The film was Toscanini — The Maestro, a bonus DVD included in the 71-CD boxed set of all Arturo Toscanini’s major recordings as conductor (mostly with the NBC Symphony but also containing the handful of records he made with other orchestras: the La Scala Orchestra of Milan in 1920, the New York Philharmonic in 1926-1936, the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1937-39 and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1941-42; the criteria for inclusion seemed to be either studio recordings or broadcasts released on record during Toscanini’s lifetime and with his approval), which turned out to be a film made by Peter Rosen in 1985 for the Bravo cable-TV network, at a time when Bravo was still trying to be a “special” channel for culture mavens and before it got homogenized into the same gluey mix of standard TV formulae just about every other cable channel has become. (I once read an article about the consultant who wreaked havoc on every non-premium cable channel — I forget her name but I recall she was a woman and I’m pretty sure her first name was Debbie — who successively got hired by Arts & Entertainment, Lifetime and any channel with any distinctive flavoring and rewired them to the same putrid formula, and the fact that the article actually presented her with approval made the story even more disgusting.) The 1985 production date is also important because it meant that Rosen was shooting his film at a time when musicians who had played under Toscanini in the NBC Symphony were still alive and available for interviews — though their comments were pretty predictable: they said that Toscanini could be mean and volatile during rehearsals but he could also be gentle and caring.
Much of what we think we know about Toscanini comes from the incredible hype NBC and its parent company, RCA, put out about him during the 17-year run of the NBC Symphony broadcasts, and some bits of the legend still cling in Rosen’s presentation, including the argument that Toscanini was the only 20th century conductor who became a real celebrity (what about Leopold Stokowski? Herbert von Karajan? Leonard Bernstein?) — and much of the writing about Toscanini since his death (including Joseph Horowitz’s book Understanding Toscanini, to which one imdb.com contributor suggests this documentary was an answer to) has been an attempt to unpack the myth and argue that there are actually ways to play the standard symphonic repertoire other than the generally fast, taut, high-tension way Toscanini liked to play it. Some pro-Toscanini critics have argued that we think of Toscanini as that sort of conductor — emphasizing speed and precision over poetry and eloquence — because that’s what’s on most of his records, especially those with the NBC Symphony (which is the bulk of his legacy because until he started conducting the NBC Symphony in 1937 he recorded only sporadically, though the few records of him pre-NBC that exist reveal a more expansive and less obsessed conductor). One quirk about Toscanini is that, while most long-lived conductors (he worked until he was 87 and died just a few days short of his 90th birthday) get slower as they age, he got faster (as did his bitter enemy, Willem Mengelberg; for a time in the late 1920’s they shared the job of principal conductor with the New York Philharmonic despite their diametrically opposed conceptions of how to conduct — Mengelberg heavily edited his scores and went for rapid gear changes in the middle of a piece; Toscanini meticulously rehearsed and expected his musicians to play it pretty much the same way every time — which must have made the Philharmonic players feel whipsawed between two quite different approaches from the podium), and at least one recent article in Fanfare suggested that as he became older he became less patient with “expression,” with any sense of deviation from the composers’ score markings.
The show made most of the major points about Toscanini’s upbringing (born a poor kid in Parma, albeit to a musical family, who went to the Parma Conservatory at age 9 and lived in dormitory conditions), his early efforts at composition (which he abandoned, according to Rosen, because once he heard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde he felt he’d never be able to write anything nearly as good and so he decided not to try), and his dramatic conducting debut when, at age 19, he was deputized to fill in for an indisposed conductor during a South American tour of an opera company performing Aïda (at a time when it was still relatively new music, just 15 years after its premiere). Rosen makes a big deal about how much Toscanini reformed the world of opera — ironically as opera was receding from mainstream popularity (which Rosen variously dates from the death of Verdi in 1901 and the death of Puccini in 1924) and becoming an elitist medium — and refused to countenance the slapdash productions he’d grown up with in Italy. He also notes that Toscanini’s repertoire ranged all over the European map — at a time when conductors usually specialized in the music of their home country, Toscanini not only conducted Verdi in Italy but Wagner in Germany (when he became the first non-German conductor at the Bayreuth Festival in 1930 the orchestra musicians derisively referred to him as “Der Italiener”) and — though this isn’t mentioned in the film — led the Italian premiere of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at La Scala in 1908 (just six years after the world premiere under André Messager in Paris), an opera that still has only a toehold in the standard repertory even though Debussy’s orchestral works are mainstays of the modern symphonic repertoire.
