Arturo Toscanini

Conductor

• Born: March 25, 1867
• Birthplace: Parma, Italy
• Died: January 16, 1957
• Place of death: New York, New York

Italian orchestral conductor

A genius among classical orchestral conductors, Toscanini is considered by many to be the most influential conductor of the twentieth century. His interpretive insights into the classical orchestral repertory and his development of the conductor’s art made him a pivotal figure in the history of musical performance.

Area of achievement Music

Early Life

Arturo Toscanini (ahr-TEW-roh toh-skah-NEE-nee) was the first child of Paola and Claudio Toscanini. Claudio, a poor tailor, had fought alongside Italian military and nationalist leader Giuseppe Garibaldi and was often more preoccupied with politics than with providing for his family, to which he soon added three daughters Narcisa (who died as a child), Zina, and Ada. Arturo was a sensitive and strong-willed child and, although sickly, grew strong enough to be sent to the famous Parma Conservatory when he was nine years old. To his father’s relief, he received free board and education at the conservatory for nine years.

Trained primarily as a cellist, Toscanini also studied solfeggio, or music theory and composition. On his own, he also acquired some conducting experience by gathering his sometimes unwilling peers into small musical groups to play his arrangements. His musical sensitivity and memory for tone were remarkable from the start. Both characteristics, combined with his passion for precision and perfection, were important aspects of his development. As a conservatory student, he was invited to play for one year with the orchestra of the Teatro Regio in Parma. He graduated from the conservatory in 1885 with highest honors in both cello and composition. An excellent cellist, he played in the second cello section at La Scala in Milan in 1887 for the premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Otello.

Toscanini’s first major milestone as a professional musician came when he was nineteen years old and on tour in Brazil with an Italian opera company. Problems with a conductor in Rio de Janeiro led to his emergency appointment to conduct Verdi’s opera Aïda (1871) on June 30, 1886. Conducting totally from memory (which turned out to be his custom), he achieved a resounding success that began one of the most remarkable conducting careers in history.

Life’s Work

Toscanini’s career was long and varied. Following his recognition in South America, he worked in numerous theaters in Italy for the next ten years, where his reputation for emotional, exacting conducting became an institution. He despised anything routine or mediocre and worked mercilessly with his orchestras to achieve the desired effect. He became known for his interpretations of the works of verismo composers, whose art closely imitated real life. Toscanini’s friendship with Alfredo Catalani caused him to often be associated with Catalani’s music, especially the opera La Wally (1892). Toscanini was also responsible for the premieres of both Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892) and Giacomo Puccini’sLa Bohème (1896). His relationship with Puccini lasted until Puccini’s death. In the company of such great singers as Enrico Caruso, Toscanini brought life to many of Puccini’s works, including Madama Butterfly (1904), Tosca (1900), Manon Lescaut (1893), and La Rondine (1917).

In addition to the Italian repertory, Toscanini had a particular affinity for both the symphonic and operatic music of Richard Wagner, whom he often called the “greatest composer of the [nineteenth] century.” Teatro Regio in Turin appointed Toscanini music director in 1895, where he opened with Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (1874). He was, at the same time, making guest appearances at La Scala and had made quite a name for himself in Milan. In 1898, La Scala’s general manager, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, offered him the artistic direction of the famed opera house. On December 26, 1898, his reverence for the work of Wagner surfaced again as he bravely chose a German opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1867) for his first performance in an Italian theater. Toscanini had a commonality with Wagner in that he believed that opera should be a culmination of all the arts visual, musical, and literary.

In addition to increasing the repertory to include German, Russian, and French works, Toscanini diligently strived to bring a seriousness to opera performance previously unknown: He asked women to remove their hats, deplored encores that stopped the dramatic motion, and would not tolerate egotistical actions of singers onstage that undermined the artistic integrity of the work. The artistic conviction that made him demand total control was a point of struggle throughout his life; indeed, when, along with other small difficulties, the fight became too much for him at La Scala, he left in 1908.

At the same time, both he and his colleague Gatti-Casazza were engaged by the Metropolitan Opera in New York for what turned out to be the most outstanding artistic period yet experienced at the famous opera house. With the demanding temperament for which he was now well known, Toscanini ruled with an iron hand and brought performance standards to new heights. A dazzling roster of singers worked under his regime, including Emmy Destinn, Geraldine Farrar, Enrico Caruso, and Giovanni Martinelli. In seven seasons, he conducted 367 performances of thirty operas, adding works such as Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1859) and Götterdämmerung, Georges Bizet’s Carmen (1875), and Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (1762). Among the world or U.S. premieres were Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (1874), Gluck’s Armide (1777), and Puccini’s La fanciulla del west (1910). Unable to work out artistic disagreements with the management, Toscanini resigned from the Metropolitan Opera in 1915, never to conduct there again.

With war raging in his native Italy, Toscanini was restless to return home. During the next five years, he served a short term at the Teatro dal Verme in Milan and conducted many benefits for the war effort but had no permanent assignment. In 1920, Toscanini was appointed director of the newly organized La Scala and was given unprecedented artistic power. He built an orchestra of one hundred players and a chorus of 120 members. While the stage was being reconstructed according to his instructions, he took the troupe on European tours. Averaging five concerts per week, he remained at La Scala until 1929, when he resigned his post in the face of the growing menace of the fascist regime and an inability to impose his rigid standards of excellence strongly enough to achieve what he felt was true integration of the arts. The politics of war caused him great concern as well, and, in the 1930’s, he withdrew from his involvement with both the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festivals because he would not tolerate Nazi discrimination against Jewish performers.

