Radio Maestro

Why do symphony conductors cost so much? If it comes to that, why is a conductor? These questions may well have been pondered by R. C. A. stockholders last January when their pudgy President David Sarnoff sent envoys to Milan to induce Maestro Arturo Toscanini to conduct ten broadcasts with the projected NBC Symphony Orchestra (TIME, Feb. 15). Conductor Toscanini asked and got a contract for $4,000 per broadcast, probably the highest price ever paid a conductor. At the behest of plump, practical Signora Toscanini, it was also stipulated that NBC should buy the Maestro a round-trip ticket from Italy to the U. S. and pay the income taxes on his U. S. earnings (TIME, Oct. 18).

To the U. S. man in the street, a symphony conductor is somebody who flops his arms in a sweating frenzy while others do the job. His are the most spectacular tantrums the music world allows, the greatest adulation and the creamiest financial reward it bestows. Yet he scrapes not, neither does he toot, thump nor sing. How does anybody know whether he can even read music? Yet at the end of the concert it is he who takes the bows, not the laboring instrumentalists over whom he presides. Is his a job, or a racket?

That his job is not lightly to be dispensed with was shown nine years ago. Following a precedent set by tradition-busting Muscovites,* Manhattan musicians formed a "Conductorless Orchestra" and gave a series of Carnegie Hall concerts. They managed to keep time with each other, played as well as some orchestras do under some conductors. But the electric fusion of tone that would have been brought forth by a Toscanini, a Stokowski or a Furtwangler was completely lacking. Financially the venture was a dismal flop.

That a conductor's presence may make the difference between a competent and an inspired orchestra was shown last week. While the U. S. man in the street tuned in his radio, 1,200 of Manhattan's musical and other Who's Whos swarmed to Radio City's white-walled Studio 8-H. (Fifty thousand requests for tickets had been turned down.) What brought them was not the new $600,000-a-year, 92-man NBC Symphony, for better woodwinds and brasses, comparable strings are boasted by at least three other U. S. orchestras. It was not the prospect of purely musical enjoyment, for dulled acoustics make a broadcasting studio the worst possible place to hear a symphony concert. What brought them was a conductor: lean, aristocratic Toscanini, whipping, caressing, smoothing, churning the air before his fragile body while a team of musicians strained with dog-like devotion to reflect each gesture in exactly the kind of sound the Maestro wanted. For one hour and 36 minutes the audience sat rigid and tense. At the close of Vivaldi's Concerto Grosso in D Minor, awed and uncertain about broadcast manners, it neglected to applaud, but after Brahms's C Minor Symphony it rose and yelled approval. Pundits who had heard the orchestra's previous broadcasts under noted Maestros Artur Rodzinski and Pierre Monteux marveled at the new-found precision and elasticity with which the orchestral machine performed, wondered how it would stand up under the continued strain of Toscanini's driving. Even those U. S. lowbrows who were listening in to this highbrow stuff could feel the hypnotic power that was welding 92 separate instrumental voices into one voice. Critics, who had not been enthusiastic about symphonic performances since Toscanini's last Manhattan appearances, again waxed rhapsodic, spoke of perfection.

Perfection is what imperious, white-haired little Toscanini has always sought, at any cost. Once, at Milan's La Scala, after months of incessant rehearsing, he called off a performance of Norma because the quality of the singing at the dress rehearsal did not suit him. In a rage at an imperfect performance by New York's Philharmonic-Symphony, he left a concert unfinished, rushed hatless and coatless from Carnegie Hall to his hotel through a heavy snowstorm. A clause in his NBC contract held that if he did not like NBC's new Symphony Orchestra, the deal was off. On his advice, gangling, fidgety, Dalmatian-born Maestro Rodzinski was given the job of choosing the orchestra's personnel. But from his Milan home Toscanini tuned in on the preliminary broadcasts, even though he had to get up at 4 a. m. (10 p. m., E. S. T.) to hear them.

Seventy-year-old Toscanini's fame as a symphonic conductor came late in life. In 1920-21 he toured the U. S. with the rather inferior La Scala Orchestra, but not until he was appointed guest conductor of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony in 1926, when he was 59, did the world begin to acclaim him as No. 1 interpreter of Beethoven's and Mozart's symphonies. His earlier exploits had been operatic. He had first been thrown into the limelight at a performance of Aida in Rio de Janeiro in 1886, when the scheduled conductor did not dare to face the boos of a hostile audience. Humble Cellist Toscanini rose from the ranks, folded up the orchestra score and sat on it, proceeded to conduct the whole opera from memory. Similar mnemonic feats began to grow into a legend. When Franchetti's opera Cristoforo Colombo was being rehearsed for its first performance in Genoa, Conductor Mancinelli fell suddenly ill. Toscanini was sent for, memorized the new score in 24 hours. Today he is credited with knowing by heart the whole standard operatic and symphonic repertory, and in such detail that he remembers obscure misprints in various editions of each score. Reason for this incredible amount of memorizing: Toscanini is nearsighted, cannot read a score when it is more than four inches from his eyes.

In 1898 he became artistic director of La Scala Opera House in Milan, conducted there, off & on, for 20 years. In 1908 Impresario Giulio Gatti-Casazza brought him to the Metropolitan Opera House, where Manhattanites gaped at his implacable, cyclonic tantrums, his insatiable interest in details of costuming and stage deportment, his lordly expenditure of extra rehearsal time (paid for by the board of directors), his intolerance of every sort of mediocrity, and his adamantine sense of discipline. Glamorous Geraldine Farrar once stopped a rehearsal he was conducting, said: "Maestro, I am the star of this performance--not you." "Madame," rejoined Toscanini, "there are no stars in my performances. There are only stars in Heaven." With a grunt, a glare, a whipstroke at the conductor's desk, Toscanini continued the rehearsal.

In 1915 Toscanini returned to La Scala, where he remained, except for a few guest appearances, until his tour of the U. S. and subsequent engagement as guest conductor of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony in 1926. His career reached its climax in 1930, when he toured the principal capitals of Europe with the orchestra, won universal acclaim. In 1936 he resigned from the leadership of the Philharmonic-Symphony. His subsequent activity has been international. The only non-German who has conducted the music-dramas of Richard Wagner at the shrine of Wagnerism, Bayreuth, he soon found himself at odds with the Hitler Government, has not since 1931 conducted in Germany. Most important of his activities in recent years has been his participation in the annual Summer Music Festival in Salzburg.

In the eyes of most of his U. S. admirers, Toscanini can do no wrong. His very rages and imprecations are treasured in musicians' memories, his broken batons are collected and respectfully preserved. In a rehearsal tantrum several years ago he rushed off the stage, scurried up the stairs to his dressing room, pounded his fists against the door of a closet until the wood paneling splintered. A lady Philharmonic subscriber heard of the incident, drove with her chauffeur to the stage entrance, begged to be given the door as a sacred relic. Allowed to carry off a few of the splinters, she took them reverently home to be enshrined.

*Moscow's "Persimphans," a conductorless orchestra organized in 1922, gave 90 concerts during its first two years, was praised by Composers Glazounov and Milhaud.

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