Word: maestro
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...rehearsal was over; the guest conductor stepped down from the podium. Said Maestro Toscanini, who had been sitting quietly in a back seat scrutinizing the score: "Now! That man really knows how to play that music ... I play it like a pig!" The little knot of courtiers around Toscanini hastened to assure him that it wasn't so. The old man turned on them with one of his sudden, unpredictable thunderclaps: "Oh, so you think I don't know music?" As he marched off he sputtered: "The trouble with all of you is-you have all been poisoned...
TIME'S human touch last summer in presenting Mormon Leader Smith as "slyly popping bonbons into his mouth" drew apt approval in Letters. Now in a single issue [March 29] we find Music-Maestro Ormandy and Ball-Bingler Crosby popping peppermint and peanuts into their mouths...
...Toscanini, having sweated through his first telecast (TIME, March 29), decided to call off the second one. It was too hot under those lights, he complained. Howls of dismay from disappointed televiewers (and NBC's promise to turn up the studio cooling system) changed the old maestro's mind. At concert time, he appeared with no vest, breezed through Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for a fitting finish to his tenth season with...
Last week, after Music Czar Petrillo lifted his ban on television (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), the networks scrambled to be first to televise their big symphonies. CBS won by a nose, with a telecast of the Philadelphia Orchestra. It was an interesting performance: Maestro Eugene Ormandy, unwarily popping a peppermint into his mouth in midpassage; the camera ogling the girl members of the orchestra. But for most televiewers it was just a curtain raiser for Toscanini, half an hour later...
...Toscanini, unnaturally docile about it all, was in top form. No less adroit was the photography of Director Hal Keith's three cameras. The television eye followed the music smoothly as it proceeded from section to section of the orchestra. It caught some remarkably candid glimpses of the maestro that concertgoers never see: Toscanini's glittering eyes, flashing eloquent messages to his musicians; his triumphant roar in the midst of a Wagnerian crescendo; the beads of sweat, glistening on his brow...