Toscanini: Musician of Conscience
(Liveright, $40) Arturo Toscanini’s long, eventful life “would interest anybody,” said Jay Nordlinger in National Review. A tailor’s son, born in 1867 in Parma, Italy, he found his calling at 19 and strung together a 68-year career, attaining “a fame that is unthinkable for a classical musician in our own age.” Not only was he showered with applause in the world’s greatest concert halls. Not only did his music become appointment listening in millions of American living rooms. He was also worshipped the world over for having stood up against Mussolini and Hitler. The great conductor “now has a great biography”—a 900-page monument that has sweep as well as girth. The Toscanini we meet is easy to admire. He was “an SOB,” but he also “had greatness in his soul.”
Whatever the man’s flaws, “everything he did was in the service of music,” said Robert Gottlieb in The New York Times. A working musician by 14, he was playing cello in a touring opera company five years later when he was elected to serve as an emergency maestro and—because he’d memorized every part—instantly triumphed. Though he remained widely liked, he was cruelly demanding in rehearsals. Though loyal to staying married, he carried on passionate affairs with dozens of women. By refusing Mussolini’s demand that the Fascist anthem be played before all public concerts, he earned a beating by Blackshirts in 1931, yet persisted in his political resistance. By then he was conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and when he tired of that, a canny radio executive recruited him to lead the new NBC Symphony Orchestra—a crackerjack outfit built to Toscanini’s tastes. From the late 1940s on, “nothing could get between him and his adoring public.”
Some music critics have never forgiven him for his fame, said David Denby in The New Yorker. Because he did so much to push classical music to its pinnacle of popularity in America, he’s sometimes dismissed as middlebrow culture’s faux genius. But there’s good reason many of his contemporaries regarded him as the greatest. Every page of Harvey Sachs’ book showcases “the unending drive and conscientiousness” that Toscanini poured into his work, that he trained on the music of Beethoven, Verdi, Puccini, and so many others. Listen to the recordings now, and the sound is invariably “lean, transparent, surging.” He knew how to raise the listener’s pulse, and “some of the performances stagger belief.”