(b Parma, 25 March 1867; d New York, 16 Jan 1957). Italian conductor. The son of a tailor (who had fought with Garibaldi), he early showed exceptional musical gifts and in 1876 at the age of nine was sent to the Parma Conservatory, becoming a boarder in 1878. For nine years he studied the cello there (with Leandro Carini) and also the piano and composition, graduating in 1885 with maximum marks. Toscanini began his professional life as a cellist (while still a student he had played in the orchestra of the Teatro Regio, Parma), and was second in the cello section for the première of Verdi’s Otello at La Scala in 1887. But by that time he had already embarked on the career of conductor, for which a prodigious musical memory and ear, insatiable curiosity, great powers of concentration, and a dominating and uncompromising character alike destined him. At the age of 19, on tour in Brazil with an Italian troupe, a series of accidents led to his being promoted from the cellos to take over a performance of Aida in Rio de Janeiro (30 June 1886). He conducted, without a score, in masterly fashion, and achieved a success from which there could be no turning back.
For the next ten years he worked in various Italian theatres, and won a growing reputation as a powerful and exacting conductor and the enemy of mediocrity and routine. He became associated with the works of Catalani and with those of the verismo school, conducting the premières of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (1892, Milan) and Puccini’s La bohème (1896, Turin). Above all, he championed Wagner (‘the greatest composer of the century’), then still relatively unknown in Italy. He also showed an interest in symphonic music rare in an Italian conductor of that period. In 1895, in addition to being made musical director of the Teatro Regio, Turin (where he opened with Götterdämmerung), he was invited to form a municipal orchestra, with which in 1898 he gave a series of 44 concerts at the Turin Exhibition, including works by Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and Verdi (Italian première of three of the Quattro pezzi sacri). By then he had also conducted concerts with the Scala orchestra, and it was no surprise when Boito and Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the new manager, invited him to Milan to become La Scala’s artistic director, at the age of 31. His regime was inaugurated on 26 December 1898 with Die Meistersinger.
Toscanini was at La Scala altogether for less than 15 years in a career which lasted for nearly 70. Yet in a real sense La Scala was the artistic focal point of his existence, the symbol of his struggle to realize his ideal of opera as a totally integrated dramatic art. Once he had finally broken with it, he never again entered an opera house to direct opera, except as a guest at the Bayreuth and Salzburg festivals. But to the end of his life he continued to watch over La Scala’s fortunes, giving it advice and, on occasion, his services.
Toscanini’s repertory during his first period at La Scala was made up of Wagner, Verdi, new works and Italian premières (Yevgeny Onegin, Pelléas et Mélisande, La damnation de Faust, Euryanthe). From the first he concerned himself with every aspect of operatic performance, down to the smallest details of staging. He insisted that his singers, even those in minor parts, study and master the whole libretto, and he coached them minutely, bar by bar, setting as much store by inflection and gesture as by tone and musical phrase. The standard of ensemble and dramatic presentation rose strikingly (as even the many enemies whom he had made by his intransigence – among them the house of Ricordi – were forced to admit). Boito’s account of one performance of Falstaff moved Verdi to thank Toscanini in a famous three-word message: ‘Grazie! grazie! grazie!’. But it was a fierce battle, not only to overcome the traditional bad habits of singers and the evasions and economies of administration, but also to educate the audience to a serious attitude towards opera. Toscanini had the house lights lowered, got the ladies to remove their hats, and abolished the practice of concluding an opera performance with a ballet; but it was harder to suppress the demand for encores. It was over such a demand that he walked out, during a performance of Un ballo in maschera that he was conducting, on the last night of the 1902–3 season.
He was absent from La Scala for the next three seasons, conducting in Buenos Aires, Bologna and Turin, and touring Italy with the Turin orchestra, with whom he gave the Italian premières of works by Richard Strauss and Debussy. In 1908, after only two more seasons at La Scala, he went to New York as artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera, of which Gatti-Casazza had just been appointed manager. There for seven years Toscanini ruled over one of the most dazzling constellations of singers in the history of opera (among them Caruso, Scotti, Farrar, Destinn and Martinelli) and to a remarkable extent succeeded in imposing his unique discipline on them. Premières, world or US, included Boris Godunov, La fanciulla del West and Gluck’s Armide. Once again, however, disagreement with the administration over economies, and impatience with less than ideal conditions and less than complete authority, drove him to resign.
He was influenced by other factors as well: his love affair with Geraldine Farrar, his leading soprano, which reached a crisis at about this time, and his intense patriotism, which made him restless at being abroad when his own country was at war. While at the Metropolitan he had spent his summers in Europe (in 1913 organizing and conducting performances of Falstaff and La traviata for the Verdi centenary celebrations at Busseto); and in 1915 he returned to Italy. For the next five years he was without a fixed position or a settled income. He directed a short season at the Teatro dal Verme, Milan, gave many concerts gratis for the Italian war effort and formed a military band which he conducted in the front line during the assault on Monte Santo.
