Word: toscanini
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Dictators might have envied the cult of personality that centered on Arturo Toscanini in America. For a half-century he reigned supreme in the popular estimation as the world's greatest conductor, and when he died in 1957 at the age of 89, the New York Times spoke for the nation: "Both as an operatic and symphonic conductor, he achieved a stature no other conductor before him had attained...
...Although revisionists set to work soon after the maestro's death, Understanding Toscanini is the most detailed examination yet of the man, his work and his audience. "To study how Americans perceived Toscanini is to study how they perceived themselves," argues Joseph Horowitz, a former music critic for the Times. "As a personality, even as a musician, Toscanini embodied 'self-made' virtues distinguishing the New World from the parent culture of Europe. As the dominant figurehead for Great Music, he furnished proof of New World high cultural achievement . . ." The quality of his interpretations was almost irrelevant; in Horowitz's view...
...contemporary listener, the mystique seems hard to fathom. The core of Toscanini's repertoire was small -- Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner made up 40% of his New York Philharmonic programs; Puccini and Verdi were favorites in the opera house -- and his interest in contemporary music, aside from fellow Italians like Respighi, was almost nil. The famous RCA recordings of the Beethoven symphonies now sound febrile and coarse. Even the conductor's notorious temper and torrents of epithets, which once seemed so romantically apposite -- no musician had really lived until Toscanini called him Porco! (pig) -- come off today as operatic posturing...
...almost from the moment he arrived at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1908, reports Horowitz, Toscanini was a celebrity. The story of his professional debut -- rising from the cello section to lead Verdi's Aida from memory in Rio de Janeiro at the age of 19 -- had preceded him, and the New York music critics provided a collective embrace. "As great and as welcome as anything that has come out of Italy since Verdi laid down his pen," proclaimed the New York Tribune in a typical response...
...opposite is the case with James Levine: The Life in Music, a portrait of the Metropolitan Opera's dynamic artistic director, scheduled to air in August. The tightly woven hour combines Levine's own reflections -- on choosing music as a career, his admiration for Toscanini -- with revealing views of him at work. Whether he is steering his orchestra through a demanding passage during rehearsal ("I need super concentration here . . . like you were driving in heavy traffic") or attending to business in his Lincoln Center office, every scene seems to define the man and command our respect...