Arturo Toscanini

Arturo Toscanini ranks among history’s foremost opera and concert directors, celebrated worldwide for the intensity and distinctive manner of his conducting that produced exceptional precision. From the dawn of the twentieth century until his withdrawal in the 1950s he stood as the preeminent orchestral leader on the planet, matched solely by his enduring rival Wilhelm Furtwängler. Born in Parma, Italy, in 1867, he entered the Parma Conservatory at age nine, where he trained on the cello and in composition. He completed his studies in 1885 at eighteen with highest honors in cello performance and, the following year, accepted an offer to join the Italian opera company in Rio de Janeiro. During a performance of Aida the conductor was driven from the podium by an antagonistic audience, and the inexperienced cellist was summoned to take his place. Toscanini led the opera from memory, an event that launched his conducting career and demonstrated an ability that would sustain him for the ensuing seventy years. The audience responded with a standing ovation, and he remained in the role through the end of the season. Thereafter his path as a conductor was fixed. Though he briefly returned to the cello section for the premiere of Verdi’s Otello under the composer’s supervision, he soon established himself as a conductor through uncompromising perfectionism and directed the premieres of Puccini’s La Bohème and Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci during the closing years of the nineteenth century. He became Italy’s most prominent young conductor, a central presence at the opera houses of Rome, Milan, and Turin, and, from 1898 onward, principal conductor at La Scala. Amid his operatic commitments he did not lead his first symphonic concert until 1896; that program introduced the Italian premiere of Brahms’s Tragic Overture along with works by Schubert, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner.

Toscanini’s distinction lay in his perfectionism and declared fidelity to the printed score. His years in the opera pit bred an aversion to the liberties he observed among fellow musicians and conductors of the period. He rejected the self-indulgence that characterized performances of the day and the inclination of conductors and players to dwell on their own sonorities while overlooking the nuances and accuracy composers required. In this respect he resembled Johannes Brahms: both viewed themselves as committed classicists amid romantic excess and each saw himself as a defense against such excesses. Toscanini remained an iconoclast—demanding, unyielding, and dismissive of “traditions,” which he regarded as nothing more than accumulated faults from prior performances. Musicians who served under him remembered that he approached every concert as though it were the first, producing, together with his intolerance for what he considered laziness, an extraordinary clarity and accuracy from singers and instrumentalists alike. In numerous respects, as his recorded legacy shows, he anticipated the modern pursuit of historical authenticity, particularly with Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, yet his methods also illuminated the music of Elgar, Debussy, and other post-Romantic composers.

By the opening of the twentieth century his reputation had crossed European borders. In 1908 he joined the Metropolitan Opera in New York, remaining until 1915. That engagement, together with his reputation for exact knowledge of scores conducted from memory and for perfectionism reinforced by a volatile temperament, helped establish the Toscanini cult in the United States. At the podium he was lionized in the press for his fierce persona and eloquent hand gestures—though his primary control came through his eyes—and for his strict adherence to the printed page, achieved through rigorous attention to tempo and timbre, yielding remarkable precision and crisp, transparent playing even with large ensembles on demanding scores such as the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, which formed his New York concert debut.

While in New York his personal life affected his professional trajectory. A brilliant and forceful musician, Toscanini extended his passions beyond music to extramarital relationships. During his Metropolitan tenure he became involved with Geraldine Farrar, one of the era’s most acclaimed singers. In a predominantly Protestant nation still marked by cultural insecurity and widespread puritanism, even the relatively worldly New York opera community found the liaison unacceptable. Toscanini resigned and advanced his return to Italy. By fortunate chance he departed weeks earlier than scheduled; his original booking had been on the Lusitania, sunk by a German U-boat that May with more than one thousand of the nineteen hundred passengers lost.

Back in Italy he restricted his conducting during the war to military bands and benefit concerts. After the armistice he assumed the music directorship at La Scala, which had declined sharply, and restored it to full vitality and international standing. He remained in the post until the close of the 1920s. During this period he also accepted guest engagements with the New York Philharmonic, subsequently leading the orchestra on its first European tour in 1929 to enthusiastic acclaim and immediately becoming its principal conductor.