In 1920 Toscanini was appointed artistic director of a reorganized Scala, with unprecedented powers. He formed a new orchestra of 100 players (as well as a chorus of 120) and, while the stage and the auditorium, on his advice, were being reconstructed, toured Italy, the USA and Canada with it, conducting 137 concerts in three periods totalling 28 weeks – an average of nearly five concerts a week. Toscanini’s regime culminated in 1929, when he took the company on a triumphant tour to Vienna and Berlin. His resignation the same year was due to a number of different factors: La Scala’s financial crisis, his own exhaustion, growing defects in the repertory system he had created, and perhaps a final recognition of the impossibility of realizing his ideals in an opera house. He must also have felt the need to provide for his coming exile from Italy, with whose fascist regime he was in increasingly open conflict. Toscanini had been at first attracted to Mussolini’s ideas, and in 1919 had stood, unsuccessfully, as a fascist candidate in Milan. Before long, however, he had become a passionate opponent of fascism, on numerous occasions (including the première of Turandot in 1926) refusing to conduct the fascist hymn Giovinezza. In 1938 Roosevelt had to intervene with Mussolini to have his passport restored (Toscanini never renounced his Italian citizenship).
Politics played a decisive part in Toscanini’s career in the 1930s. Having conducted at Bayreuth in 1930 and 1931 (the first non-German to do so), he broke with the festival in 1933 over Hitler’s ban on Jewish artists and never returned there. Similarly, his appearances at the Salzburg Festival (1934–7; Falstaff, Fidelio, Die Meistersinger, Die Zauberflöte) ended abruptly with the Anschluss; in 1938 and 1939 he went to the Lucerne Festival instead, conducting an orchestra largely composed of refugees from Nazism. His sympathy with Jewish musicians led him to conduct the inaugural concert of the Palestine SO in Tel-Aviv (26 December 1936) and subsequent concerts in Jerusalem, Haifa, Cairo and Alexandria. In 1938 he returned to Palestine for further concerts.
During this period Toscanini was also heard in Paris, Brussels and Scandinavia and, with the BBC SO, in London (1935 and 1937–9, including a memorable Beethoven cycle at Queen’s Hall in 1939). But the centre of his activities in the last 25 years of his career was New York. In 1928, after two seasons as guest, then associate conductor (with Mengelberg) of the New York PO, he was put in charge of the amalgamated Philharmonic and Symphony, and he remained there until 1936, taking the orchestra on a brilliantly successful tour of Europe in 1930. In the opinion of many musicians this period was the zenith of his greatness, when he achieved performances of a clarity, precision and glowing intensity unknown until then.
Less than two years after leaving the New York PO he returned to New York, at the instigation of David Sarnoff and Samuel Chotzinoff, to direct the specially formed orchestra of the National Broadcasting Corporation. This was Toscanini’s main instrument during the last 17 years of his career. With it he made the bulk of his recordings. He took it on a tour of South America in 1940, and in 1950 across the USA and back; but New York was to remain his headquarters and his home. However, his roots in Italy were too strong ever to be broken. In 1946 he returned to Milan to inaugurate the rebuilt Scala with a concert of Italian operatic music, and conducted several concerts there in the following years, as well as opening the first postwar Venice Festival. He also gave two Brahms concerts in London at the Royal Festival Hall with the Philharmonia in 1952. His final concert, with the NBC, was on 4 April 1954. After retiring he continued to work on editing the tapes of his recordings almost until his death, two months short of his 90th birthday.
Energy, single-mindedness, impetuosity combined with an inflexible will, fanatical perfectionism, and an almost morbid self-criticism were among Toscanini’s most remarkable characteristics. He drove himself as few if any other executive musicians have done; the sheer amount of work he accomplished staggers the imagination. If he was ferocious in his demands on others, and in his criticism of them when they fell short of their best, he was still more dissatisfied with himself, rarely feeling that he had attained the ideal he envisaged. From this, as much as from a naturally dictatorial personality, stemmed the legendary and often terrifying outbursts of rage; as George Marek said, they were ‘manifestations of a mind so hotly functioning that when it was exposed to a cold temperature it began to foam, as do two inimical chemicals thrown into the same retort’.
The state of hypertension in which he constantly worked could be adversely reflected in his performances, in a certain relentlessness of tempo and an almost brutal vehemence of attack. This was most evident during the final period of his career, most notably in his interpretations of the Viennese Classical composers; and it is accentuated by the dry, constricted tone quality characteristic of the recordings dating from that period, most of them made in the NBC’s notorious Studio 8H. Toscanini’s working environment at the NBC (where the orchestra was a small and potentially expendable unit in a vast organization) was generally less congenial than it had been at the New York PO in the 1930s, when his performances – of Beethoven for example – seem to have been a good deal freer and more ample. In any case, the positive and far more significant side of his impatience was the electric intensity of his finest interpretations, which, for all their meticulous care for textural detail, gave the impression of being conceived and carried out as single organic wholes: they seemed in some mysterious way to relive the fiery moment of the music’s actual creation. Toscanini had exceptional feeling for large-scale musical architecture, for rhythmic continuity, for the singing line and the wide-spanned arch of melody; and (despite his self-doubts) there was a force in him, unanalysable but irresistible, which exerted a magnetic power over orchestras.
