By ROBERT GOTTLIEB
TOSCANINI
Musician of Conscience
By Harvey Sachs
On the night of June 30,
1886, Arturo Toscanini — recently turned 19 — arrived, barely on time, at the
imperial opera house in Rio de Janeiro, where the touring company for which he
was the principal cellist was about to perform “Aida.” Pandemonium. The unpopular
lead conductor had resigned in a huff. His unpopular replacement had been
shouted off the podium by the audience. There was no one else. Toscanini, who
was also assistant choral master, was thrust forward by his colleagues.
“Everyone knew about my memory,” he would recall, “because the singers had all
had lessons with me, and I had played the piano without ever looking at the
music.” He was handed a baton and just started to conduct. A triumph! Typical
of the glowing reviews: “This beardless maestro is a prodigy who communicated
the sacred artistic fire to his baton and the energy and passion of a genuine
artist to the orchestra.” For the remaining six weeks of the tour, Harvey Sachs
tells us in his biography “Toscanini: Musician of Conscience,” the maestro led
the orchestra in 26 performances of 12 operas, all from memory. No one offered
him a raise, and it didn’t occur to him to ask for one.
It was almost 68 years
later, in April 1954, that he conducted his final concert, an all-Wagner
program, at Carnegie Hall. He was 87, and decades earlier had established
himself as the world’s most famous conductor — the world’s most famous
musician; a “genius,” in fact, alongside such names as Einstein, Picasso and,
with a backward glance, Thomas Alva Edison. Nor was this a new notion: Back in
the conservatory in Parma, his hometown, “Arturo’s fellow students teased him
by calling him Gèni, the dialect word for ‘genius.’”
Toscanini, circa 1890.
Credit From “Toscanini: Musician of Conscience.”
Genius or not, he
unquestionably was a prodigy. At school he had been assigned the cello as his
instrument, and he quickly mastered it — by the time he was 14 he was playing
in the Parma opera company’s orchestra. He taught himself to play the piano,
the violin, the double bass. He sang, he composed, he organized and led groups
of his fellow students. Everyone was aware of his astounding photographic
memory and his immense powers of concentration. In his final year he was named
the school’s outstanding graduate, and he was liked as well as admired. “When I
look back at the years of my adolescence,” he would reminisce, “I don’t
remember a day without sunshine, because the sunshine was in my soul.”
Music happened to him by
accident. His good-natured if rather feckless father, Claudio — whose heart lay
in his years of campaigning with Garibaldi’s army of the Risorgimento, and who
made a somewhat precarious living through tailoring — and his cold and distant
mother, Paola, were “musical,” but not exceptionally so. It was an
elementary-school teacher who spotted little Arturo’s strong response to music
and advised his parents to send him to Parma’s music conservatory, where once
he was accepted as a live-in student all his expenses were taken care of — a
boon to the financially strapped family.
Word of Toscanini’s South
American success quickly got around, and soon he was a busy itinerant opera
conductor: Turin, Bologna, Venice, Genoa, Palermo, Pisa, Rome — he was working
everywhere, though undoubtedly his greatest satisfaction in those early days
was playing cello for Verdi, his hero, at the 1887 premiere of “Otello.” After
some years at Turin’s Regio Theater, where in 1895-96 he conducted the world
premiere of “La Bohème” (he’d done the same for “Pagliacci” in Milan) and the first
Italian production of “Götterdämmerung,” he was wooed away, inevitably, by La
Scala, where he reigned on and off until in 1908 he left Italy to lead the
Metropolitan Opera in New York. In Milan he had worked with (and disciplined)
the young Caruso and Chaliapin, had forced audiences to accept darkened
auditoriums, instituted a bitterly opposed policy of no encores, and had the
orchestra playing in a pit rather than at stage level. He had mounted and
conducted the first Italian performances of “Siegfried,” “Pelléas and
Mélisande” and “Eugene Onegin.” And he had married.
Carlotta De Martini, in
1897 Credit From “Toscanini: Musician of Conscience”
When Arturo met Carlotta De
Martini in 1895, he was 28 and she was 18, a pretty, vivacious girl whom he
pursued with all his intensity and tenacity. They married in 1897, and he liked
telling people that their son Walter was born exactly nine months after the
wedding: “in tempo, like a good conductor.” Two girls and another boy would
follow. You could say that it was a successful marriage but not a happy one.
Arturo and Carla would stay together until her death in 1951, both of them
loyal to the idea of family but increasingly distanced from each other
emotionally. Her messiness maddened him (“For 41 years I’ve suffered from this
disorder of hers!!!”), and his serial philandering deeply wounded her. He came
by his life of compulsive adultery honestly: Claudio, Arturo would say, “was a
good-looking man. Women went after him. And what’s a young man to do? Some say
yes, some say no.” Claudio said yes often, and Arturo, notably short though
equally good-looking, said yes as well — many, many times, both as a young man
and as an old one.
The most damaging of his
extramarital relationships was a prolonged affair with the superb singer Rosina
Storchio. The relationship was an open secret — one night when she was singing
Cio-Cio San, one of her finest roles, a breeze ruffled her robes and a member
of the audience shouted out, “Butterfly is pregnant with Toscanini’s child.” In
1903 Rosina gave birth to a son, Giovanni, but a mishap during the delivery
left him brain-damaged, and Giovanni died at 16. Rosina never married.