Until then he had been known chiefly as an operatic conductor, but the Philharmonic appointment shifted his focus decisively toward the concert hall. He maintained an active schedule across North and South America and Europe, although relations with his native Italy grew strained because of his opposition to Benito Mussolini and the Fascist regime. On one occasion pro-government thugs assaulted him for refusing to perform the ruling party’s anthem. His left-of-center politics left him no patience for Il Duce’s posturing, and his public condemnation of the dictator—later extended to Adolf Hitler—made him a hero to millions outside the musical world while placing him in direct opposition to Wilhelm Furtwängler, his sole peer. He continued regular appearances in Paris, Vienna, Salzburg, Stockholm, and The Hague, and in the still relatively open Weimar Germany of 1930 became the first non-German-Austrian conductor to lead at Bayreuth.

Toscanini left the New York Philharmonic in 1936 at age sixty-nine, fatigued by its three-concert weekly schedule over five months and by the often difficult task of managing the ensemble. No diminution of energy appeared on the podium; for his final April concert police were required to manage the crowds besieging the Carnegie Hall box office for standing-room tickets. The intensity was understandable: during his decade with the Philharmonic he had elevated the orchestra’s playing and precision to unprecedented American levels, establishing interpretive standards still audible in the twenty-first century. He offered strong opinions on a successor, initially recommending Furtwängler, whose stature in German-speaking lands rivaled his own. Furtwängler was a commanding figure yet controversial for having remained in Germany after the Nazi rise, seeking to shield music and prevent the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics from becoming instruments of the regime. Although principled, this stance rendered him unacceptable to lead a major American orchestra in 1936.

While the Philharmonic continued its search, Toscanini returned to Italy, where he was treated as a political nonentity. Opportunities contracted as Fascism spread; he ceased accepting engagements in Germany and, as Nazi influence expanded, eliminated additional European venues. Italy itself soon became untenable even as a residence. In 1937, a year after leaving the Philharmonic, he received an unexpected offer from David Sarnoff, founder and head of RCA and the National Broadcasting Company, that would reshape his life and career precisely when he contemplated retirement.

Sarnoff proposed forming an orchestra for Toscanini to conduct in a sixteen-week annual radio season of one weekly broadcast, offering an annual fee of forty thousand dollars—when the average well-employed worker earned roughly eighteen hundred dollars—plus royalties on any resulting recordings and whatever additional sessions he chose to undertake. At seventy, Toscanini described himself as “an old man” and hesitated, uncertain whether to accept this novel undertaking. No established conductor had previously received such a proposal, and most would have found it unfamiliar; for his generation, broadcasts and recordings remained secondary to live performances. He had also never felt comfortable with recording or broadcasting technology. Although he had worked occasionally with the BBC, he remained among the least recorded major conductors: a handful of acoustical sides with the La Scala Orchestra in 1920 and, in the twelve years since electrical recording began, fewer than six hours of sessions with the New York Philharmonic.

He had moreover come to dislike the recording process then in use. All recording was still done directly to wax lacquer discs with a maximum duration of slightly more than four minutes; listeners purchased fragile, heavy 78 rpm shellac discs that required frequent side changes. Any longer work had to be planned around these interruptions. No immediate playback existed; producers relied on perfect hearing to catch errors at the moment of recording. Yet nearly all of Toscanini’s prior recordings had been made for RCA Victor, among them his remarkable 1936 account of the Beethoven Seventh Symphony, still regarded more than seventy years later as one of the finest ever made.

Toscanini accepted. The arrangement placed him in an unprecedented musical and cultural position, foreshadowing the later careers of Herbert von Karajan, Sir Georg Solti, and Leonard Bernstein. The timing proved ideal for both parties even though the classical-music industry and the broader economy remained weak. Although the worst years of the Depression had passed, labels continued to consolidate and most orchestras struggled financially. Radio, however, flourished. During the 1930s it occupied a unique cultural role; even the poorest households prized their radios, and surveys showed many families would relinquish their iceboxes before parting with them. NBC, with its two national networks—the red and the blue—possessed the resources and, through Sarnoff’s vision, the determination to offer Toscanini stable employment that reached the entire nation regularly.

