Word: toscaninis
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Dressing-Room Drill. On his birthday they were just rehearsing for Toscanini's opera broadcast of the season-the riproaring, tearfully tender music of Verdi's Aida. The music meant something special to the maestro. He had conducted it in his Rio de Janeiro debut almost 63 years ago as a beardless bambino, and in his U.S. debut at Manhattan...
...usual, Toscanini had picked singers who weren't too set in their own ways to learn his, then drilled them for weeks in his dressing room, clonking the piano himself...
...Richard Tucker had never before tried the big, dramatic tenor role of Radames; Toscanini's favorite soprano, red-haired Herva Nelli, who had had to hold herself in as Desdemona in his 1947 broadcast of Otello, was getting a chance to open up as Aida. He had picked three newcomers: slim Norwegian Contralto Eva Gustavson (Amneris), who arrived in the U.S. last October, young Canadian Bass-Baritone Dennis Harbour (the King of Egypt), who a fortnight ago won the Met's radio auditions, and Soprano Teresa Randall (the Priestess), a finalist in the same contest. Baritone Giuseppe Valdengo...
...Living. Even so, the rehearsal was far from grumpless; if it had been, it wouldn't have been a Toscanini rehearsal or resulted in a Toscanini performance. Once, when a singer yelped on an entrance, the tireless little tyrant roared in his hoarse, drama-ridden voice: "No! NO!" then stood speechless, slapping his leg with his baton, trying to suppress what he calls his "bad character." Once, dripping-wet in his black alpaca rehearsal coat, the maestro stopped the brassy triumphal march: "No! Not for the dead. For the living, for the living...
...Among the recipients: Arturo Toscanini, Serge Koussevitzky, Leopold Stokowski, Bruno Walter, George Szell, Eduard van Beinum in Amsterdam, Sir Thomas Beecham in London, Pierre's son Jean Monteux in Paris...