Customer Reviews

The Letters of Arturo Toscanini

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This is an obsessively edited great book about, and by, an obsessively great man and great conductor. Of greatest interest to those also obsessed by Arturo Toscanini, but of great interest to anyone who wants to enter the mind of the greatest conductor of the 20th century. That's a lot of "greats", but they're well-deserved. Toscanini writes with passion, grace, lyricism, eroticism, and political insight. Mr. Sachs, the brilliant Toscanini biographer, has edited this book in a way that makes it an autobiography. Buy it!

I loved this book. Toscanini's writing style is so direct and passionate. His love of music and his worship of its icons permeates the book and his ever-present desire to do them justice (even at the expense of dealing with musicians not meeting his exacting standards) make this a fun read. As a musician I can relate to the exhaustion of rehearsals and the exaltation he felt after a great concert and in the midst of musicians in which he had respect.
The hundreds of letters to his mistress are amazing, written in the most ardent and intimate manner. (One feels that one knows her, too, from osmosis). They are speckled also with his reflections on aging and their age disparity, of his concertizing, of his passionless marriage, of his disappointment/disgust with emerging regimes of his time. I found even the most mundane details of his everyday life are somehow also interesting.
The commentary from the author is nicely formatted so that it is easy to skip over details which have no familiarity to the lay reader.

What will floor a Toscanini fan here is the revelation that the old man's emotional life was much more intense than anybody realized. The majority of the book is taken up with love-letters to one woman, although this affair only went on for 10 years or less; the outpouring of adoration, obsession, and eventual anger is stunning. There are certain performances of his about which we've customarily said, hmm, this one is relatively expressive--it turns out Toscanini confesses to his true love that while he conducted Tchaikovsky's 6th tonight, he was thinking only of her, and wept at such-and-such a passage, and even kissed the locket with her picture during the performance...so much for "literal" music-making! Although some letters are not always interesting (in the sense that his culture was not all that broad--this is not a book from which you'll learn a lot about arts & letters, performance practice, or even about music in general), and some letters will definitely make some people squeamish, they present a quite different picture of the conductor as primarily passionate, rather than primarily angry. You come away from the book, as you do from his best performances, amazed at his honesty and phenomenal intensity.

A cache of love letters is included in this book of letters for purposes of attracting readers who are drawn to the current (personal) mode of biographies. Sachs was right in stating that Toscanini would be against their publication. They contain matters of prurient and highly personal interest. The other 20% of the book contains fascinating data relating to musical and political matters. There is a discussion by Toscanini of a work I never knew he adored, the Bach Mass in b minor. I wish he had conducted and recorded it. These matters alone make the book worthy. The sexual matters disfigure it. Shame on Harvey Sachs. I know that this is how things are done today, in the guise of people's sexual behavior being germane, however it is not.

Sachs' editorial comments provide fascinating insights into the world of opera and Toscanini's role in it. Beyond the minutiae of the Maestro's life and passions, however, this book provides an intriguing perspective of world events during the first half of the 20th century.

I was prepared for true revelations which didn't come through in the letters, found precious little I didn't already know.