Word: toscanini
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...Toscanini seemed to defy history because, in an age when a musician was still weaned largely on the works of countrymen, his repertoire included not only Italian music, but also German and French...
...Toscanini's viscerally exciting performances, wrought with supreme tension and instrumental clarity, though sometimes sacrificing musical depth, also account for his popularity, according to Horowitz. Here Horowitz invokes the theories of Theodor Adorno, a Marxist of the Frankfurt school. Adorno, Horowitz writes, understood culture of the "bourgeois epoch"--"affirmative" and "official"--as neglecting the contradictions inherent in great art. Although proponents claimed classical would lead to universal enlightenment, "aspects of the concert hall experience were standardized, atomized, `fetishized,'" by alienated members of a "commodity society...
...TOSCANINI WAS an important part of the fetishization of music, Horowitz concludes, because his style, far from being suited to all types of music, cut all of it in the same, popularly appealing mold--that of the visceral music of Guiseppe Verdi, Toscanini's countryman, friend, and deepest musical love...
...easy for a cult of Toscanini to grow not only because of his enigmatic, stirring personality, but also because everything he conducted was rhythmically, erotically gripping...
More importantly, according to Horowitz, Toscanini's repertoire was restricted, especially in his later years, to what we now know as standard repertoire...