Word: toscanini
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...boss of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony last week made a good start at his new job. This was a great relief to all concerned with the oldest U.S. orchestra. Arturo Toscanini's resignation, in 1936, had left the Philharmonic as limp as a discarded ventriloquist's dummy. His successors, British-born John Barbirolli and a string of guest conductors, had failed really to strike up the band. But when 49-year-old, grey-thatched Artur Rodzinski left the podium last week, the audience had heard some pretty musicianly music and even the skeptics were hopeful...
...Rodzinski was also a conductor of long experience, particularly famed among musicians as an orchestra builder and repairer. He had, in 1933, developed the bush-league Cleveland Orchestra into one of the Middle West's two finest (the other: the Chicago Symphony). He had been picked by Arturo Toscanini in 1937 to organize and train the NBC Symphony. Last spring Rodzinski got ready for his New York job by suddenly firing or pensioning 17 of the Philharmonic's most important musicians (including Concertmaster Mishel Piastre and practically every soloist in the brass and reed sections). It was obvious...
...more entitled to make these artistic gestures than Arturo Toscanini. The most famous of all living Italians except Mussolini and the most famous living embodiment of the art of music, the little, white-haired 76-year-old maestro had for years been using the lever of his prestige to pry at the roots of Fascism. To most Italians, who rate music as important as food and wine and a good deal more important than politics, that lever was a powerful one. To music-loving Germans (who gave him a smashing reception as conductor of the Bayreuth Wagner Festival...
Feeling and Belief. Toscanini's personal fight with Fascism began in 1922, when he first defied a request to play Giovinezza at Milan's La Scala Opera House. When the Fascists started to agitate for control of La Scala's policies in 1929, Toscanini resigned as director. Two years later, at a concert in Bologna, the peppery little maestro again refused to conduct Giovinezza, saying publicly that, in his opinion, it was not music at all. After the concert a Fascist mob beat him up, Fascist authorities temporarily confiscated his passport, and the Fascist Party surrounded...
Last week in LIFE Toscanini brought his political platform up to date, denounced Vittorio Emanuele and Badoglio and called fervently for a democratic Italy. Said he: "Italy will certainly have a revolution as a result of the current war; the Allies will either favor and help it, or hinder it. The Allies' attitude will determine whether the revolution will, or will not, result in an orderly democratic government...