it has endured.” Surely
the recording technology of the 1930’s did not do justice to Toscanini.
Certainly, reading this book made me lament the fact that I had been born too
late to have experienced a performance by the conductor, whose performances at
its best must have been incandescent.
Toscanini – Musician of Conscience, is obviously a labour of love for Harvey Sachs, who must have
devoted many years in researching and writing the present volume. This is an
important book that should be read by many. Sachs’ book is more than a mere life
story of a great musician, but also a glimpse into the musical culture of our
recent past, thoughts about the role of an artist in society, and a history of
the development of music in our society.
It is also, for
those interested, a darn good read.
Patrick May
November 21, 2017
