Maestro

"II Maestro e morto!" shouted the newsboys in Milan. Everyone understood. To Milan, and to much of the world, there was only one Maestro--Arturo Toscanini. At La Scala, long Toscanini's artistic home, scene of some of his greatest triumphs, a rehearsal for a new opera (by French Composer Francis Poulenc) was hastily called off.. As the musicians went home quietly, one violinist said: "He has gone on golden wings." In Milan's Casa di Riposo, which was founded by Verdi and to which Toscanini contributed, aged singers and musicians started a fast. And at Toscanini's Milan home, a veteran servant placed the traditional "book of condolences" in the entrance; for days, people passed by to inscribe their names. Millions all over the world added their names from a distance, including the President of the U.S., who said: "The music he created and the hatred of tyranny that was his are part of the legacy of our time."

Toscanini was dead after a stroke at 89. The short, precisely garbed body lay for two days in the coldly impersonal dignity of a Manhattan funeral parlor on Madison Avenue, and thousands filed past for a look. Along with friends and true admirers came a miscellaneous crowd who might never have heard a note Toscanini played, or who might not be able to tell one note from another, but who were sure that the little man had been a genius. And they were right.

End of an Era. His death closed not only a career but an era. Gone was the last human link with the great Italian romantics, a man who had learned Verdi's last great works from Verdi himself. The world knows no musician to fill his place.

As a conductor, he made fidelity to the composer his watchword. From the time he first mounted a podium as a "beardless bambino" of 19 (in 1886), no man ever swayed him from what he felt in his heart to be right, but in judging what was right, he relied not only on heart, but on his extraordinary taste and ear. His goal was perfection, and he sought it with the fervor of a knight seeking the Grail. In his own mind he never achieved it, but through the years, his music became ever cleaner and simpler. He was the ever-inquiring kind of man who could decide at 85 that (although he loved Wagner and Beethoven) "I have been poisoned all my life by the German approach to music," and attempt to scrub his performances even cleaner.

His origins were simple--his father was a poor Parma tailor--but his genius was plain in childhood. He never wanted to be anything but a musician, and he never was. He was often open and fun-loving among his friends, but toward the public he was shy. He shunned personal honors and shrank from personal publicity (he never granted a formal interview in his life). He was content with the limited kingdom of concert hall and home, and in that kingdom he was as absolute a monarch as ever lived. He was the highest-salaried classical conductor in history (up to $9,000 for a single broadcast). He had little interest in money as such, but proudly insisted musicians should be well paid as a measure of their worth. Though he sometimes acted like a savage, in his heart he hoped that, like Verdi, whom he venerated, he was really "a good man."

"How Did I Do It?" Away from his music, he sometimes seemed like a child. He liked to watch children's programs or boxing on television, and he could shake with laughter watching an unsuspecting guest try to cut meat with a folding knife. The stories that clustered about him bore testimony to the fact that he was (in the words of a friend) at once naive and crafty, simple and complex, gracious and spiteful. When a rehearsal failed to meet his standards, he was capable of kicking over the music stand and storming offstage to rip scores from his studio bookshelves and upset furniture. He loved the players, and yet often regarded them as his enemies. "I want to kill them," he would cry passionately after a bad rehearsal. "They are beasts." But he blamed himself just as bitterly, and he could be generous in his praise of a good performance: "Santa Madonna! Now I am happy, you are happy, Beethoven is happy."

Toscanini left the mark of his honesty and passion on the conscience of his musical generation, particularly on every artist who ever worked with him--at La Scala, the Metropolitan (1908-15), in the New York Philharmonic-Symphony (1928-36), at Salzburg, at Bayreuth and the NBC Symphony Orchestra (1937-54). Few could define exactly how the little tyrant worked his magic with them. As he hoarsely, ardently sang along with the orchestra, or exhorted, bullied and implored, he could make performers redden with shame, burn with rage, or soften with sympathy for him. And with uncanny and unerring instinct, he knew which would wring a surpassing performance from each of them. Over the years, he played Svengali to hundreds of Trilbys. After listening to a recording of her singing in Toscanini's 1947 broadcast performance of Otello, Soprano Herva Nelli (Desdemona) exclaimed:

"How did I do it? He must have hypnotized me."

Eternal Secrets. Listening to a Toscanini performance contained the same element of surprise as looking at the original of a painting after knowing it only in copies and prints. Faded colors suddenly leaped to life; obscured details became plain; disjointed lines and phrases connected up. No contemporary could match his subtlety of nuance--the exquisite tenderness, the sweetness, the purity; nor could anyone equal his passion and force. Somehow, when the score demanded it, he seemed to coax a bigger volume of sound from a given number of instruments; he could also reduce the same number to a greater degree of stillness.

He was often criticized for the rigidity and the rapidity of his tempos, but he scorned increasingly throughout his life the exaggeratedly retarded tempos of more sentimental schools of conducting; it was in the precision and incisiveness of the rhythm that he found his, and the composer's, power.

Toscanini knew his limitations. Most of the cerebral music of the neoclassicists and the modernists, he said simply, is "not music for me." He was never notably a pioneer, though he introduced some of the music of his contemporaries (Pagliacci in 1892, La Boheme in 1896, the first performances in Italy of Wagner's Goetterdaemmerung and Siegfried). His abiding interest was "to come closer to the secrets of Beethoven and a few other eternal masters." For the majority of musicians, music lovers and critics the world over, he came closer to realizing the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner and Verdi than any conductor ever did. No conductor can copy him exactly; he was ever searching, ever changing.

His energy was fabulous. When he was past 80, a visitor found him jumping up and down on his dressing-room couch, trying to reach the ceiling and shouting: "I am an old man. Why has God afflicted me with the blood of a 17-year-old?" When he was a pink-cheeked 83, he led the NBC Symphony in a grueling whirlwind tour of 20 U.S. cities in six weeks. At 85, he conducted perhaps the finest performance (Beethoven's Ninth Symphony) of his career. When he finally withdrew to his Riverdale home, he still spent long hours in the living room listening to virtually every scrap" he ever recorded (RCA Victor engineers kept begging him to approve more of his performances for release). When he approved of a recorded passage, the right hand stirred in rhythm to the music, then the left hand signaled for expression, finally both arms moved in great sweeping gestures as the old man conducted the invisible orchestra. The dark-eyed, sensuous face lighted once again with the fury and exaltation it had worn on the podium, and the cracked voice rose in frenzy.

But he began to fail. Bad news, such as the death in an airplane crash last November of his protege Guido Cantelli, was kept from him. On New Year's Day, he suffered a stroke, prelude to the death that came in his sleep. The big loudspeakers in the living room were silent, but everywhere the eulogies and the memorials began. In Manhattan's St. Patrick's Cathedral, a solemn pontifical Requiem Mass was offered by Cardinal Spellman (though Toscanini had never been noticeably religious). His body will be taken to Milan for burial. Arturo Toscanini's epitaph might best be expressed in words spoken by the Austrian poet Grillparzer at Beethoven's grave: "Whoever comes after him will not be able to continue; he will have to begin again, for his predecessor ended only where art itself must end."

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