Word: toscaninis
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...that is needed is to follow the composer's explicit directions, what's all the fuss about conducting? To the average listener, it might seem that a mechanical metronome would serve as well as a human one. There are other conscientious conductors, just as selflessly anxious as Toscanini to express the composer's intent. Why does Toscanini tower over them...
...guard not to exhaust prematurely, in a too early climax, the excitement meant for a later one; to make each part shine for itself, and fit in a whole. It is not a metronome that is required, but taste, talent, culture and care-and some musical X besides. Toscanini has that X blazoned on his forehead...
...young Toscanini, Verdi found a conductor he could trust. Before a performance of Verdi's Quattro Pezzi Sacri, Toscanini once called on him, told him that he felt a retard was needed in one passage of the Te Deum. When Verdi heard him play it, he patted him on the back, said: "Splendid! That is just how I heard it in my mind." "Why didn't you write it that way?" asked Toscanini. Said Verdi: "I was afraid it would be exaggerated." Said Giacomo Puccini of Toscanini, who had conducted the world premiere of his La Boheme: "Toscanini...
...other Toscanini is the little old man who loves to go to parties, whirl down Manhattan's Hudson River drive from Villa Pauline, his Riverdale home, to Rockefeller Center in his black Cadillac, and play practical jokes on his family and friends. Once he arranged to have a rubber knife put at his wife's place at a dinner party, was furious when she found the meat tender enough to cut with a fork, and didn...
...Character." He likes to think of himself as shy, humble, unassuming, courteous-and, off the podium, he usually is. Toscanini the musician seems to be almost as fearful an object to him as it does to others. After an explosive day of ranting, raving, stomping and swearing in rehearsal, he will sometimes sidle up to an intimate friend at a party, and say with downcast eyes: "I have a bad character." Most of his friends know the right response. "No, Maestro, you don't have a bad character; you just have a bad temper." But he will continue...