The Perfectionist

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The rehearsal was over; the guest conductor stepped down from the podium. Said Maestro Toscanini, who had been sitting quietly in a back seat scrutinizing the score: "Now! That man really knows how to play that music ... I play it like a pig!" The little knot of courtiers around Toscanini hastened to assure him that it wasn't so. The old man turned on them with one of his sudden, unpredictable thunderclaps: "Oh, so you think I don't know music?" As he marched off he sputtered: "The trouble with all of you is--you have all been poisoned by me!"

For 62 years now, the "poison" of Arturo Toscanini has been seeping out into the world. Drugged by it, millions of music lovers (and not a few critics) have come to regard all of the Maestro's music with dumb and unquestioning adoration. Certainly he has brought the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner and Verdi to life as no other man has. He is now a white-haired little man of 81, and when a human being reaches that age, his critics, remembering his finer hours, are apt to temper their judgments with mercy.

No one need make that kind of apology for Toscanini--and no one ever has. The "poison" that he spreads has only grown more potent and magical with the years. Today, the crowds that choke Manhattan's Radio City on Saturday nights for the Maestro's broadcast concerts hear the music of a man who is without question the greatest living conductor. They also look upon--and this is Toscanini's secret --an incorruptible man in a corruptible world.

Words & Music. Last week, Maestro Toscanini was busy brewing one of his favorite prescriptions in his own precise and painstaking way. Next week in Carnegie Hall he will conduct the Verdi Requiem in a charity performance for the New York Infirmary. And at $5 to $25 a seat and $250 a box, Carnegie Hall is already sold out, for the biggest gross in its history.

No one has ever had to beg Toscanini to play for charity--although he has refused to play for dictators. And he venerates Verdi above all other composers. For the past two months he has been teaching Verdi's score to his soloists. In his long, low-ceiling dressing room on the eighth floor of the RCA Building, he has sat at the piano, croaking and gesticulating at red-haired Soprano Herva Nelli, while a picture of Verdi stared at her from the piano's littered top. "Nelli," he pleaded, "please do use the expression on your face that you feel in the music. That will bring out the words and the music too." It was an old insistence of his. In rehearsal for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony he had stopped a soloist and asked him, "Do you know what you are singing about? You are singing of brotherhood, but in your face you look like you hate everyone. That will show in your music."

Note & Nuance. Not very long ago, Soprano Nelli was a virtual unknown whom the Maestro had molded and hammered into a fine Desdemona for his broadcast of Otello (TIME, Dec. 15). She knew he would work with her on every note and nuance until the concert began; she also knew that if her singing the day before the concert was a flight below his perfectionist standards, out she would go. Toscanini once told a musician, "God tells me how the music should sound, but you get in my way"; he is a man who regards an imperfection in the performance of a composer's music as no better than the kiss of Judas Iscariot. When listening to playback records of the Otello broadcast at his home, he stomped to the phonograph, stopped the record and roared: "At this point, I was betrayed!"

To Toscanini, an erring musician is not a blunderer, he is an "assassin"; hands folded, the Maestro stands, humble with rage, before the player, then erupts: "Ver-gogna!" (shame). Once when the entire NBC Symphony seemed to be off in its playing, Toscanini roared: "Do you know what I am going to do? I am going to open a whore house, and not one musician can get in."

Head in Hands. Compromise is one word Arturo Toscanini never uses. Once in Salzburg, he adamantly refused to have a certain soloist in an opera because he felt he didn't look the part. He has canceled concerts at the last minute because he felt the orchestra was insufficiently rehearsed. No commands or considerations --financial or humane--have ever been able to shake him.

He is rarely satisfied with his own magnificent performances, and, notoriously, almost never pleased by any other conductor's. After some of his own concerts, he has gone into his dressing room to sit for hours, head in hands. More often than not, he blames himself, mutters over & over, "I am a stupid man." He astonished friends after one recent concert by politely refusing his customary glass of champagne, saying with a sweetly penitent smile: "No thank you, tonight I will take only water." He likewise surprised the orchestra and chorus after the recent performance of the Ninth Symphony. Mopping his forehead with a handkerchief, he said wearily: "I think that's the best I can do." RCA Victor has never been able to get a recording of the Ninth out of him which he would allow them to release. In fact, their files are full of performances which the Maestro has not okayed.

Artistic Outrage. Toscanini was always uncompromising, even before he was the great conductor who could afford to be. As a "beardless bambino" of 20, with only a season's conducting of a road-show opera company behind him, he was hired to play a concert in Turin, and demanded two rehearsals. The orchestra manager would grant him only one, despite young Toscanini's warnings that one would not be enough. When concert time came, Toscanini went home and went to bed. When they tried to rout him out, all he would say was: "The orchestra is not ready. I will not conduct." The audience was waiting, but the concert was canceled.

