Toscanini's Triumph

Giuseppe Verdi, a formidable old man in his 70s, looked sternly down on the four cellists. In rehearsal for the first performance of his new opera, Otello, the La Scala orchestra had just reached the important cello passage in the first act. The second cellist, a 19-year-old boy, could barely be heard. The composer demanded to know his name. "Toscanini," he was told. Toscanini had played the passage exactly as it was marked--pppp. Patiently, Verdi explained that the fault was his own: he really intended only pianissimo, and had exaggerated his directions to make sure that they would be obeyed.

Last week, wearing his familiar rehearsal outfit--a severe black alpaca choke-collar coat, that set off the whiteness of his hair and mustache--the little cellist himself was stopping other cellists, screaming at violinists, and cajoling a 50-voice chorus. He was rehearsing one of the year's memorable musical events--a broadcast of the entire opera Otello, in two Saturday broadcasts, an hour and a quarter each. "This Is Desdemona." For weeks the Maestro had been getting set for his one opera broadcast of the year. He had hand-picked his singers, rehearsed them relentlessly in his dressing room, accompanying them on the piano himself. There were few big bright names in his cast--he preferred to use singers he could mold in his own way: stressing first expressiveness, then diction, and lastly voice. He had heard the Philadelphia La Scala Soprano Herva Nelli sing last summer, and announced, "This is Desdemona." She told him she had never sung the role. Toscanini snapped: "Good. I'll teach you myself." He drilled the Metropolitan's brilliant new baritone, Giuseppe Valdengo (a graduate of the New York City Opera Co.), for two hours on the proper way to sing just two words--"non so"--at a crucial spot in the play.

Once, in rehearsal, Toscanini directed his scorn at big-voiced Chilean Tenor Ramon Vinay, who has done the role of Otello at the Met. Said Toscanini: "Haven't you ever been in love? You have to be persuasive and gentle in love--even if she is your wife."

He made the cellos repeat and repeat the melting cello quartet passage that had troubled him 60 years before, and when their playing of it did not suit him, he turned to the cellists with a look of contained rage that was as effective as a blow-off would have been. Other times, in dissatisfaction, he slapped his baton fitfully against his trouser leg.

He stopped the orchestra, looked up a passage in the score with his nose almost touching the page, and then, his darkest suspicions confirmed, whacked the score with his baton and shouted directions to the strings. He exhorted, implored and cursed in Italian. He sang a troublesome passage for the orchestra in his croaky voice. When the chorus mumbled, he said sharply, in Italianized English that was hard to understand: "Let me hear the words. There is not a word that has no meaning." For an erring violinist, he indulged his own brand of humor: "If you play that wrong Saturday night, I will drop dead. Then they will put you in jail for murdering me." Muttered one perspiring observer: "They will all drop dead before the Old Man does."

Power & Polish. But for musicians and listeners alike it was worth it. At week's end, when the 80-year-old Maestro shuffled to the podium and began Otello, music-lovers, filling Radio City's huge NBC Studio 8-H and at radio sets throughout the U.S., heard an Otello with power, polish and finesse they had seldom--if ever--heard before. It was opera the way it can be: no show-off arias, hogged and uneven duets, but fast-moving drama and fine music, put together exactingly and with love by the greatest conductor alive.

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