Great Concert

Three years before Ludwig van Beethoven shook his great fist at the thunder & lightning raging outside his window and fell back dead on his bed, his Ninth (last) Symphony was given its first performance in Vienna. Beethoven, a homely, dumpy, shaggy-headed little figure, stood in the orchestra, eyes fixed on his score, awkwardly beating time. He was not the official conductor. The players had been instructed to pay him no attention. He was so deaf by that time that he could hear nothing of the great, surging music called for by the pinny, almost illegible little notes he had made. He did not sense the applause which came afterwards until one of the soloists, a Fraulein Caroline Linger, turned him around so that his eyes could take it in. The music passed into the background then. The demonstration took a sudden, emotional turn as the people started shouting, beating their palms together still harder in an effort to assure the fierce-looking little man of their sympathy, their appreciation.

When Arturo Toscanini finished conducting Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall last week the demonstration took the same emotional turn as the scene in Vienna 108 years ago Toscanini had given a great concert, perhaps the greatest he has ever given. But more, the audience had not seen & heard him for weeks. He had been sick (TIME Dec. 21). His conducting arm had failed him. He had had to cut short his season go back to Italy for treatments. The rumor that he might never come back had never quite been downed, yet he had come back, traveled 4,500 mi. from Italy to help unemployed U. S. musicians. "The audience stood up when he came on stage. It rhapsodized over him during intermission. It suddenly started cheering when the concert was done. For once Toscanini was disarmed, appeared not ungrateful for appreciation.

The first performance of the Ninth Symphony was a financial failure. Beethoven's reward from the King of Prussia, to whom he dedicated it, was an imitation diamond ring. The concert last week, except for a few $250 boxes, was sold out the day it was announced. The Philharmonic Symphony sent back $10,000 in checks, turned thousands away from the boxoffice. At the hall when receipts were added it was found that Toscanini had earned some $26,000 for his jobless brothers, only $1,000 less than Paderewski raised in Madison Square Garden, which seats 18,903 against Carnegie's 2,760.

The program had attracted everyone: the Prelude to Parsifal and the Good Friday Music, then the great Ninth Symphony. It was Toscanini's idea of "the perfect program." Wagner, in his last, leisurely opera worked with such themes as idealistic love, faith through suffering, purification, redemption. He varied them, interchanged them so masterfully, so melodiously that a certain haloed authenticity has become attached to his muddled allegory of the Grail-keepers.

Beethoven's ideas for the Ninth Symphony were so titanic that they would not be kept within ordinary symphonic bounds. He wrote an opening movement teeming with conflict, a scherzo that called in horns and tympani, a slow deeply reflective movement, then a crashing, cumulative finale based on Schiller's "Ode to Joy." For the finale Beethoven brought in voices, solos and a great chorus which some critics have pronounced irrelevant, too difficult for human voices. But Toscanini last week performed another of his miracles.

A half-hour after the concert Toscanini hurried from Carnegie Hall to obey the precept he had just preached so eloquently. He went to the home of Giulio Gatti-Casazza, his longtime friend at the Scala and at the Metropolitan. They had not spoken for 17 years. Now they greeted each other with passionate penitence, the frail little Toscanini and the hulking Gatti, both of them in their sixties. They wept. Signor Gatti regretted that a cold had kept him from the concert. They were friends again.

The rift between Toscanini and Gatti has never been explained. They went to the U. S. together in 1908, worked together until 1915. Then Toscanini announced that he was leaving the Metropolitan, never coming back. After their reunion, Toscanini and Gatti met again the next day for lunch. Friends got Toscanini's luggage ready for sailing. He and Gatti talked late into the afternoon, about Toscanini's sore arm, about Gatti's Depression difficulties at the Metropolitan. Gatti went to see Toscanini sail on the Ile de France. The two shook hands before a battery of cameras so that the whole world could see that they had made up.

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