When his career was still in the making 45 years ago, he resigned from Milan's famed La Scala rather than submit to what he considered the artistic outrage of encores. Once in Palermo, hot-blooded Sicilians threatened to mob him because he wouldn't respond to their cries of Bis! bis! (encore). He was only saved by a Mafia leader who admired his courage. He got into repeated tiffs with edgy prima-donnas during his seven-year stay at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. When one told him, "You cannot treat me like this, I am the star," he replied: "Madam, there are only stars in the heavens, there are no stars in my performances."

Corpses & Flowers. He hates to take bows, refuses to take them alone when there are soloists in the performance. He was visibly furious when the soloists in Otello tricked him by going offstage by another exit and hiding until Toscanini was forced to face the bravoing audience alone.

He believes that all credit is due to the composer (he repeatedly tells his musicians in rehearsal: "It is not I who want this fortissimo, it is Beethoven"), and considers himself the mere unworthy agent of the music. After one stirring performance with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony years ago, a huge floral wreath was brought to the stage for him. Toscanini was so angry and so flustered that he ran offstage, kept running until he reached his suite in the Astor Hotel, a dozen blocks away. (Of floral tributes, he says, "They are for primadonnas and corpses; I am neither.")

Bread & Water. Firebrands are not uncommon; but firebrands that burn with the hard and gemlike flame of Toscanini are rare. How did the little giant (he is a little over five feet) get that way? His ancestors were of peasant stock; his father was a poor tailor in Parma; neither his father nor his mother was interested in music.

Yet, at nine, young Arturo was already nicknamed "Genio" by his classmates at the Parma Conservatory. He had enrolled as a cello student, but his first love was opera. He would sneak into the "piano cell" (Toscanini remembers the conservatory as "monastic") and play passages from operas for hours. When he was caught at it, he was put on bread & water for a week. But when he graduated con lode distinta at 18, his certificate included "an award for piano and composition. (Toscanini has never since tried his hand at composition. The conservatory, however, still treasures his schoolboy manuscripts.)

Batons & Frock Coats. Arturo got his next lode distinta one night a year later in Rio de Janeiro. The opera was Verdi's Aida, and the house was jammed. Just before curtain time, the Brazilian conductor quarreled with his Italian musicians, and refused to conduct. Both the assistant conductor and the chorus master were booed from the podium. Then orchestra men reminded the frantic impresario of the little cellist who seldom looked at his music when he played because he knew it all by heart. Young Arturo was hurried from the pit, bundled into an oversize frock coat and handed a baton.

The audience settled down to enjoy at least a good laugh. This little scarecrow figure who closed the score before he started to play looked as if he might furnish some fun. But by the end of Act I, they were on their feet, cheering. At 19, Arturo Toscanini had won his first ovation as a conductor.

Ideas & Ideals. But all the bravos in South America and in Turin, where he conducted next, couldn't have kept Toscanini from a job he had his eye on. With his cello under his arm, he scurried to Milan to join the orchestra--as second cellist--that was preparing the premiere of Verdi's new opera, Otello.

To this day Toscanini thinks of Verdi with the same mixture of fear, awe, love and respect with which his own musicians now regard him. From Verdi, he got most of his ideas and ideals of conducting. Verdi, like most composers, was outspoken against conductors who felt they had to "interpret" (i.e., change) his music. Said he: "My manuscripts are clear enough, but I have practically never heard my works interpreted as I imagined them."

Certainly some conductors (and some famous ones) make the strings weep when the composer only intended them to sigh. But if all that is needed is to follow the composer's explicit directions, what's all the fuss about conducting? To the average listener, it might seem that a mechanical metronome would serve as well as a human one. There are other conscientious conductors, just as selflessly anxious as Toscanini to express the composer's intent. Why does Toscanini tower over them?

The answer is that there is much more to conducting than just keeping time; though even keeping time in a complicated score isn't always easy. At any given moment the flute player or the violinist is concerned only with his own note, which the conductor must blend--in time and volume--with the playing of 100 others. And while concentrating on the notes being played at any given moment, the conductor must also have one part of his mind listening to the entire piece. He must be on guard not to exhaust prematurely, in a too early climax, the excitement meant for a later one; to make each part shine for itself, and fit in a whole. It is not a metronome that is required, but taste, talent, culture and care--and some musical X besides. Toscanini has that X blazoned on his forehead.

