The Letters of Arturo Toscanini (review)

Harvey Sachs's collection of letters provides an ideal way to become acquainted with Arturo Toscanini. Of course, Toscanini still lives in the memories of the elderly and, more broadly, his many recordings speak for him as a performing musician. Already a mythic figure during his lifetime, his reputation continues to be buoyed up by hundreds of gossipy anecdotes and eyewitness accounts. Contemporaneous reports of this sort have made their proper contribution to biographies such as Sachs's own Toscanini (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1978) and Denis Matthews's Arturo Toscanini (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1982). More recently, Joseph Horowitz has investigated the socioeconomic and cultural meanings of the conductor's American reception in particular (Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987]).

With the Letters we come to a book written largely by Toscanini himself over the course of seventy-two years; it comprises more than seven hundred messages, most in the form of letters but with a smattering of telegrams. Italian predominates as the language of the originals. Sachs has accomplished a Herculean undertaking in getting Toscanini's words into perfectly idiomatic English. Each entry is meticulously labeled as to date and place of origin, person (and place) to whom the letter was addressed, and current location of the letter.

The items selected were chosen from a much larger pool, the selection having been made with an eye to pleasing "readers whose principal interest in Toscanini has to do with his music making and his whole persona" (p. xxiii). Bracketed ellipses—[...]—within the printed letters indicate the frequent editorial excisions of repetitious and inconsequential material. The ravages of time and other circumstances set limits on the correspondence from which Sachs has drawn. The letters of Giulio Ricordi, for instance, are missing, and examples of the courtship letters to Carla De Martini, the conductor's wife to be, have intentionally been held to a minimum. Nor has any attempt been made to include letters received by the maestro. Instead, to clarify what Toscanini is saying, editorial annotations explain the relevant situations and briefly identify scores of obscure performers and other figures. In addition, Sachs manages to slip in a few opinions of his own.

This volume opens a window on the maestro's career. We see him making demands on various institutions such as La Scala, the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera Company, the Bayreuth Festival, and the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Likewise, we observed his fallings out with fellow musicians (e.g., Richard Strauss) and the rivalries in which he found himself (vis-à-vis Willem Mengelberg, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Leopold Stokowski). Toscanini's antagonism toward established authority and pretensions of superiority is neatly prefigured in the earliest entry of all (12 January 1884); this letter of apology was occasioned by acts of student insubordination in which Toscanini had a hand. He soon recognized the directorial usefulness of his temper and accepted his reputation as a "pestiferous ball-breaker" (p. 163). Thus, over the years his assertiveness was forcefully channeled into music, specifically into his function as conductor.

Yet beyond the sphere of musicmaking, Toscanini had attained, by the 1930s, international status as a leading antifascist. Although Toscanini always held political positions that were radical and republican, albeit Italian and patriotic, he was so much a loner that his prominence during World War II may seem an anomaly. But as the letters make clear, his suitability as a celebrity symbol of the anti-Axis war effort rested in good part on his disdain for officeholding and ordinary political organizations. That is, he appeared to act outside of everyday causes, standing for freedom in the arts, for creativity against ideology. In this matter, as elsewhere, Toscanini was thinking as an elitist. Perhaps his willingness to send opinions and advice to...