Toscanini’s pursuit of perfection

Toscanini. By Harvey Sachs. W.W. Norton; 944 pages; $39.95. To be published in Britain in July; £29.99.

ASK music-lovers to name a conductor, and among the greats they are likely to mention Arturo Toscanini. The Italian, who died in 1957, is perhaps best known for leading the NBC Symphony Orchestra from the 1930s, which had a large following in America. Yet Toscanini was an elite musician as well as a popular one. And he worked with the world’s most prestigious orchestras, as the principal conductor of La Scala in Milan and as a conductor at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany. Harvey Sachs has written the definitive biography of this great, and colourful, character.

Mr Sachs has already published a biography of Toscanini, in 1978. Yet this is not merely a new edition of an old book. Mr Sachs has drawn on a batch of Toscanini’s letters unearthed in the 1990s, as well as the archives of many of the organisations he worked with, including La Scala’s. The result is an entirely new study.

Drawing on an enormous range of evidence, Mr Sachs paints a vivid picture of the great conductor. His first job with the baton came by accident, while he was on tour in Rio de Janeiro in 1886, after an audience refused to listen to the scheduled maestro. The 19-year-old Toscanini, engaged as a cellist, agreed to take charge only after a panicked subscriber ran in, shouting: “Isn’t there anyone in the orchestra who can conduct ‘Aida’?” As was his wont, he knew the entire work from memory.

Before long he was leading ensembles all over the world, usually to rave reviews. Critics praised Toscanini’s interpretations for hewing closely to composers’ intentions. Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, a now almost unknown composer, sat in as Toscanini performed one of his pieces, gushing, “I come here to hear every single nuance, every bit of phrasing that I intended, expressed by this marvellous man.”

The pursuit of perfection did not come without costs, however. Toscanini slept barely five hours a night and went for long stretches without seeing his children, to whom he did not think it worth his time to impart his musical knowledge. And though Mr Sachs lays to rest a long-standing myth that Toscanini once blinded a violinist in a fit of rage, tantrums were certainly common.

Toscanini had equally strong views on the merits of different composers. As he got older, he had little time for the works of Arnold Schönberg or Bela Bartok (though he did enjoy conducting Stravinsky). His oldest love may have been Giuseppe Verdi, Italy’s greatest opera composer, with whom he became friends. “Down on your knees to Verdi!” he implored his mother as a teenager.

Yet more than anyone else, Richard Wagner (1813-83) casts a long shadow over the conductor’s life. Toscanini incorporated many of the musical ideas Wagner advocated. He favoured dimming the lights in the opera house, for instance, so that the audience would focus on the performance. This provoked fury among Italians who came to the opera house not to listen but to flirt and eat ice cream. Like Wagner, he wanted the orchestra in a pit below the singers rather than on the stage, especially important when performing the bombastic works of Verdi or Wagner, so as not to overpower the singers. La Scala’s first orchestra pit was constructed in 1907. Toscanini celebrated by performing Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung”.

Alongside this lengthy examination of Toscanini’s approach to music, Mr Sachs treats the reader to a bit of gossip. Toscanini had a voracious sexual appetite and innumerable lovers. Mr Sachs has dug out letters which Toscanini exchanged with women all over the world. Some drip with sexual innuendo.

Of his time

Mr Sachs also uses Toscanini’s life as a window onto a wider discussion of musical and historical themes. He documents Toscanini’s many performances in Argentina, then one of the world’s richest countries. And his portrait of the music scene in turn-of-the-century Italy is fascinating. Musicians would compete to sit in the prestigious seats in the orchestra; the police were sometimes needed to break up fights. Audiences would aggressively demand encores of the entire performance if they had enjoyed it (Toscanini, however, did not like pandering to such extravagant requests). And despite the myth to the contrary, opera singers worked just as hard back then as they do today. A production of “Götterdämmerung” that opened in Turin in 1895 was performed every other day for six weeks and only the roles of Brünnhilde and Gutrune were double-cast.

Unafraid as he was to court controversy, it was inevitable that Toscanini would be caught up in politics. By the 1920s Benito Mussolini was tightening his grip on Italy. Fiercely anti-fascist, Toscanini refused to accept accolades from a government he did not like. Before long, Mussolini’s regime had amassed a massive police file on the conductor. Things turned nasty at a concert in Bologna in 1931. On Toscanini’s refusal to play the national anthem, a fascist hit him in the face and others chanted “A morte!” (“Death!”). By 1937 he was in America, with NBC broadcasting his work to dozens of radio stations across North America and Europe.

Some readers may wish that Mr Sachs offered more of these rich historical descriptions and less of the minutiae: how important are the names of the ships that carried Toscanini between Europe and America? Or the precise mountain that Toscanini climbed while on holiday? After seeing ten newspaper reviews heaping praise on Toscanini, no one will doubt his greatness. By the umpteenth review over 700 pages, the reader may wish to read something else.

Yet this is a quibble. Mr Sachs’s writing style is precise, fluent and gripping. And one can dip in and out of the book, since Mr Sachs helpfully offers reminders of important characters and explains basic concepts. As a study of the life and times of one of the greatest conductors of all time, this book will not soon be bettered.