There are attempts to “humanize” Toscanini, showing home movies of him at his island villa in Italy (where he continued to live until 1938 even after the Italian Fascists had driven him off the symphony and opera stages of his home country — more on that later) with his family and friends, but even there he seems to have been gripped by the driven intensity with which he did everything; the narration by Alexander Scourby (32 years after his marvelous performance as the all-powerful corrupt gangster/city boss in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat and 21 years after he narrated a 45 rpm tribute/memorial record to John F. Kennedy) explains that while on his island Toscanini did hikes and did them faster than people one-half, one-third or one-quarter his age. Just about every shot of Toscanini in this film, whether taken from the famous black-and-white stills of him by Robert Hupka (credited as a consultant) with his leonine white-haired head looming out over a stark field of black, or TV footage of his concerts (in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s some of the NBC Symphony concerts — including his spectacular concert performance of Verdi’s Aïda with Herva Nelli in the title role, Richard Tucker as Radamès and Eva Gustafson magisterial as Amneris — were televised, and later they were prepared for video with the original crappy TV soundtracks erased and replaced by the professional RCA Victor recordings of the broadcasts) or even the home movies, shows Toscanini intensely serious, glowering, as if whatever he was doing at the moment was the most monumentally important task any member of the human race had ever been given to perform, and therefore neither he nor anybody he was responsible for could dare screw it up.
Toscanini’s principled fight against Fascism and Nazism is
one of the most ennobling parts of his biography. This film acknowledges that
in 1919 he supported Benito Mussolini (and even ran for the Italian Parliament
on Mussolini’s ticket), but that when Mussolini still proclaimed himself a
socialist. (The documentary “explains” Toscanini’s Leftism by saying he got it
from his father, a soldier in Giuseppe Garibaldi’s revolutionary army in the 19th
century which attempted to unify Italy as a republic — not, as eventually
happened, as a monarchy.) After Mussolini led a Right-wing march on Rome in
1922 and took over the Italian government, Toscanini consistently opposed him
(unlike people like Puccini, who eagerly embraced the new regime; though the
world lost a lot from Puccini’s early
death in 1924, including a coherent ending to Turandot, Puccini’s reputation probably gained from not
having lived long enough to write the patriotic potboilers Mussolini wanted
from Italy’s composers and got from Puccini’s longer-lived contemporary, Pietro
Mascagni) and eventually suffered from it. He and Mussolini had a long-standing
feud over Toscanini’s refusal, when La Scala in Milan was under his artistic
directorship in the 1920’s, to display photos of Mussolini and the Italian king
(who had essentially turned himself into a figurehead for the Fascist regime —
to the point where in 1946, asked whether the monarchy should continue in a
post-Fascist Italy, the Italian people voted overwhelmingly against it) or to
allow the fascist hymn “Giovinezza” (with its line “Giuro fede al Mussolini!”)
to be played on stage, as the fascist regime required every April 21 (the
official birthday of the city of Rome and a Fascist-proclaimed holiday).
Sometimes Toscanini ensured that the theatre would be closed on April 21 when
“Giovinezza” was supposed to be played; sometimes he would compromise and allow
a band to come on stage and play the offensive song without his involvement.
