With Love

Eighty birthdays, thought Arturo Toscanini, were enough for a while. When his musicians sent him a present on his becoming an octogenarian two years ago, he forbade them to do it again. One relenting proviso: if they liked, they might each save a dime a year to buy him a present when he reached 90. Until then, he scowled, no more fuss.

One day last week, Arturo Toscanini reached a pink-and-white 82. There was no fuss. His musicians, a handful of distinguished singers, and a Robert Shaw-trained chorus of 60 voices gave him the kind of birthday present he could hardly grump about. In NBC's Manhattan studio 8-H, they played and sang their hearts out on the music the little maestro loves most.

Dressing-Room Drill. On his birthday they were just rehearsing for Toscanini's opera broadcast of the season--the riproaring, tearfully tender music of Verdi's Aida. The music meant something special to the maestro. He had conducted it in his Rio de Janeiro debut almost 63 years ago as a beardless bambino, and in his U.S. debut at Manhattan's Met in 1908.

As usual, Toscanini had picked singers who weren't too set in their own ways to learn his, then drilled them for weeks in his dressing room, clonking the piano himself.

The Met's Richard Tucker had never before tried the big, dramatic tenor role of Radames; Toscanini's favorite soprano, red-haired Herva Nelli, who had had to hold herself in as Desdemona in his 1947 broadcast of Otello, was getting a chance to open up as Aida. He had picked three newcomers: slim Norwegian Contralto Eva Gustavson (Amneris), who arrived in the U.S. last October, young Canadian Bass-Baritone Dennis Harbour (the King of Egypt), who a fortnight ago won the Met's radio auditions, and Soprano Teresa Randall (the Priestess), a finalist in the same contest. Baritone Giuseppe Valdengo (Amonasro), big Bass Norman Scott (Ramfis), Tenor Virginio Assandri (the Messenger), were all Toscanini veterans. NBC was doing its part in the old top-network tradition--spending an estimated $70,000 of its own money to put the show on just as Toscanini wanted it.

For the Living. Even so, the rehearsal was far from grumpless; if it had been, it wouldn't have been a Toscanini rehearsal or resulted in a Toscanini performance. Once, when a singer yelped on an entrance, the tireless little tyrant roared in his hoarse, drama-ridden voice: "No! NO!" then stood speechless, slapping his leg with his baton, trying to suppress what he calls his "bad character." Once, dripping-wet in his black alpaca rehearsal coat, the maestro stopped the brassy triumphal march: "No! Not for the dead. For the living, for the living!"

At week's end, a jampacked studio audience (some had written in last summer for the free but hard-to-get tickets) and several million listeners and televiewers heard the first two acts of Aida living as it has seldom lived before. For his 82nd birthday, the great conductor had given the world's music lovers a present: the kind of exact and exacting, passionate performance that is in his power to give, dedicated with love and devotion.

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