In young Toscanini, Verdi found a conductor he could trust. Before a performance of Verdi's Quattro Pezzi Sacri, Toscanini once called on him, told him that he felt a retard was needed in one passage of the Te Deum. When Verdi heard him play it, he patted him on the back, said: "Splendid! That is just how I heard it in my mind." "Why didn't you write it that way?" asked Toscanini. Said Verdi: "I was afraid it would be exaggerated." Said Giacomo Puccini of Toscanini, who had conducted the world premiere of his La Boheme: "Toscanini conducts a work not just as the written score directs, but as the composer had imagined it, though his hand failed him when the moment came to write down what he heard so clearly in his head."

Golden Age. In the 50 years since Puccini and Verdi gave their imprimatur to Arturo Toscanini, the world has learned how right they were. La Scala had 15 of its most glowing years under the Maestro's baton. With Toscanini in the pit, and Caruso, Melba, Scotti, Destinn and Sembrich on the stage, Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera saw its golden age. Salzburg and Bayreuth acclaimed him. The New York Philharmonic-Symphony, which paid him the highest salary it has ever paid a conductor--about $80,000 a year--has never been the same since he left it in 1936.

Toscanini has always left orchestras when he felt blocked--by money or managers--from achieving what some consider his fantastic standards of perfection.

Ever since NBC Musical Director Samuel Chotzinoff (whom some call NBC's Vice President in charge of Toscanini) persuaded the Maestro to come back from his native Italy ten years ago, promising him an orchestra all his own, the fear that he might walk out again has roamed the corridors of Radio City, unnerving strong-nerved executives.

For dictators are no match for Toscanini. Once a friend of Mussolini, he had been his running mate on the socialist ticket in the general elections of 1919 ("we got about three votes each"). But when the Duce marched on Rome, Toscanini publicly and violently denounced him.

He refused to play the Fascist anthem Giovanezza (because, he says, he didn't consider it music). He was once set upon by Fascist hoodlums, but Mussolini recoiled from taking official action against him. He refused to play in Germany under Hitler. He has never played in Russia, although he was invited by both the Czars and the Soviets.

Drive & Energy. Some say that Toscanini is a dictator himself. He certainly seems to run his own orchestra tyrannically. But few of his musicians can agree on exactly how he works his magic on them. Fear and respect, naturally. Some also explain it by the inexhaustible energy he still has at 81. Others find an indefinable inspiration in his physical embodiment of the music: not so much in his croaking of themes as the orchestra plays, but in the exultation that sometimes lights his face, and in the meaningful sweeps of his left hand (his right hand marks the time; his left signals the expression he wants). He is surely one of the world's greatest natural actors--and on the podium he acts with complete naturalness, absorbed in the music and oblivious of the audience. No windmilling conductor, he leads with the economy of motion that Shakespeare asked of actors.*

When Toscanini is not on his podium-pinnacle, his musicians usually feel free to joke with him, drop into his dressing room to tell him how a solo passage feels to them (he doesn't always agree). He was particularly pleased when Local 802 of the A.F.M. made him an honorary member (he carries a gold card) because, he says, he likes to feel close to his men. They have learned to take his tantrums as he means them: impersonally. They know, as he often pleadingly tells them, that "there are two Toscaninis."

The other Toscanini is the little old man who loves to go to parties, whirl down Manhattan's Hudson River drive from Villa Pauline, his Riverdale home, to Rockefeller Center in his black Cadillac, and play practical jokes on his family and friends. Once he arranged to have a rubber knife put at his wife's place at a dinner party, was furious when she found the meat tender enough to cut with a fork, and didn't use it.

He still has a quick eye for good-looking women, and an obvious attraction to them. He makes a point of telling friends that he never looks in mirrors, even to shave, says, "I hate my face." Friends who went with him to see the first showing of The Hymn of the Nations, the movie he made for OWI during the war, said he looked away self-consciously whenever his image came on the screen. But he dresses fastidiously, is visibly pleased when a friend remarks on a new coat or suit (most of which he still has made for him in Italy).

"A Bad Character." He likes to think of himself as shy, humble, unassuming, courteous--and, off the podium, he usually is. Toscanini the musician seems to be almost as fearful an object to him as it does to others. After an explosive day of ranting, raving, stomping and swearing in rehearsal, he will sometimes sidle up to an intimate friend at a party, and say with downcast eyes: "I have a bad character." Most of his friends know the right response. "No, Maestro, you don't have a bad character; you just have a bad temper." But he will continue: "I was bad. I don't know what makes me do those things, but I can't help it. Do you think I am bad? I am not; I am a good man, really."

