Toscanini's Friend

If treatments for his "glass arm" had not kept Conductor Toscanini so long in Italy (TIME, March 14 et ante), the world premiere of his friend Ottorino Respighi's Maria Egiziaca might have caused more stir last week. Toscanini planned to direct the production. But instead Composer Respighi came. He relegated Philharmonic Symphony players to a dark corner of the Carnegie Hall stage. In their usual place a great gilt-framed triptych stood, spattered with stars and angels. Angels opened the triptych, disclosed three panels rudely painted to suggest a ship docked in the harbor of Alexandria, a temple doorway in Jerusalem, a grotto in a desert beyond the River Jordan. Over the half-hidden orchestra, Composer Respighi benignly presided while wanton Mary of Egypt, his latest creation, flaunted her trade on the water front, repented and finally crawled, a sainted harridan, into a grave dug by a lion in the middle of the desert.

Respighi meant his Maria Egiziaca to be mounted simply so as to suggest the old mystery plays. Mary of Egypt (German Charlotte Boerner) sang capably last week but, for the rest, the Philharmonic production was amateurish to a degree that Toscanini would never have tolerated. In his own miraculous fashion Toscanini might even have made the drab, derivative music take on color, sound significant.

But at best Maria Egiziaca is not likely to become so popular as the Fountains of Rome and the Pines of Rome. When he started this famed cycle (1916) Respighi had a sure-fire formula fixed in his head. He would do a musical baedeker with gay, faintly comic descriptions, the kind of thing the Russians had taught him to write. He would write dreamy, sensuous interludes, great, glittering climaxes.

Three years after he wrote the Fountains, Respighi married one of his pupils, Elsa Olivieri Sangiacomo, a quiet, mysterious person, part Aztec. She used to compose too, but now she just sings his songs, uses her Indian intuition to help order his career. Their villa high on the outskirts of Rome is named for the second Roman poem -- "The Pines."

Respighi's later works have been fairly often performed. Most of them are effective and sound up-to-date without being eccentric or unpleasant. But the Pines has stayed an outstanding bestseller.

U. S. orchestras alone have given it 154 performances, the Fountains, 71 performances, Roman Festivals (third poem in the cycle) 45 performances. Royalties in such cases mount up. Respighi, Stravinsky and the later works of Richard Strauss are expensive to perform. The Philharmonic has to pay $40 each time it plays any one of the Roman poems. (For the privilege of Maria Egiziaca's premiere, the Philharmonic paid $500.) If the performance is broadcast, Columbia Broadcasting has to pay nearly as much again.

In Rome too Respighi was honored last week. Il Duce announced his election to the Royal Academy of Italy.

*G. Ricordi & Co. vigorously protects Respighi's music as it does that of the late Giacomo Puccini. Manhattan's Metropolitan has to pay $500 each time it puts on a Puccini work. Ricordi charged radio on an average of $5,000 apiece for the six Puccini operas sent over the air two seasons ago (TIME, Nov. 18, 1929).

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