Customer Reviews

Understanding Toscanini: A Social History of American Concert Life

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You'll have to decide for yourself, so don't skip this one.

Horowitz portrays the beloved and tempestuous conductor as a carefully packaged and sold cultural superstar. I wonder if he's not a little ahead of himself on that one -- we're talking pre- during and post WWII here. Of course Toscanini's association with the NBC Orchestra paid off in a variety of ways but Horowitz seems to have forgotten the great conductor's incredible sensitivity to the music and the composers that he interpreted.

I enjoyed this book immensely but can't agree with the author in a number of respects. Toscanini's fame was, quite obviously, a direct result of his talent, drive and the love audiences had for his interpretation of the music. Those are the facts, pure and simple.

The book, however, deserves an unprejudiced and thoughtful reading.

Mr. Horowitz's thesis is that American concert life was governed by profit and not art. That's fine and probably quite accurate. To prove his thesis he completely maligns a great conductor. When he discusses Toscanini, he makes errors of both facts and judgment, which are well-documented with erudition and grace in Harvey Sachs's Reflections on Toscanini. Mr. Sachs's biography of Toscanini is the standard; he knows whereof he speaks.
If it weren't for the thesis, I would completely downgrade this book. As it is, the thesis is well-stated.

Joseph Horowitz writes a well-researched tome. However, he spends too much time in his book delving into post-modernist head-scratching about why Toscanini was so loved among the American people. Most of this, Horowitz chalks up to the P.R. machine NBC and RCA used to propel Toscanini into the living rooms of millions of Americans via radio and phonograph records.

Horowitz credits Toscanini's 'over'-popularity with stifling creativity and diversity among the ranks of classical musicians. Bosh! The man's been dead for 47 years, and no-one has come along since who made classical music such a household name. If there's anything America needs now, more than ever, it's a shot in the arm from someone such as Toscanini. All the NEA and PBS tax dollars in the world won't make the American people turn on to great music. Toscanini was popular because of his extraordinary talent for delineation and his perfectionism.

He made classical music not only enjoyable, but infused millions of Americans with the passion he himself had for the music. Do you see James Levine or anyone else making 'La Boheme' as exciting as Toscanini? Was Toscanini perfect? I would say not. However, if I as a four year old could grasp that there was something akin to superhumanism about Toscanini's conducting, that I just didn't pick up in Lenny Bernstein's wretched performances, then I don't see why it slips by Horowitz.

To be fair, Horowitz acknowledges Toscanini's abilities, but implies all throughout this book that something had been 'put over' on the American people. Horowitz seems to have confused Toscanini with Bernstein. But then, again, Horowitz recounts a quote from a Russian who told the author that if Leonard Bernstein had been a Russian that he would have been an unassailable superstar. Apparently, the Russian thought Bernstein was underappreciated over here.

This book gives a great history of Toscanini and the NBC, but reading it through Horowitz' cynical lenses makes one itch for someone who can laud a true American treasure, instead of prospecting for clay.

Why? Because Joseph Horowitz has clout, and because there are still a lot of listeners who, like him, don't or can't really hear the many subtle facets of Toscanini's music-making.

Other reviews of this book have said a lot of what I would say, so I will simply add a few things. First, that all music-listening is subjective, so if you don't understand Toscanini (no pun intended) you probably won't "get" him anyway. Second, that Toscanini "heard" his orchestra as a large chamber group, not as a solid mass of sound, so if you don't appreciate this aesthetic your listening experience is going to be up against a wall before you get very far.

The strange sound quality of Toscanini's recordings, particularly the NBC recordings, is partially due to the many engineers who worked on his broadcasts and studio sessions who all had their own idea of sound, and partially due to Toscanini's preference for a flat audio response and two-dimensional sound so that all the strands of the music can be heard in equipoise. This preference of his is as evident in the recordings and broadcasts made in Carnegie Hall, even the last two broadcasts which were recorded in stereo, as it is in the Studio 8-H recordings. Toscanini did not like a lot of "space" around the instruments. Thus the most "realistic" recordings are those made without his consent as to microphone placement which were taken, as it were, from a slight distance from the source. These include his BBC broadcasts of 1935 and 1939, the 1948 La Scala performance of excerpts from "Mefistofele," and the 1952 Philharmonia Orchestra performances of Brahms. The 1941-42 Philadelphia Orchestra recordings were also realistically recorded for their time, although only the most recent issue of these truly do them justice.

While it's true that Toscanini was aggressively marketed by RCA, the bald truth is that the market already existed for his art. Prior to spending thousands of dollars to create the NBC Symphony, RCA did a nationwide survey and discovered that nearly 40% of the American public had heard of Toscanini. This figure, to their surprise, also included about 25% of the African-American population. It was a very different world indeed!