Radio networks maintained orchestras of varying sizes, typically directed by emerging or journeyman conductors such as Bernard Herrmann or by musicians drawn from the theater world. These ensembles existed to serve programmers and producers. No conductor of Toscanini’s stature had ever agreed to lead a broadcast orchestra, and no network had made so substantial a commitment to classical music. In the 1930s a genuine audience for classical repertoire numbered in the millions; music education in schools ensured broad familiarity. NBC enabled Toscanini to reach those listeners with far less exertion than the Philharmonic had required. Much of the initial assembly of the orchestra fell to his chosen assistant, Artur Rodzinski, while day-to-day management rested with others. His first broadcast occurred on Christmas Eve 1937 from the newly opened Studio 8-H in Rockefeller Center. From that moment Toscanini became, in effect, the world’s most widely heard conductor and, for many, its music teacher. The New York Philharmonic and its management viewed the development with dismay: with a few signatures, the nation’s leading orchestra suddenly faced a rival ten blocks away in a state-of-the-art facility backed by NBC’s vast resources. Sarnoff regarded the prestige of the association—and potential long-term RCA Victor sales—as justification enough. Although the Philharmonic presented more concerts during its five-month season, its CBS broadcasts now competed with NBC for listeners and sponsorship.

Within a year Toscanini had been transformed from a concert-hall and opera-house titan into classical music’s first electronic-media superstar. Occasional difficulties arose, including a brief resignation later withdrawn over issues of authority, yet the broadcasts continued for seventeen years and encompassed hundreds of performances. His presence guaranteed the NBC Symphony comparable media prominence and a larger audience than the Philharmonic. Through these programs he became, more than any other conductor, an arbiter of musical taste across the country. A work gained immediate acceptance simply by entering his broadcast repertory, which included a surprising number of living or recently deceased composers. During these years he derived greater satisfaction from the broadcasts than from commercial recording, which remained cumbersome. Guest conductors appeared, among them Bruno Walter and George Szell, so listeners never felt shortchanged.

World events reshaped his larger career. From 1939, with Italy aligned to the Axis powers, New York became his permanent residence. He continued opposing Fascism, traveling to the Middle East to conduct the Palestine Philharmonic, composed largely of European Jewish musicians driven from their homes by the Nazis. This action, together with his public resistance to Hitler and Mussolini—who by 1939 had adopted anti-Semitic policies and allowed the Italian press to label Toscanini an “honorary Jew” deserving of execution—earned him special regard among Jews and anti-Nazis worldwide. His political stance also produced musical consequences. After withdrawing from the Salzburg Festival following Germany’s annexation of Austria, he helped establish the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland; ironically, after World War II Furtwängler enjoyed some of his greatest successes there.

The Philharmonic’s search for a successor proved difficult. John Barbirolli, a young London-born conductor, was appointed but returned to England in 1941 because of the war. The orchestra then turned to Artur Rodzinski, who proved scarcely more successful, followed by Dimitri Mitropoulos; both were ultimately worn down by internal politics before Leonard Bernstein arrived as a music director capable of matching Toscanini’s charisma. Two decades separated Toscanini’s departure and Bernstein’s arrival, years during which Toscanini’s reputation and audience expanded while the Philharmonic’s did not.

Although the NBC Symphony was not initially the all-star ensemble press releases described—many players had already been employed by NBC in other ensembles—it developed into a formidable body that occasionally toured and gave concerts, rivaling the Philharmonic. Demand for tickets to its broadcasts was intense; despite the legal prohibition on selling admission, NBC received fifty thousand requests for the 1937 premiere in a studio seating fourteen hundred. Toscanini’s recording career also surged, driven by the broadcasts. In 1937 he had been among the most sparsely represented major conductors on disc, with barely six hours of music available; within ten years he became one of the most extensively documented. His output included the first complete, integrated Beethoven symphony cycle, a Brahms cycle, concert versions of Verdi’s most important operas (which he knew, reaching back to Verdi’s own time, better than any living conductor), Puccini’s La Bohème (which he had led at its premiere), Beethoven’s Fidelio, and distinguished performances of hundreds of other works spanning two centuries and the full range of Western orchestral literature, from Bach, Haydn, and Mozart through Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Dvořák to Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Shostakovich.