These qualities, together with his uncanny musical memory, his dominating personality and his insistence on the primacy and purity of the musical text, made him one of the great cult figures of his time (though he himself was uninterested in the trappings of fame). For many people he was a god who could do no wrong: Toscanini’s way, being the composer’s own as set down in the score, was right, and necessarily invalidated other conductors’ or at least exposed them as inferior. Toscanini’s attitude to interpretation (which was, in fact, more pragmatic than his admirers imagined) had been formed in natural reaction to the shoddy Italian performing traditions in which he grew up, and his example undoubtedly helped to foster the modern spirit of respect for the composer’s intentions. But it led in turn to the myth of the objective and therefore faithful interpretation, as opposed to the subjective and wilful one epitomized by Toscanini’s rival Furtwängler. Recently there has been a fresh reaction, towards a more flexible conception of interpretation of the printed score, and it is probable that Furtwängler’s influence among younger musicians is now greater than Toscanini’s. Yet Toscanini’s extraordinary genius remains one of the great phenomena of the history of musical performance in the last 100 years, and marks a highpoint in the development of the conductor’s art.
During his later years his repertory was criticized for being narrow and in particular for ignoring contemporary works; but by then he was an old man handicapped by failing sight. He was not interested in the music of Mahler (with whom he had shared a season at the Metropolitan Opera in 1908–9) nor in the Second Viennese School or neo-classical Stravinsky. His taste, which was largely formed in the 19th century, was in fact unusually wide. He was a notable interpreter of composers as various as Puccini, Berlioz, Brahms, Debussy, Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss. But he was at his greatest in the music of his three favourites, Beethoven, Wagner and Verdi; his recording of Falstaff (made in 1950) will remain a classic of re-creation and a monument to his vitality and interpretative insight.
Toscanini, who was married to the daughter of a Milanese banker, had a son, Walter, and two daughters, Wanda (who married the pianist Vladimir Horowitz) and Wally.
DAVID CAIRNS
D. Bonardi: Toscanini: il creatore, l’uomo, la sua arte, le sue interpretazioni famose (Milan, 1929)
S.W. Hoeller: Arturo Toscanini (New York, 1943)
A. Segre: ‘Toscanini: the First Forty Years’, MQ, xxxiii (1947), 149–77
H. Taubmann: ‘Toscanini in America’, MQ, xxxiii (1947), 178–87
F. Sacchi: Toscanini (Milan, 1951; Eng. trans., rev., abridged, 1957, as The Magic Baton)
H. Taubman: The Maestro: the Life of Arturo Toscanini (New York, 1951)
C. Sartori: ‘The Scala under Toscanini’, Opera, v (1954), 266–9, 329–34, 485–90, 554–9, 620–25, 663–70, 730–39; repr. in The Bedside Book of Opera, ed. H. Rosenthal (London, 1965)
S. Chotzinoff: Toscanini: an Intimate Portrait (New York, 1956/R)
R.C. Marsh: Toscanini and the Art of Orchestral Performance (London, 1956/R)
D. Matthews: ‘Toscanini and Beethoven’, Gramophone, xxxiv (1956–7), 361–2, 441–2
A. Della Corte: Toscanini visto da un critico (Turin, 1958)
B.H. Haggin: Conversations with Toscanini (New York, 1959, enlarged 2/1979); repr. in B.H. Haggin: Arturo Toscanini: Contemporary Recollections of the Maestro, ed. T. Hathaway (New York, 1989)
S. Hughes: The Toscanini Legacy (London, 1959, enlarged 2/1969) [with discography by W. Toscanini]
F. Sacchi: Toscanini: un secolo di musica (Milan, 1960)
G. Valdengo: Ho cantato con Toscanini (Como, 1962)
S. Antek and R. Hupka: This was Toscanini (New York, 1963)
B.H. Haggin: The Toscanini Musicians Knew (New York, 1967); repr. in B.H. Haggin: Arturo Toscanini: Contemporary Recollections of the Maestro, ed. T. Hathaway (New York, 1989)
H.C. Schonberg: The Great Conductors (New York,1967/R)
G.N. Vetro: Arturo Toscanini alla Regia Scuola del Carmine in Parma (Parma, 1974)
G.R. Marek: Toscanini (New York, 1975)
H. Sachs: Toscanini (London, 1978/R)
A. Della Corte: Arturo Toscanini (Pordenone, 1981)
J. Horowitz: Understanding Toscanini (New York, 1987)
H. Sachs: Reflections on Toscanini (New York, 1991)
D.C. Meyer: The NBC Symphony Orchestra (diss., University of California, 1994)
D.C. Meyer: ‘Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra: High, Middle and Low Culture’, Perspectives on American Music: 1900–1950, ed. M. Saffle (New York, 1999)