Toscanini, then and now

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2003 by Fromm, Harold

It would be terrible if our souls always showed their naked selves! No one would have anything to do with his fellow man, and perhaps not even with himself!

-Letter from Arturo Toscanini to Ada Mainardi, July 10, 1938

IT IS HARD FOR ME TO BELIEVE THAT FIFTY YEARS HAVE PASSED since those extraordinary evenings when my parents and I huddled around our first TV set to witness a concert performance by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony. The TV was a ten-inch RCA with a round picture tube made to look rectangular by cabinetry. The sound was tinny and the picture was black and white. Yet what I witnessed as a music-crazed college student was little less than a sacred event, especially if it was Beethoven's Ninth, one of the "Maestro's" kinetic, titanic specialties. With his taut bearing, sprawling moustache, and white hair, Toscanini was a commanding figure who, even without histrionics, could whip his musicians into demonic overdrive that left his audiences gasping for breath. Then too, during those early fifties, Toscanini's last years of conducting, when he hovered in his eighties, he recorded an amazing series of new performances onto LPs to take advantage of the hi-fi and phonographic revolutions in audio that were very quickly to render obsolete the 78 rpm disks on which all of his previous recorded work was engraved. But what has taken place since then, in both the world of classical music and the world of audio, could hardly be imagined back in 1950, a subject to which I will return below.

Watching this imposing and monumental figure in the innocence of youth and behind the gentilities of the early 1950s provided no clue to the complex person revealed in Harvey Sachs's artfully collected and edited volume of Toscanini's letters.1 This book, unmistakably from Knopf, even as Knopf has been swallowed up by a gigantic conglomerate, is admirable in every way. A handsome physical artifact elegantly printed on heavy laid paper, bound with the familiar Knopf deckled edges and consummately edited and translated from the mostly Italian materials by Sachs, this is a major contribution to musical and general culture (even though my copy has already fallen apart from flimsy attachment of cover to text). Sachs's 1978 biography of Toscanini has been upstaged by the large cache of letters that subsequently tumbled out of auctions and catalogues in the 1990s to transform the existing portraits by removing some of the filters limiting their complexity.

Toscanini, who lived to be ninety, died in 1957 after an astonishingly active and productive career that was launched at age nineteen when he was called upon at the last minute to conduct a performance of Aida in Rio de Janeiro. His legacy was to raise the standards of both opera production and orchestral performance through exacting demands, like Wagner's, that a "performance" be conceived as a total work of art. Today's audiences can hardly appreciate the ahistorically high standards to which they have grown accustomed. Music seasons are now planned years in advance rather than produced ad hoc as circumstances of the moment may dictate. Audiences now sit quietly respectful, not walking, eating, talking, playing cards and flirting (to echo Sachs), while highly skilled musicians rehearse to a point of near perfection before going public. Toscanini early on made enemies by insisting on a dark theater for performances of Tristan, which prevented the customary disruptions from inattentive audiences otherwise engaged. When a defiant management turned up the lights, Toscanini smashed his own conductor's lamp in retaliation. As far back as 1897, Toscanini could write to his fiancee, "I am just now getting home after four and a quarter hours of rehearsal. I'm dead tired. I began at ten-thirty this morning, teaching a little solo in the third act [of Tristan] to the English horn player; at eleven-thirty I ate two eggs in a hurry and from noon on I rehearsed the orchestra alone; then at six I continued with the singers. In all, eleven hours of rehearsals for your poor Arturo." This scenario, hardly atypical, lasted well into his old age, when a feverish work schedule could be said to have kept him alive, because without it he fell into depression and despair over his art, his life, and the entire human race.

Toscanini's professional life involving his role as conductor at La Scala, at the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, the NBC Symphony, Bayreuth, and orchestras in England, Salzburg, Switzerland, Boston, Philadelphia, and South America is represented throughout, but the most compelling and extraordinary letters do not begin to appear until well into his early old age, a period, however, that commences early in the volume, about a third of the way through its 400 pages, as a result of the aforementioned cache of letters to Ada Mainardi that Sachs discovered in the early 1990s.

From these letters we learn of his constant anxiety about conducting, his sense of unworthiness and deficiency, almost crippling, until the moment he stepped before the orchestra, transcending time and place. He was plagued for much of his life by physical ailments, shoulder pains from conducting, gradually deteriorating eyesight, a bad knee. Married for sixty years to Carla de Martini, he was miserable with their relationship, particularly their early cessation of sex (possibly his greatest need). One experiences the sense of cosmic isolation expressed in his letters as an almost hysterical craving for sensual love and as a predisposition to overstatement and extravagance generated by his needs of the moment ("I see black, everything black"). He constantly bemoaned his loss of privacy as he became more and more lionized worldwide, a celebrity as charismatic and fetishized as Elvis, hounded by upper-class groupies and corporate dignitaries who left him little time to himself. Despite his harshness and negativities, when he returned, after many years, as guest conductor for the New York Philharmonic and other orchestras for which he had been principal conductor, he was cheered by the players, who dismissed his requests for silence by continuing their ovation. He disliked publicity, never gave interviews, refused honorary awards and titles. He referred to the importunate executives who created the NBC Symphony expressly for him and lured him back to conducting in old age as "ferocious ball-breakers," but he recognized his deep personal need to accept their offer. As a result of this life of frenzied activity, of endless sailings between Europe and America (which took ten days), a concert schedule beyond belief, of broadcasts and recording sessions, two world wars in which his role was far from negligible, the re-opening of La Scala after the second war, the new life he began in America with the NBC Symphony when he was already an old man, and the intense emotional strife he experienced through volatile clandestine relationships that he juggled around his marriage-as a result of this maelstrom of activity, he treasured his island retreat at Isolino San Giovanni in Italy, to which he returned whenever he could and felt repose and relief at his home in Riverdale on the Hudson when he was concertizing in New York. By the end of his life, he wrote one of his daughters, "I can't stand being Arturo Toscanini any longer-at this point I'm bored with hearing my name-it's been heard for many years, too many, and I would like to rest for what little time remains to me and enjoy a peaceful death."