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Arturo Toscanini (March 25, 1867 – January 16, 1957) was an Italian musician. He is considered by many critics, fellow musicians, and much of the classical listening audience, to have been the greatest conductor of his era. He was renowned for his brilliant intensity, his restless perfectionism, his phenomenal ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his photographic memory which gave him extraordinary command over a vast repertoire of orchestral and operatic works, and allowed him to correct errors in orchestral parts unnoticed by his colleagues for decades.
Biography Toscanini was born in Parma, Emilia-Romagna, Italy and won a scholarship to the local music conservatory, where he studied cello. He joined the orchestra of an opera company, with which he toured South America in 1886. While presenting Aida in Rio de Janeiro, the orchestra's conductor was booed by the audience and forced to leave the podium. Although he had no conducting experience, Toscanini was persuaded to take up the baton, and led a magnificent performance completely from memory. Thus began his career as a conductor at age 19. Upon returning to Italy, Toscanini self-effacingly returned to his chair in the cello section, and participated as cellist in the world premiere of Verdi's Otello (La Scala, 1887) under the composer's supervision. (Verdi, who habitually complained that conductors never seemed interested in directing his scores the way he had written them, was impressed by reports from Arrigo Boito about Toscanini's ability to interpret his scores. The composer was also impressed when Toscanini consulted him personally, indicating a ritardando where it was not set out in the score and saying that only a true musician would have felt the need to make that ritardando.) Gradually the young musician's reputation as an operatic conductor of unusual authority and skill, supplanted his cello career. In the following decade he consolidated his career in Italy, entrusted with the world premieres of Puccini's La Bohème and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. In 1896 he conducted his first symphonic concert (works by Schubert, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner), in Turin. By 1898 he was resident conductor at La Scala, Milan and remained there until 1908, returning during the 1920s. Outside of Europe, he conducted at the Metropolitan Opera in New York (1908–1915) as well as the New York Philharmonic Orchestra(1926–1936). As was also the case with the New York Philharmonic, Toscannini was the first non-German conductor to appear at Bayreuth (1930–1931). In the 1930s he conducted at the Salzburg Festival (1934–1937) and the inaugural concert in 1936 of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra (now the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra) in Tel Aviv, and later performed with them in Jerusalem, Haifa, Cairo and Alexandria. Strongly opposed to Italian and German fascism, he left Europe for the United States, where in 1937, the NBC Symphony Orchestra was created for him. He conducted the first broadcast concert on December 25, 1937, in NBC Studio 8-H in New York City's Rockefeller Center. Toscanini was often criticized for neglecting American music; however, in 1938, he conducted the world premieres of two orchestral works by Samuel Barber, Adagio for Strings and Essay for Orchestra. In 1945, he led the orchestra in Carnegie Hall recording sessions of The Grand Canyon Suite by Ferde Grofe and An American in Paris by George Gershwin. The NBC concerts continued in this large studio until the fall of 1950, when they were moved to Carnegie Hall, where many of the orchestra's recording sessions had been held, due to the dry acoustics of Studio 8-H. With that orchestra he performed on national radio and television and toured regularly until 1954, thus becoming the first conducting "superstar" of modern mass media. The final broadcast performance, an all-Wagner program, took place on April 4, 1954, in Carnegie Hall. That June he participated in his final recording sessions, remaking portions of two Verdi operas so they could be commercially released. After his retirement, the NBC Symphony was reorganized as the Symphony of the Air, making regular performances and recordings, until it was disbanded in 1963. With the help of his son Walter, Toscanini spent his remaining years editing tapes and transcriptions of his performances with the NBC Symphony. The "approved" recordings were issued by RCA Victor, which also has issued his recordings with the Scala Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. His recordings with the BBC Symphony Orchestra were issued by EMI. Various companies have issued recordings of a number of broadcasts and concerts that he did not officially approve on compact discs. Among these is a stereophonic recording of his last NBC broadcast concert, in which the "lapse of memory" that he had on the air is unnoticeable. His recorded legacy spans the years 1920 to 1954. In 1944, he appeared in a documentary film directed by Alexander Hammid, Hymn of the Nations, which featured Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra performing the music of Verdi. Filmed in