By
1929 working in Italy had become so intolerable that he gave up the
directorship of La Scala and came back to Italy only for special concerts; in
1931 he was invited to give a benefit for his friend, composer Giuseppe
Martucci, but on his way into the theatre to rehearse a gang of Fascist thugs
beat him up and injured his arm so badly that for the Bayreuth Festival in 1931
(his second and last year conducting there) he had to lead Wagner’s Parsifal — all five hours and five minutes of it — with his
arm in a sling. Toscanini was invited to Bayreuth in the first place by
Wagner’s son Siegfried in 1930, the last year of his (and his mother Cosima’s)
life, and he played there for two years; at the time the tradition at Bayreuth
was that the festival would take place two years in a row, then take off a
year, and by the time the festival was to resume it was 1933, Hitler had taken
power in Germany, Siegfried’s widow Winifred (a huge supporter of Hitler and the Nazis, whose sponsorship had done
much to make them respectable) pleaded with him to stay, but Toscanini said no
way, he wasn’t going to show up and ignore the evils of Hitler’s party just to
conduct Wagner. When Walter Legge, music critic and later record producer for
British HMV and Columbia (eventually merged into EMI), reviewed the 1933
Bayreuth festival he noted that Winifred Wagner and the Nazi regime were trying
to make a virtue out of the withdrawals of Toscanini and many of the Jewish
artists who had previously sung at Bayreuth (notably soprano Lotte Lehmann and
basses Alexander Kipnis and Emmanuel List) by proclaiming the festival to be
one of “German Artists for German Art.” Legge noted the “hundreds of
cancellations” from all over the world that followed Toscanini’s withdrawal,
sneered that the “German Artists for German Art” policy was “a fear-induced
protection of inferior home products against superior foreign competition, and
wrote that “the performances of Die Meistersinger and Parsifal were considerably inferior to those that most of us expected when,
five or six months ago, we bought our tickets. The fault is not on Toscanini’s
side — no one can blame him for his withdrawal.”
In 1934 he accepted an offer
from the producers of the Salzburg festival to build their enterprise into a
sort of anti-Bayreuth, performing works by Mozart, Verdi and other composers as
well as Wagner and inviting all the singers who by nationality or ethnicity or
religion were no longer welcome on Germany’s stages — and that lasted for four
years, producing some galvanic performances that can still (more or less) be
heard on lousy-sounding short-wave monitor discs and dubs from Selenophon recordings
(the Selenophon was a recording machine that cut a phonograph-like groove on a
strip of film). Then Hitler annexed Austria (his native country) in 1938 and
Toscanini ended up at a smaller festival in the Swiss city of Lucerne when he
wasn’t in the U.S. conducting the NBC Symphony — from which he walked out
during the 1940-41 season (Stokowski replaced him) after he realized “his”
musicians were being pulled out of his rehearsals to play on other NBC
broadcasts, though he returned on February 22, 1941 to conduct a benefit
concert for the American Red Cross. He made this an all-Wagner concert — yet
another gesture of defiance to the fascists; it was obviously Toscanini’s way
of saying to Hitler, “You don’t
own Wagner. Wagner belongs to all the world, including the people who are
fighting you for the ideals of peace, justice and humanity” — and invited
Lauritz Melchior and Helen Traubel as guest stars to sing incandescent excerpts
from Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung that are our only documentary evidence of Toscanini
conducting music from the Ring with singers. In 1943 Toscanini made a documentary for the U.S.
Office of War Information film in which he led the NBC Symphony in Hymn
of the Nations, a Verdi-Boïto potboiler
based on different countries’ national anthems, to which Toscanini changed the
line “Italia, mia patria” — “Italy, my fatherland” — to “Italia, mia tradita” —
“Italy, my betrayed.” He also added the “Internationale,” representing the
Soviet Union, and “The Star-Spangled Banner” to the end of the piece so it
would include the anthems of all
the major countries fighting World War II on the Allied side, and as his final
fuck-you to the Fascists he hired Jewish tenor Jan Peerce as the soloist. (The
currently circulating DVD versions of this film omit the section containing the
“Internationale” — ah, the ever-changing horizons of political correctness! —
but the audio CD’s of the performance include it.) James Agee reviewed this
film for The Nation and said,
“[T]he face is as good a record of human existence somewhere near its utmost as
we are likely to see.”