In a dismaying echo of that
tragedy, Arturo and Carla suffered an equally devastating loss. Their second
boy, Giorgio, not yet 5, died of diphtheria while they were all in Buenos
Aires, and Carla — not only drowning in grief but wildly angry because she
believed her husband had been with Storchio as Giorgio was dying — packed her
trunks to leave for Italy. She relented, though, as always torn between her
love for her husband and her distress at the circumstances of her marriage.
Besides, she had her other children to consider, Walter and her daughter,
Wally. Despite her grief — or, as Sachs suggests, perhaps because of it — she
determined to have another baby. But with the birth of Wanda, when Carla was
30, all sexual relations between husband and wife came to an end. As for Wanda,
whose difficult disposition reminded her father of his difficult mother, she
went on to marry the profoundly neurotic (and homosexual) piano virtuoso
Vladimir Horowitz.
Toscanini’s relationship
with Geraldine Farrar, the reigning diva of the Metropolitan Opera, was hardly
a secret. She was determined to marry him, he had no intention, then or ever,
of leaving Carla and the children, and it’s generally assumed that he resigned
his leadership of the Met after seven years in order to escape her
importunities. Among the dozens of other women with whom he was involved were
other famous singers like Lotte Lehmann and Alma Gluck (and, some said, Gluck’s
daughter, the writer Marcia Davenport). Carla put up with all of it — and, in
fact, befriended a number of the mistresses.
One of the things that led
Sachs to write a second biography of Toscanini, more than twice as long as his
first (published in 1978), was the new availability of huge archives of
documents and letters — in 2002 he edited “The Letters of Arturo Toscanini.” The
letters cover an immense range of musical, political and personal matters, but
the most astonishing ones are passionate love letters that sometimes go beyond
the erotic to the pornographic. From a typical letter to Elsa Kurzbauer, with
whom he was in love for many years: “Your kisses, your lips (oh! sweetness)
your mouth inflame ever and evermore at the utmost my frenzy to have you under
my libidinous caresses — kisses — suckings — lickings — bitings, all over your
girlisch body — I am dying and lusting for every part nook — crevice — hole —
holy hole of your lovely person.” Their relationship would pick up, though not
quite where it had left off, 20 years later, when Elsa had escaped from Vienna
to New York. “Don’t lose time,” the septuagenarian Arturo wrote to her. “Maybe
before long God will take away even the little bit of virility that’s left me.
And then? What misery!”
The fullest correspondence,
though — almost a thousand telegrams and letters from Toscanini, adding up to
something like 240,000 words — was with Ada Mainardi, a pianist with whom he
was besotted for seven years, beginning in 1933. They met rarely — she was in
Italy, with her cellist husband, and he was mostly in America — which may
explain why the relationship in all its intensity lasted so long. These letters
are a revelation of his day-to-day doings, his ideas, his feelings. And he
wrote, compulsively, of his passion: “I’m like a madman, I could commit a
crime!! … When, oh when, will we be able to possess each other completely, clinging
together, deep inside each other, our mouths gasping, united while awaiting the
supreme voluptuousness at the same moment? When — when?” His erotic impulses
toward Ada grew ever stronger — and stranger. Sachs tells us that “he had begun
to send her a fresh handkerchief each month, with increasingly insistent
requests that she stain it with her menstrual blood and send it back to him so
that he could suck it — or so he claimed — ‘since I can’t quench my thirst
directly at the delightful fount,’” and apparently she often complied. To each
his own.
What eventually undermined
the relationship was not their geographical separation but his increasing
distaste, then disgust, for her political leanings and casual anti-Semitism.
“You hurt me when you say that you don’t love the Jews. Tell me, rather, that
you don’t love the human race,” he wrote to her in 1939. He had been deeply
moved, by his experience three years earlier, when — at no fee and paying his
own expenses — he inaugurated what would become the Israel Philharmonic. By
that time, he was famous throughout the world for his implacable hatred of
Fascism and Nazism. One of the many ways he demonstrated his hostility to
Mussolini was his defiance of the law that the Fascist Party’s anthem, “Giovinezza,”
be played at the start of every public performance. In response, in 1931 he was
beaten by Fascist thugs outside the opera house in Bologna, and his passport
was taken from him. Only in the face of an international outcry was it
returned.
In 1933, after several
extraordinarily successful seasons at the Bayreuth Wagner festival — Toscanini
was the first non-German conductor to perform there — he informed Winifred
Wagner, Wagner’s English daughter-in-law now in charge (and a close friend of
Hitler’s), that given the conditions obtaining in Germany since the Nazis had
taken over earlier that year, and despite a flattering personal letter from
Hitler himself, he would not be returning. “For my peace of mind, for yours,
and for everyone’s, it is better not to think any longer about my coming to
Bayreuth.” Nothing could better demonstrate both his unbending loyalty to
principle and the astounding position he held on the world stage.
In the same spirit, early
in 1938, after having triumphed for the third time at the annual Salzburg
Festival, he decided that with the Germans poised to overrun Austria, he would
not return. Mussolini again had his passport impounded, and again worldwide
indignation forced the Duce to change his mind. On the very day that the passport
was suddenly returned, the Toscaninis left Milan for America. “To flee, to flee
— that was the consuming thought!” he wrote to Ada. “To flee in order to
breathe freedom, life!”………………………
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/27/books/review/toscanini-biography-harvey-sachs.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FClassical%20Music&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection
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