Arturo Toscanini

Arturo Toscanini was born on March 25, 1867, in Parma, a city in northern Italy with a proud operatic tradition and a strong association with Giuseppe Verdi, who had grown up in the surrounding countryside ^[1]. His father, Claudio Toscanini, was a tailor who had fought as a volunteer with Giuseppe Garibaldi during the campaigns for Italian unification, and the household was poor but steeped in patriotic feeling and popular song ^[2].

The boy's musical gifts appeared early. At the age of nine he entered the Regio Conservatorio di Musica in Parma on a scholarship, studying the cello as his principal instrument along with composition ^[1]. Fellow students later recalled his phenomenal memory: he could reportedly absorb entire scores after limited study, a faculty that shaped his whole career. He graduated in 1885 with highest honors in cello and composition, and took work as an orchestral cellist, the conventional start for a conservatory graduate of modest means ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Arturo Toscanini before fame usually begins with a single evening in South America. In 1886, while touring Brazil as principal cellist and assistant chorus master with an Italian opera company, the nineteen year old was pushed forward in Rio de Janeiro to rescue a performance of Verdi's Aida after the scheduled conductor withdrew amid audience protests. Toscanini conducted the opera from memory, without a score, and the performance succeeded ^[1]. The episode, confirmed by contemporary accounts and retold in every serious Arturo Toscanini biography, launched him on the podium almost by accident ^[3].

Back in Italy, Toscanini built a conducting career in the busy circuit of provincial and metropolitan opera houses. He continued to play cello for a time, and he sat in the cello section at La Scala for the world premiere of Verdi's Otello in 1887, an experience he treasured for the rest of his life ^[2]. Through the late 1880s and 1890s he conducted in cities including Turin, Genoa, Bologna, and Palermo, gaining a reputation for discipline, textual fidelity, and an intolerance of routine that startled singers accustomed to indulgent accompanists ^[1].

Two world premieres marked him as a leading figure of the new generation. On May 21, 1892, he conducted the first performance of Ruggero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci at the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan, and on February 1, 1896, he led the premiere of Giacomo Puccini's La bohème at the Teatro Regio in Turin ^[1]. In Turin he also conducted the first Italian performance of Wagner's Götterdämmerung, part of a lifelong effort to bring the German symphonic and operatic repertoire to Italian audiences ^[2].

In 1898, at thirty one, Toscanini was appointed principal conductor of La Scala in Milan, Italy's foremost opera house ^[1]. He set about reforming its habits: he insisted on lowered house lights during performances, curtailed the practice of granting encores mid opera, and demanded that audiences treat the theater as a place of serious art rather than fashionable display. The reforms provoked resistance, and disputes with the public and management led him to resign in 1903, though he returned for a second period from 1906 to 1908 ^[3].

The list of Arturo Toscanini achievements spans three continents and nearly seven decades of performance. In 1908 he crossed the Atlantic to become a principal conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where he remained until 1915. During those seasons he led the company's first performances of works including Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, and on December 10, 1910, he conducted the world premiere of Puccini's La fanciulla del West, written for the Metropolitan with Enrico Caruso in the leading tenor role ^[1].

After the First World War, during which he conducted benefit concerts and at one point led a military band near the front lines, Toscanini returned to La Scala as artistic director in 1920 and rebuilt the house into a disciplined ensemble of international standing ^[2]. In 1926 he conducted the posthumous premiere of Puccini's unfinished Turandot, famously stopping the first performance at the point where the composer's manuscript ended ^[1]. From 1926 he began appearing with the New York Philharmonic, and he served as its principal conductor from 1929 to 1936, leading the orchestra on a celebrated European tour in 1930 ^[3].

His fame reached its widest audience through broadcasting. In 1937 the National Broadcasting Company formed the NBC Symphony Orchestra specifically for him, and for seventeen seasons his radio concerts, and later a series of pioneering television broadcasts beginning in 1948, carried symphonic music into millions of American homes ^[4]. The recordings he made with the NBC Symphony, including complete cycles of Beethoven and Brahms symphonies and a famous 1954 farewell to the podium, remain in print and continue to define his interpretive legacy ^[5]. He was also the first conductor who was not German or Austrian to appear at the Bayreuth Festival, conducting there in 1930 and 1931, and he led the opening concerts of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, later the Israel Philharmonic, in 1936 ^[2].

Toscanini's public life cannot be separated from his opposition to dictatorship. Although he had briefly appeared on a Fascist candidate list in Milan in 1919, before the movement seized power, he turned decisively against Benito Mussolini's regime and refused to conduct the Fascist anthem Giovinezza at his concerts ^[2]. In May 1931, after declining to play the anthem at a concert in Bologna, he was assaulted by Fascist supporters outside the theater. He never conducted in Italy again while Mussolini held power ^[3].