Toscanini — the Maestro
is as good a defense of Toscanini as we are likely to see on film, “printing
the legend” and less answering than just ignoring the criticisms that have been
made of him since his death and since the NBC hype machine surrounding him that
proclaimed him the greatest conductor of all time shut down. The criticisms are
that he conducted everything too fast, with too strict a sense of rhythm, and
he didn’t let the music “breathe” the way looser, more improvisatory conductors
like Wilhelm Furtwängler did. (In 1936, when Toscanini stepped down as
conductor of the New York Philharmonic, he asked the orchestra’s board to hire
Furtwängler as his replacement, perhaps not only admiring Furtwängler as a
musician but hoping to get him away from his impossible situation as a
basically decent man forced to suck up to the Nazis in public time and time
again — but the Jewish members of the board had a hissy-fit and said under no
circumstances would they allow a Nazi, which Furtwängler technically wasn’t
since he never joined the Nazi Party, to conduct the New York Philharmonic.) In
the 1970’s a lot of young conductors glommed on to Furtwängler as a sort of
anti-Toscanini — leading to a lot of long, slow performances of core 19th
century repertoire by people like Daniel Barenboim (listen to his performance
of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and compare it to Furtwängler’s 1951 Bayreuth
recording and you will hear the difference between a genius and a mediocrity
who’s trying to copy him) — and then in the late 1980’s the pendulum started
swinging again, this time under the lash of the “historically informed
performance” movement, as Roger Norrington recorded an influential cycle of the
Beethoven symphonies that used small, chamber-sized orchestras, period
instruments and zippy tempi (Norrington’s Beethoven Ninth took a little over an
hour versus the 1951 Furtwängler’s 78 minutes). After not having heard them for
years, I got a download of Toscanini’s 1950’s Beethoven recordings a few years
ago and was amazed at how contemporary they sounded; how they captured the
drama and inner life of the scores even if they came short on passages
requiring profundity (like the first movement of the Ninth, which Furtwängler
in Bayreuth made a deeply moving, spiritual experience and Toscanini seemed to
be rushing through to get to the “good stuff” at the end, in which he faced and
mastered the technical challenge of pulling together orchestra, chorus and
vocal soloists, at which Furtwängler’s Bayreuth Ninth had fallen short).
There
are other aspects to Toscanini — The Maestro, including its rather odd treatment of Toscanini’s
womanizing; the film mentions one
notorious affair he had with Metropolitan Opera soprano (and major movie star,
even though it was still the silent era!) Geraldine Farrar, which allegedly led
to his abrupt departure for Italy in 1915 (elsewhere I’ve read it had to do
with the Met’s wanting to allow encores in the middle of opera performances, a
practice Toscanini detested, along with a factor that did get mentioned here: Italy’s involvement in World War
I — ironically, on the same side
as the British, French and ultimately the Americans — and Toscanini’s desire to
be part of the war effort, which he achieved by leading a military band at the
front and actually winning a decoration for having played under fire and
inspired a regiment of the Italian army to take a crucially important hill). It
doesn’t mention that, despite being in a long-term marriage (to Carla
DeMartinis, daughter of an Italian merchant and the woman who bore Toscanini
his four acknowledged children), Toscanini, like such other musical geniuses as
Richard Wagner and Duke Ellington, did not believe that marriage = monogamy.
Indeed, his first departure from
La Scala in 1903 got embroiled in sexual as well as musical politics; the
following year, when Puccini’s Madama Butterfly literally got booed off the stage at its premiere at La Scala
in 1904 (with Cleofonte Campanini having the unenviable task of replacing
Toscanini as conductor), the audience was well aware that the soprano in the
title role, Rosina Storchio, had been having an affair with Toscanini. When her
costume blew over her head in the second act, a prankster in the audience yelled
out, “Butterfly is pregnant! Ah, the little Toscanini!” Storchio actually was pregnant with Toscanini’s child at the time, though
she had a miscarriage later. Rosen’s script for Toscanini — The
Maestro makes his dalliance with Farrar
seem like an exception when in fact it was a long-term pattern — and like so
much of Toscanini’s biography, facts about his womanizing haven’t really come
out until after his death and after the NBC hype machine stopped running
interference for him.
My own feelings about Toscanini are genuinely positive;
I’m old enough that I learned much of the standard symphonic repertoire from
his records, and there are some of his performances (like the 1950 NBC
recording of Debussy’s La Mer)
that I think are unsurpassed to this day. I can hear what his critics are
talking about — that he was too glib, that his tastes were too conservative
(the man who was arguably the greatest conductor of the 20th century
left only one movement of the
ballet score Petrouchka and
otherwise recorded nothing by the
man who was arguably the greatest composer of the 20th century, Stravinsky — though Toscanini not only
gave the world premieres of three Puccini operas and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci but also in his NBC years gave the world premiere of
Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings,
which became a classical standard in the 1980’s when it was used in the film Platoon), that he zipped through scores with too little
feeling — but overall his recordings are at an incredibly high standard. Once
you acknowledge that Toscanini’s way is not the only way these pieces should be played, his records still
have enduring value — and his story, even in this rather whitewashed version,
is worth telling as well.