Sometimes, on awful occasions, he brings the other Toscanini to a party. Then he glowers in a corner, refuses to talk, turns away food and drinks and generally casts a pall over everything. At one party, a waggish friend suggested hanging a sign around his neck, "Do not feed the Maestro." Another evening was saved only when a nonartistic friend, arriving late, went over to the sulking Toscanini, slapped him on the back and said: "Did you see that Louis-Walcott fight?--worst fight I ever saw." Toscanini brightened immediately. Ramming his fist into his hand, he shouted, "He couldn't hit him, he couldn't hit him." The rest of the evening was a success.

In the past year, since he has had a television set in his home, Toscanini has become an authority on boxing. Although he never attended fights because he considered them "savage," he now knows all the rules and points. When friends visit him at his eight-acre, 22-room estate overlooking the Hudson at Riverdale, they often find him watching a fight, jumping up & down in his chair like an eight-year-old. When a fighter is knocked down, he leaps up, thrusts his finger at the prostrate figure on the screen, yells at him, "Die! die! die!"

He also likes children's programs on television. A friend recently caught him watching Du Mont's program "Small Fry Club," asked him, "What are you watching, Maestro?" Toscanini replied, never taking his eyes from the screen: "Fry Small." Last month, when NBC first televised his concert, the Maestro watched the audience and musicians on a set in his dressing room until it was time to go on.

"No Pancia." Toscanini himself is still in fighting trim. He is slightly heavier than he once was, but likes to point to his midriff and say, "Look, no pancia.'" He can still bound up stairs two at a time, although he seldom does because, he says, people think it's undignified. Often before rehearsals he jumps up on an office couch, feet together, to test his legs. Before a recent performance, he jumped up & down trying to reach the ceiling, crying, "I am an old man. Why has God afflicted me with the blood of a 17-year-old?" He is continually on the go, sleeps only three or four hours a night, has never had an operation or been seriously ill. He has all of his own teeth, although friends suspect that when he recently insisted on being driven into Manhattan without telling anyone where he was going, he went to a dentist to have a tooth pulled.

When, on their golden wedding anniversary, NBC gave the Maestro and buxom Carla Toscanini a clock that supposedly would run for 50 years without rewinding, Toscanini beamed happily and said: "Just think, when this clock stops, no one here in this room will be here but me." Last week Carla was in Italy, and son Walter and his family were staying with the Maestro at the big house in Riverdale. Daughter Wanda visits frequently (with her pianist husband, Vladimir Horowitz). He often talks by telephone with his other daughter Wally, the Countess Castel-barco, who lives in Italy.

Toscanini was baptized a Roman Catholic, but has seldom gone to church in recent years, except for the first communions of his two grandchildren. He refuses to conduct without a heavy, brass-framed strip of pictures of his children in his pocket. (The strip includes a picture of son Giorgio, who died at eight in South America.)

A man with a deep moral sense, he is outraged by man's inhumanity to man. The worst tantrum he ever threw was on the day of the Austrian Anschluss. He tried to rehearse, but left the podium after the first minute. He didn't stop raging until he had almost kicked a massive table to pieces, pulled all his scores from their shelves, nearly wrecked his dressing room. Then he sat down and cried.

Scrupulously honest, he detects sham of all kinds instantly. Years ago, after Richard Strauss had asked him to conduct the first performance of his Salome, then gave it to another conductor, Toscanini went all the way from Milan to Vienna to tell him, "Strauss, as a musician I take my hat off to you; as a man [Toscanini here went through a furious pantomime of a man clomping on hats repeatedly] I put on twelve hats."

"Not for Me." Toscanini is sometimes criticized for not playing enough contemporary music, or for choosing, in the current music he does play, the second-rate or derivative. But the Maestro knows his own limits: he will not play music he is not sure he understands (although he has tried Gershwin without much success). Looking at a new score, he seldom says, "This is bad." Instead, he says, "This is not music for me." He does not trust music that does not touch his heart. He feels that he was a pioneer in his youth, and that it is now up to younger conductors to pioneer the music of their generation. His ambition now, he says, is "to come closer to the secrets of Beethoven and a few other eternal masters."

For most music lovers, Toscanini already comes closer to the secrets than anyone before him. He does his best to ignore the legend of his own greatness, but he knows that it is around. At a rehearsal of his all-Debussy concert a month ago, he was flushed with a fever of 102 degrees. His friends tried to persuade the old man not to conduct, but he was insistent. Said he, as he trudged out to the podium: "Sometimes I must act like Toscanini."

* From Hamlet's famous advice to the players: ". . . Do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness."

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