The NBC Symphony competed with the Philharmonic not only for audiences but for players. At its founding it attracted some of the country’s finest musicians, particularly on the East Coast, by offering salaries comparable to those in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia for shorter seasons and fewer performances. By the 1940s it had become, for many, the more desirable ensemble. Trombonist Abe Pearlstein, a Juilliard student regarded as the city’s finest baritone-horn player, might at any earlier moment have been recruited by the Philharmonic; instead Toscanini, after initially favoring Italian horn players, engaged him to play the tenor-tuba part in the “Bydlo” section of Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and Pearlstein eventually joined the orchestra as second trombone.

The RCA Victor recordings sold well yet remained controversial into the 1990s, decades after Toscanini’s death. For the first decade most were made in Studio 8-H, though many others were recorded at Carnegie Hall. Their sound quality varied. The original 78 rpm discs possessed a notably dry acoustic that made even excellent performances seem thin; even after transfer to magnetic tape and reissue on LP, many sides lacked warmth and depth. Part of the difficulty stemmed from Studio 8-H itself, designed for spoken-word broadcasting and therefore acoustically dead—an environment ideal for drama or comedy but unsympathetic to instrumental resonance. Some scholars have linked Toscanini’s acceptance of the studio to his interpretive aesthetic: its flat acoustic aligned with his preference for clarity and detail over lush sonority. Combined with his characteristically brisk tempos, this produced a lean, almost minimalist quality that reinforced his image as a spare, precise interpreter. His indifference to engineers’ technical concerns further enhanced the recordings’ mystique. An often-repeated anecdote recounts his being warned that the volume he demanded would damage the equipment; his impatient reply was, “Then break the machine!”

He remained in the United States throughout World War II but returned to Milan in 1946 to reopen La Scala, which had suffered extensive bomb damage. He continued annual European engagements, recording for HMV (part of EMI), and made notable appearances and recordings in England through 1952. By then magnetic-tape recording and the LP had arrived, inaugurating classical music’s golden age of recording. At his retirement in spring 1954, age eighty-seven, he had accumulated hundreds of recordings, frequently multiple interpretations of core repertory works, encompassing nearly five hundred compositions from the eighteenth century to the 1940s. His fame was such that in the 1951 film He Ran All the Way a character’s reference to a new recording of the Beethoven Fifth “by Arturo” required no further identification for mainstream audiences.

After his death in early 1957 at age eighty-nine, his reputation declined. Critics long resentful of his dominance exploited the limited scope of RCA’s releases and the technical shortcomings of those discs to magnify his perceived faults. The notion took hold that his repertory was confined to established “warhorses”—Beethoven and Brahms symphonies, for example—although many of the works later regarded as standard had been contemporary when he first performed them. Critics also claimed his interpretations never varied and that he favored excessively rapid tempos. The sound of the available recordings compounded the damage; the Studio 8-H discs in particular sounded cold and flat beside emerging stereo releases, and continued use of inferior master sources further compromised timbre. RCA exacerbated the situation by adding artificial reverberation to some 8-H recordings. The “rechanneled stereo” versions issued in the 1960s proved especially harmful to both his standing and listeners who purchased them.

Early compact discs worsened the problems, magnifying flaws in the source material rather than its virtues. Sufficient demand remained, however, for RCA to undertake remedial action in the late 1980s. A systematic effort organized existing holdings and supplemented them with master-quality transfers supplied by the Toscanini Estate—whose collection included master copies of virtually every broadcast and recording, obtained by his preferred engineer, Richard Blane Gardner—and by the Recorded Sound Archive at Lincoln Center. The result, released in 1992 on RCA Victor Gold Seal, was the eighty-two-CD Arturo Toscanini Collection, presenting more of his work than had ever been available simultaneously. Sound quality improved, though limitations of mastering technology at the time persisted.

In the late 1990s RCA/BMG conducted a thorough inventory of its holdings, leading to an improved series issued as The Immortal Toscanini. These slim double-CD packages revealed previously underappreciated qualities to many listeners. In 2006 Testament Records released his ten television appearances with the NBC Symphony, recorded between 1948 and 1952—including a remarkable concert performance of Verdi’s Aida—on DVD, along with additional previously unreleased audio performances licensed from the Toscanini Estate.