Word: conduction
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Words & Music. Last week, Maestro Toscanini was busy brewing one of his favorite prescriptions in his own precise and painstaking way. Next week in Carnegie Hall he will conduct the Verdi Requiem in a charity performance for the New York Infirmary. And at $5 to $25 a seat and $250 a box, Carnegie Hall is already sold out, for the biggest gross in its history...
Toscanini was baptized a Roman Catholic, but has seldom gone to church in recent years, except for the first communions of his two grandchildren. He refuses to conduct without a heavy, brass-framed strip of pictures of his children in his pocket. (The strip includes a picture of son Giorgio, who died at eight in South America...
Scrupulously honest, he detects sham of all kinds instantly. Years ago, after Richard Strauss had asked him to conduct the first performance of his Salome, then gave it to another conductor, Toscanini went all the way from Milan to Vienna to tell him, "Strauss, as a musician I take my hat off to you; as a man [Toscanini here went through a furious pantomime of a man clomping on hats repeatedly] I put on twelve hats...
...does his best to ignore the legend of his own greatness, but he knows that it is around. At a rehearsal of his all-Debussy concert a month ago, he was flushed with a fever of 102 degrees. His friends tried to persuade the old man not to conduct, but he was insistent. Said he, as he trudged out to the podium: "Sometimes I must act like Toscanini...
Christian Conscience. But a Christian at war must look sharply and often to his conscience. "The tendency of a conflict to change its character as it proceeds, and of a nation at war to deteriorate progressively in outlook and conduct, must always be of grave concern to Christians, on account of the ethical dilemmas that arise when what began as a 'just' war comes to assume a more dubious countenance . . . We would therefore emphasize the duty that is laid upon Christians of refusing to participate in any act of war which they are morally certain is wrong...