Toscanini was never "used" to sell commercial products or even RCA radios. He simply broadcaast his music and made commercial recordings. No particularly aggressive marketing techniques were used to sell these recordings; it was simply not the right time for such a thing and, to be honest, it wasn't necessary. Occasional light articles about the Maestro appeared in popular magazines, but very few, and never a single interview. Toscanini actually loathed promotion and being in the public eye other than when he was on the podium. For him, as tenor Jon Vickers put it, music-making was a sacred, almost religious experience in the non-denominational sense of the term. In this respect he was much closer to Furtwangler, whom he greatly admired, by the way, than he was to Stokowski whose fast tempi and tight structural form was more like his. But Stokowski came, increasingly over time, to view music as a way of personally promoting his own ego, and this became distasteful to Toscanini. Moreover, Toscanini used the NBC Symphony as a platform to showcase conductors whose aesthetic he did admire, particularly Ernest Ansermet, Erich Kleiber, Fritz Reiner, Pierre Monteux, Antal Dorati, and his protege Guido Cantelli. Mr. Horowitz seems to forget, or neglect, the many, many, many broadcasts that these conductors led at Toscanini's personal invitation and imprimatur.

Mr. Horowitz' glib and infuriatingly shallow descriptions of Toscanini's performances are an insult to the intelligence of the millions of educated listeners and professional musicians who admired and still admire him. If I attacked Wilhelm Furtwangler by exhibiting a similarly shallow and ignorant understanding of HIS aesthetic, I would, rightly, have every intelligent musician who admires him down my throat. But in a way, Toscanini-bashing is a reaction to certain critics who did exactly that, mostly after both conductors were dead. Even when Furtwangler's musical approach was wrong for the composer or the specific score, he usually had good and sound artistic reasons for his decisions. The same was true of Toscanini and, yes, I consider at least 20% of Toscanini's output to be too tense, too shallow or emotionally disconnected from the material. But you can't throw out the baby with the bath-water. You can say, as I have said, that Furtwangler's performance of a certain work - let's say, the Beethoven Violin Concerto - is more attractive or valid than Toscanini's, and it is. But you don't use Furtwangler or Stokowski or Koussevitzky as a club to beat Toscanini over the head. It just doesn't wash.

This book is a good read insofar as some of the facts Horowitz has dug up go, but be careful about separating fact from opinion here. In a way, the weakest part of Horowitz' argument is like the criticism he levels against Theodor Adorno, that he came here ranting and raving and trashing all things in American culture but had nothing constructive or positive to offer in its place. There are people who wll never "dig" Toscanini or "get" him. OK, fine. But what purpose does it serve to bash him post-mortem? You can't say, as Horowitz insists, that Toscanini was a non-thinking machine-musician. There are far too many deep and thoughtful performances in his ouevre to contradict that. Let's just say that there is so much of his work in existence on records that you're bound to trip across the two out of ten performances that just don't work. If they are your first experiences with Toscanini, of course they will leave a bad impression. But if they aren't, you simply realize that you found a dud performance and move on.

Recommended for people with no sensitivity to subtlety and no sympathy with structural integrity in musical performances.

A brilliant insight into the cultural commodotification of a great conductor by the forces of materialism. A wonderful exposition on the exploitation of intellectual and cultural capital which someone like Bourdieu would do well to read. We discover not only fascinating stories of Toscanini's relations with Mahler and Furtwangler, but excellent analyses are given to show how Toscanini was iconised. The reason has much to do with a reflection of American society and the political and international situation of that time. After reading this book, it was clear to me why Toscanini is my idea of a great conductor, von Karajan (who has a cameo appearance in the book) as the technical exepert and balanced visionary, and Furtwangler as the intense Romantic, mystical artist. But both Toscanini and Furtwangler stand out as stalwarts against totalitarian regimes, though while former had his due, the latter was given his due recognition for this only after his death. A treat and joy for anyone who loves classical music.

The power of myth is supported by the unexpected appearance of a hero who has nothing to do with the values of the city to conquer. He simply is absent of pacts or any kind of hidden compromises.

In the Thirties USA lived possibly the most important flow of immigrants the history has known about, different origins and ideologies; beliefs and nationalities; the hope of a promissory future fed the imagination and inflamed still more the unquestionable capacities and skills of undeniable talents of all order and knowledge 's discipline.

Toscanini represented by himself one of the maximum Ambassadors of the musical Art, but also he meant the irreverence and purity of convictions; his fame nourished by his well know political attitude that influenced to many musicians around the world. So he was the perfect sample of the individualism in search of the perfection and continuous discipline.

There were many others (like Fritz Reiner for instance), but Toscanini challenged Mussolini `s Italy and his brave act of deny to conduct in a fascist Italy earned him his seal of immortality, indispensable element at the moment to build a myth.

This is a book of fundamental historical relevance; not only surmounts the barriers of the musical world , but inscribes itself in a true sociological analysis of North America in those difficult and stormy years