Customer Reviews

Understanding Toscanini

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Horowitz's book started an highly interesting and vital argument within the world music community: what is the 'selling' of superstar musicians doing to the music as consumers come to experience it? In his analysis of Toscanini's repackaging as a sort of cold warrior cultural hero and 'correct' conductor by NBC in the years after WWII, Horowitz shows us the start of the commodification of serious music as a palliative for the masses. If "Mozart makes you smarter" is a trade gimmick today, it owes its inception to the selling of Toscanini as the 'only conductor to faithfully follow the score'--which he was billed as, and which he assuredly did not.

Toscanini's career is summarized and his NBC recording analyzed extensively in this volume, and the dynamics of selling serious music to a middle-brow audience come in for thoughtful consideration. This book is a bracing tonic for the idolatry that has corrupted honest critical assessment of Toscanini in the years since his death. If you're one of the ones who heard the awful singing of "The Three Tenors" and wondered how such mannered stuff could be massaged into a hit record, this book explains the process from its start.

Mr. Horowitz has a valid thesis -- that classical music in the United States was taken over by commercial interests -- but he subverts that thesis in an attack, misguided, misinformed, and mean-spirited, on a great conductor who tried to conduct music as it was written. If it were not for the thesis, this would get no stars.