His stands against Nazi Germany were equally firm. After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Toscanini withdrew from the Bayreuth Festival, giving up an engagement of enormous prestige, and in 1938, following the German annexation of Austria, he broke with the Salzburg Festival as well ^[2]. His decision to travel to Tel Aviv in 1936 to conduct the inaugural concerts of an orchestra largely made up of Jewish refugee musicians was widely understood as a rebuke to European antisemitism, and he refused any fee for the engagement ^[4].

During the Second World War he conducted benefit concerts for the Allied cause in the United States and appeared in the 1943 Office of War Information film Hymn of the Nations, conducting Verdi's cantata with the tenor Jan Peerce ^[4]. When Milan was liberated, he contributed to the rebuilding of the bombed La Scala, and on May 11, 1946, he returned to conduct the concert that reopened the restored house, an occasion of intense public emotion in Italy ^[1].

In 1897 Toscanini married Carla De Martini, and the couple had four children: Walter, Wally, Giorgio, who died in childhood of diphtheria, and Wanda ^[2]. The family home was in Milan, though the conductor's engagements kept him traveling for much of the year. Wanda Toscanini married the pianist Vladimir Horowitz in 1933, joining two of the most famous names in twentieth century music, and Walter later devoted himself to managing his father's affairs and preserving his archive ^[3].

Colleagues described a man of contradictions: austere in his devotion to the printed score yet volcanic in rehearsal, where his rages, broken batons, and withering sarcasm became legendary among orchestral musicians. Players who endured his tempers often testified that his demands produced performances of unusual clarity and intensity ^[3]. He was severely nearsighted, one reason he conducted everything from memory, and he suffered lifelong stage anxiety despite his commanding public image ^[2].

His private conduct did not always match the moral clarity of his public stands. Biographers, drawing on his voluminous surviving correspondence, have documented long extramarital relationships, including with the soprano Rosina Storchio and with Ada Mainardi, to whom he wrote hundreds of revealing letters in the 1930s ^[6]. The letters, published in 2002, also preserve his caustic judgments of colleagues and his anguished commentary on European politics ^[6].

Toscanini spent his final two decades based in the United States, living at Villa Pauline in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, overlooking the Hudson River ^[4]. The NBC Symphony seasons continued through the 1940s and early 1950s, supplemented by tours, including a transcontinental journey across the United States with the orchestra in 1950 that drew capacity audiences in city after city ^[5].

Age scarcely diminished his schedule. In his eighties he recorded complete opera broadcasts, among them Verdi's Otello, Aida, and Falstaff, that collectors still treat as reference documents of Italian performance style ^[5]. His last public concert took place at Carnegie Hall on April 4, 1954, an all Wagner program during which he suffered a momentary lapse of memory, an episode that distressed him deeply. He announced his retirement shortly afterward, and NBC disbanded the orchestra, though its members continued for a time independently as the Symphony of the Air ^[4].

Toscanini died at his Riverdale home in New York on January 16, 1957, at the age of eighty nine, after a series of strokes ^[1]. His body was returned to Italy, and enormous crowds attended his funeral in Milan, where he was buried in the family tomb at the Cimitero Monumentale. La Scala honored him with a performance conducted by his former assistant Victor de Sabata ^[3].

Few musicians have shaped the modern idea of the conductor as thoroughly as Toscanini. His insistence on fidelity to the score, precise ensemble, and continuity of line, summarized in his frequent instruction to sing, became a benchmark against which later conductors were measured, whether they embraced or resisted his approach ^[3]. Critics have debated his tempos and his sometimes driven intensity, and the scholar Joseph Horowitz argued in 1987 that American publicity inflated him into a cult figure, yet even skeptics concede the historical weight of his example ^[7].

The documentary record he left is unusually rich. Hundreds of hours of NBC broadcasts, commercial recordings for RCA Victor, and ten television concerts survive, and RCA issued his complete approved recordings in an eighty five disc edition in 2012 ^[5]. The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts holds the Toscanini Legacy collection of scores, letters, and recordings donated by his family, a primary resource for scholars ^[8].

Basic Arturo Toscanini facts endure in public memory: the teenage debut in Rio de Janeiro, the premieres of Pagliacci, La bohème, and Turandot, the broken engagement with Bayreuth, the reopening of La Scala in 1946. In Parma, his birthplace on Borgo Rodolfo Tanzi is preserved as the Museo Casa Natale Arturo Toscanini, and institutions from conservatory prizes to an orchestra bearing his name keep the connection between the conductor and his native city alive ^[1].