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A legendary musical figure

16 January 1957

Signor Arturo Toscanini, who died in New York yesterday at the age of 89, was the most renowned of living conductors, since his reputation was internationally supreme. His pre-eminence was recognized in Italy, where he was born, in America, where he worked for the greater part of his career, and in German countries, where between the wars he conducted at the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festivals.

His quality as an interpreter was mainly known in this country from gramophone records, but his visits to London in the 1930s and in 1952 confirmed and amplified the judgment that for clarity of presentation and fidelity to the composer he had no peer. His tastes were catholic but his interpretations were always those of an Italian. Yet Siegfried Wagner made him the mainstay of the Bayreuth Festival in 1930 and 1931, and the connection was broken only by Toscanini’s refusal to appear in Germany when Jewish musicians were maltreated by the Nazi Government. That he should thus be accepted by the leading institution which stands above all others for German music is certainly a remarkable testimony to the universality of his art. It was also a characteristic fulfilment of Toscanini’s career. For he had been the first to introduce Wagner’s Götterdämmerung to Italians; he had supervised the international repertory at the Metropolitan Opera in New York from 1898 to 1915; and it is on his performances of Beethoven’s symphonies that his popular fame is founded.

In this country our opportunities of hearing him in the flesh were limited to a short series of concerts in each of the years 1930, 1935, 1937–39, and a last visit in 1952, and, though we heard no opera under his direction, his performances of choral works, including Beethoven’s Mass in D and Choral Symphony, Brahms’s Requiem, and Verdi’s Requiem were memorable. It was widely claimed for him that his readings of these and other classics revealed them in their true character as their creators conceived them, if not for the first time, certainly in a definitive manner. The listener hearing some hitherto over-looked detail in a familiar symphony, noting some subtlety of tonal gradation or shaping of a phrase, was surprised to find that it was all marked in the score, which in point of fact the conductor never used either at rehearsal or at performances by virtue of his prodigious and, as it seems, photographic memory. Yet his interpretations were no more final than those of any other executant musician, and critics whose admiration was less idolatrous found the defects of his qualities in his reading of German music.

Beethoven’s Symphonies

The Latin mind, like the Mediterranean sunshine which conditions it, views things with hard edges, clear outlines, and thorough-going logic. Toscanini’s meticulous attention to detail in Beethoven’s symphonies made them classical and brilliant but ultimately a little inhuman. The opening chords of the Eroica sounded, at any rate with the virtuoso orchestras of America, more like pistol shots than an announcement of the key of E flat, and his bourgeois German Mastersingers became a procession of Florentine nobles. This is only to say that he was true to himself, and no conductor of more single-minded integrity ever lived. This sterling honesty brought him into conflict with the Fascist Government, whose song ‘Giovinezza’ he refused to play, as it also caused him later to break with Nazi-dominated Germany. To show with an unmistakable gesture what he thought of their intolerance he went to Palestine and conducted the newly formed Jewish orchestra in its national home.

Born at Parma on March 25, 1867, he began his musical studies at the local conservatoire, where his principal subject was the cello. Attention was first called to his exceptional abilities by his remarkable memory, which enabled him after a few rehearsals to play his part in the orchestra without opening the copy on his desk. His opportunity came when, at Rio de Janeiro in 1886, he was called by a sudden emergency to leave his place among the cellos and conduct Aida, which he did by heart. From that beginning he went on to the Metropolitan in New York, where he was chief conductor from 1898 to 1915. In 1922 he returned to La Scala at Milan, where he had previously worked between 1898 and 1908, and when the theatre was reopened after alterations in 1922 he was appointed director and ruled it like the autocrat he was.

Encores Abolished

Of new works, such as the eagerly expected performance of Boito’s Nerone and the premiere of Puccini’s last opera, Turandot, he refused to announce even the dates until he was satisfied that the productions were ready, in complete disregard of the convenience of those who were prepared to come long distances to attend them. Nor would he compromise on matters of artistic detail, still less on principle. Thus he abolished encores at La Scala in the face of long-standing Italian practice, and he demanded obedience from the singers and players whom he directed. Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist, who worked in happy association with him at concerts in New York, bears astonished testimony to his impulsiveness and to the general acceptance by others that his will was law. To stop a telephone bell ringing during a private rehearsal with Menuhin Toscanini pulled the instrument from the wall, plaster and all, and returned without a word to the piano. No one expressed any surprise, though Menuhin confesses that he had never before seen such an uninhibited obedience to impulse. There were therefore some qualms at the bbc when that body invited him to come and direct its orchestra, but he won the players’ confidence, enthusiasm, and loyalty without any of the explosions with which he has been credited elsewhere. Indeed, Mr Bernard Shore, the violist who played under him, says in his book The Orchestra Speaks that playing under Toscanini becomes a different art. ‘He stimulates his men, refreshes their minds; and music that has become stale is revived in all its pristine beauty.’

But his autocracy at Milan was bound to bring friction with those whose artistic concentration was less than his own, and after having taken the Scala Company abroad to Germany and Vienna and given performances, more particularly of Verdi’s Falstaff, which entranced German-speaking audiences, he announced his intention of leaving Milan, and in the winter of 1929 accepted the post of conductor to the Philharmonic Society of New York. It was with the New York Orchestra that he first came to England and toured Europe. He remained with them until 1936.

Later Tours

He then formed his own orchestra, the National Broadcasting Company Orchestra, with which he gave concerts all through the Second World War, touring Latin America and making the gramophone records which preserve his interpretations for the rest of the world. In 1946 he returned for a while to Milan for a few months in order to contribute the proceeds of some concerts towards the rebuilding of La Scala in addition to a financial gift of a million lire. When the Festival Hall was being built in 1950 it was announced that he was willing to come to London and direct some of its inaugural concerts. This plan, however, had to be abandoned. Notwithstanding, he did conduct in the Festival Hall, when in September, 1952, he came to London to give two concerts devoted mainly to the four symphonies of Brahms. In this connection it is worthy of remark that though he denounced other musicians for tampering with scores, he did himself play some tricks with the timpani of Brahms’s C minor symphony.

This symphony also showed him sacrificing the brooding tragedy of the opening in favour of creating immediately a feeling of tremendous tension, a treatment which leaves him with a problem of what to do with the development section. In the milder Brahms of the St Anthony Variations and the D major symphony he showed a more ingratiating temper and in his interpretation of Debussy’s La Mer sensuous tonal shading was not neglected. But in general it was the intensity, the urgency, the magnification of the life of a score, upon which he seized, and it was this remarkable dynamic drive which he preserved into extreme old age.

His last concert was given at Carnegie Hall in New York no longer ago than in April 1954, when he bade farewell to his orchestra and his public in a Wagner programme, at the end of which he dropped his baton and went out, not to return to face the plaudits of his audience, a symbolic gesture of retirement after 68 years of active music-making.

Signor Toscanini’s wife predeceased him in 1951. There were a son and two daughters of the marriage, of whom one is married to Mr Vladimir Horowitz, the pianist.