STEPHEN WALSH
Toscanini: Musician of Conscience Biographies of dead performing musicians, even more than biographies of dead actors, often end with an implied question mark. What can they tell us, beyond a few amusing or salacious anecdotes, a handful of review quotations (sycophantic or malicious), a discography, and interviews with widows, ex-wives, friends and maybe the odd enemy?
‘Many of today’s young musicians,’ Harvey Sachs suggests near the end of this second and hugely longer of his two Toscanini biographies, ‘barely know the names of the conductors, instrumentalists and singers who dominated the field only one or two generations ago.’
Well, a lot of my music students at Cardiff University couldn’t have told you much about Wagner or Debussy, never mind Toscanini. But at least Sachs proves, in these marvellously researched and continuously fascinating 900 pages, that Toscanini, unlike most performers, is worth studying for reasons that go beyond his brilliance as a conductor – which, as Sachs also remarks, is not necessarily well represented by his recordings, made only in the last twenty or so years of his career.
It’s true that we do not learn from this meticulous study exactly what it was that, in the years before and just after the First World War when he was conducting at La Scala and the Met, made him for those who heard him or played or sang under him simply the best, most refined, most profound and compelling; not only in Italian opera, but in the German classics, in Wagner, even in contemporary works such as Strauss’s Salome (he hated the later Strauss). The book is rich in accounts of his barely credible thoroughness in preparation and rehearsal, his photographic memory (he hardly ever conducted from a score), his genius for working with singers, his notorious explosions of rage, the intensity of his performances, and the often interminable ovations that greeted them. But the detail of the actual performances mostly escapes us.
I grew up with Toscanini’s late Beethoven recordings and the 1950 Falstaff, made in the acoustically remorseless studio 8H of the NBC. Brilliant though these are, I suspect that they represent only one aspect of his artistry, not without a touch of the brusqueness of extreme old age. What can his acclaimed 1900 Tristan at La Scala actually have been like (he only ever recorded the Prelude and Liebestod)? And what on earth would he have made of Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony, which he was scheduled to conduct in London in 1940? These are mysteries impenetrable even to the most assiduous of biographers.
The real key to Sachs’s book lies in its subtitle. Toscanini was a very great conductor, yes. Other great maestros – Klemperer, Kleiber, Bruno Walter, even the jealous Furtwängler – all The Oldie