From this point on, the maestro’s emphasis was on the symphony orchestra, where demands were less complicated than in opera and where he felt he had more control over the artistic facets of his performances. From 1928 to 1936, he was the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, leading them on tours of Europe and the United States. These performances possessed a distinctive clarity and intensity new even to Toscanini, and some historians believe these years to be the zenith of his artistic life.

In 1938, Toscanini returned to New York at the invitation of David Sarnoff and Samuel Chotzinoff to lead the newly formed orchestra of the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC). This became the venue for the majority of his recordings, and he remained with them for seventeen years. Although he did not always have the congenial relationship with the NBC players for which he was remembered at the New York Philharmonic, he was revered for his ability to bring an electric sense to the music that he loved and conducted. Although they were treasures in their own right, the recordings near the end of his career were probably not his best. They seem to reflect the impatience contained within in the driving tempos and sometimes harsh dynamics that were a direct consequence of his lifelong passion for perfection. After retiring from conducting after his last performance on April 4, 1954, Toscanini spent the final three years of his life editing the NBC recordings. He died in New York on January 16, 1957.

Significance

Toscanini greatly valued his private life, from which his emotional support often came. Devoted to his friends and family, the formidable maestro was loving, unaffected, and playful at home. He was married to Carla de Martini for fifty-four years, and they had four children two sons, Walter (his business manager) and Giorgio (who died from diphtheria at age five), and two daughters, Wanda (who married pianist Vladimir Horowitz) and Wally. He was a voracious reader and spent much of his quiet time with the classics, some of which he memorized. He also enjoyed entertaining friends at his restored Victorian home in Riverdale, New York.

Toscanini left a legacy that cannot be ignored. He had a personality of extremes passion, tenderness, exuberance, rage, sensitivity, devotion, and obsession. He recognized his own volatility and was often ashamed and apologetic following his outbursts. While these features made him the often difficult character that he was, they were also the same traits that made him able to express the genius that he possessed. An unyielding devotion to his ideals that even, at times, caused him physical pain gave him the ability to shape the history of music unlike few other conductors before his time.

Bibliography

Antek, Samuel. This Was Toscanini. New York: Vanguard Press, 1963. A simple, direct, yet moving biography from the point of view of a violinist who played under Toscanini. Includes beautiful photographs and reproductions of landmark programs.

Chotzinoff, Samuel. Toscanini: An Intimate Portrait. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956. As a music critic and the general musical director of the National Broadcasting Corporation’s radio network, Chotzinoff was one of the persons responsible for bringing Toscanini to the network. Written in a very personal style, the book is important for the inside view it provides of the NBC years and Toscanini’s personal life during that time.

Ewen, David. The Story of Arturo Toscanini. 1951. Rev. ed. New York: Henry Holt, 1960. This is simply written biography from the admiring standpoint of Ewen, who has written several other articles on Toscanini’s life and work. A good overall history with personal insights.

Frank, Mortimer H. Arturo Toscanini: The NBC Years. Portland, Oreg.: Amadeus Press, 2002. Focuses on the last phase in Toscanini’s life, when he spent seventeen years conducting an orchestra whose concerts were regularly broadcast on the NBC radio network.

Haggin, B. H. Contemporary Reflections on the Maestro. New York: DaCapo, 1989. A musician himself, Haggin offers good insight in defining Toscanini as a pivotal figure in the history of modern conducting. The book is filled with personal reflections, letters, and accounts of dialogues with Toscanini that give a close look at the conductor’s perspectives on his personal and professional life.

Horowitz, Joseph. Understanding Toscanini. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. This book is distinct from other works on Toscanini in that it is a nontheoretical but detailed case study that attempts to supply a broad sociocultural context out of which the “Toscanini phenomenon” emerged. Horowitz includes no personal impressions or interviews; the book contains more about the way in which the conductor was perceived than actual facts about his life.

Matthews, Denis. Arturo Toscanini. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1982. Matthews attempts to give a balanced view on Toscanini’s genius, including both criticism and admiration. He draws heavily on the biographies by Sachs and Sacchi for facts but includes many personal experiences and memories. Includes a lengthy bibliography and discography.

Sacchi, Filippo. The Magic Baton: Toscanini’s Life for Music. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1957. This somewhat wordy yet informative and elaborately detailed biography was published just after Toscanini’s death; it served as a source of facts for later biographers.

Sachs, Harvey. Reflections on Toscanini. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991. This is a different approach to biography in the form of collected essays, some previously published and revised, that are divided into six specific periods presented in chronological order. Includes a listing of family archives in the New York Public Library.

Toscanini, Arturo. The Letters of Arturo Toscanini. Compiled, edited, and translated by Harvey Sachs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. A collection of seven hundred letters that provide insight into Toscanini’s complex personality, his knowledge of music, events in his career, and his relationships with family, friends, and colleagues.

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