NBC Studio 8-H, the orchestra performed the overture to La Forza del Destino and Hymn of the Nations, the latter featuring tenor Jan Peerce and the Westminster Choir. On radio, he conducted seven complete operas, including La Bohème and Otello, all of which were eventually released on records and CD, thus finally enabling the listening public to hear what an opera conducted by Toscanini sounded like. He retired at age 87. When he died in New York at the age of 89, his body was returned to Italy and was interred in the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan. Toscanini conducted the world premieres of many operas, four of which have become part of the standard operatic repertoire: Pagliacci, La Bohème, La Fanciulla del West and Turandot. He also conducted the first Italian performances of Siegfried, Götterdämmerung, Salome, Pelléas et Mélisande, as well as the South American premieres of Tristan und Isolde and Madama Butterfly and the North American premiere of Boris Godunov. At La Scala, which had what was then the most modern stage lighting system installed in 1901 and an orchestral pit installed in 1907, Toscanini pushed through reforms in the performance of opera. He insisted on darkening the lights during performances. As his biographer Harvey Sachs wrote: "He believed that a performance could not be artistically successful unless unity of intention was first established among all the components: singers, orchestra, chorus, staging, sets, and costumes." In 1933, Toscanini's daughter Wanda married the Ukrainian-American pianist Vladimir Horowitz. Quotes Recorded legacy Toscanini made his first recordings in 1920 and his last in 1954. His entire catalog of commercial recordings was issued by RCA Victor, save for a single recording for Brunswick in 1926 and a series of excellent recordings with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the late 1930's for EMI's HMV label (Issued in the USA by RCA). He was especially famous for his magnificent performances of Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Strauss, Debussy and his compatriots Rossini, Verdi, Boito and Puccini. He made many recordings, especially towards the end of his career, many of which are still in print. In addition, there are many recordings available of his broadcast performances, as well as his remarkable rehearsals with the NBC Symphony. By most accounts, among his greatest recordings are the following (with the NBC Symphony unless otherwise shown): There are many pieces which Toscanini never recorded commercially; among these, some of the most interesting surviving recordings (off-the-air) include: Many hundreds of hours of rehearsal recordings exist; some of these have circulated in limited edition recordings. Broadcast recordings with other orchestras have also survived, including New York Philharmonic broadcasts from 1932-36, 1942, and 1945; Numerous BBC Symphony Orchestra performances from 1935-1939, Pre-war Lucerne Festival Orchestra concerts, and multiple concerts from appearances with the La Scala orchestra from 1946-1952, including Verdi's Requiem with a young Renata Tebaldi. Moreover, his ten NBC Symphony telecasts survive, including that of Aïda (with Herva Nelli in the title role). They were issued on home video in the 1990s and have been reissued on DVD. They further establish the passionate yet restrained podium manner for which he was acclaimed. A guide to Toscanini's recording career can be found in Mortimer H. Frank's "From the Pit to the Podium: Toscanini in America" in International Classical Record Collector (1998, 15 8-21) and Christopher Dyment's "Toscanini's European Inheritance" in International Classical Record Collector (1988, 22-8). Notable premieres Toscanini and the critics Throughout his career, Toscanini was virtually idolized by the critics, as well as by fellow musicians, with the exception of a few, such as Virgil Thomson, and he enjoyed the kind of critical acclaim that few musicians have consistently had. Over the past twenty-five years or so, however, as a new generation has appeared, there has been an increasing amount of revisionist criticism directed at him by critics who never heard him in person, and according to Harvey Sachs, Mortimer Frank, and B.H. Haggin, this criticism is largely founded on false assumptions, generalizations, and erroneous reporting, partly due to the fact that some of the Toscanini recordings were unavailable for so long. Frank, in his recent book Toscanini: The NBC Years, refutes this revisionism quite strongly, and cites such authors as Joseph Horowitz (author of Understanding Toscanini) as perhaps the worst offender in this case. Frank states that the revisionism has grown to the point that younger listeners and critics, who were not around during the Toscanini years, are easily influenced by it, and as a result, Toscanini's reputation, extraordinarily high in the years that he was active, has suffered a decline. Conversely, Joseph Horowitz, in Understanding Toscanini, states that those who keep the Toscanini legend alive are members of a "Toscanini cult", an idea not altogether refuted by Frank, but not embraced by him, either. Books about Toscanini | ||||||||
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