Day 0: So you're doing this...why, exactly?

Tomorrow begins the big Toscanini project, and I thought this would be a good time to write a bit about why in the name of all that is holy I decided to do this.

I've told a few people about this blogging project, and I admit I've gotten a few blank stares. This is even coming from professional classical musicians. It seems it's a bit unusual to want to spend eighty days studying the work of a conductor who died fifty-four years ago and who mostly conducted music written 150 to 200 years ago. I do have my reasons, so I thought it might be helpful to talk about why I've decided to spend the next eighty days listening to every official recording of Arturo Toscanini and blog about it. Why?


Toscanini is a part of American history.

Toscanini was a cultural icon in his day, and introduced countless people to classical music through his weekly radio broadcasts and through his sheer force of personality. Whether or not you appreciate the way he made music, what Toscanini represented for American musical life during those years at NBC was something extraordinary, and something we have not seen since. I often wonder if the decline of classical music in mainstream culture has been due to no one with comparable charisma ever really having taken Toscanini's place. By studying the past, hopefully we can improve the future.

The music is really, really good.

The best of Toscanini's recordings can still very much be listened to for pleasure rather than out of strictly historical interest. There is a reason why Toscanini was considered the greatest conductor in the world, and it punches you in the face when you begin listening to one of his great recordings, like the 1936 Beethoven Seventh, the 1939 Eroica or the 1947 Verdi Otello. The music he made came alive with crackling intensity through razor-sharp attacks and carefully molded contours of phrase.


But sometimes it's really bad.

It is true that the negative stereotypes about Toscanini exist for a reason. The worst of his recordings do tend to exemplify the not-so-flattering characteristics his detractors have leveled at his conducting. He conducted everything too fast, too rigid, too uptight, too metronomic, lacking in harmonic emphasis, lacking in tonal depth, lacking in blah, having too much blah blah, just generally blah de blah blah blah.

No musician is perfect, and Toscanini produced clunkers just like everyone else. But what it is amazing about Toscanini's work is how good his mistakes sound. The worst of his performances show a commitment that good performances by mediocre musicians oftentimes lack. Toscanini preached the virtues of commitment throughout his life, and in music he eternally practiced what he preached.

That personal touch.

When I was sixteen years old in the summer of 1996 I met David Walter, a double bass player for Toscanini's NBC Symphony. He was at that time a youthful eighty-seven years old. I was spending the summer at the Marrowstone Music Festival in Port Townsend, Washington learning how to play détaché strokes more détaché-ier than the other bass players. David Walter came to do some coaching at Marrowstone, which turned out to mean he came to give one masterclass (I played Tibor Freso's Mala Fantazia). 

Fortunately he came to a camp barbecue on the beach, where I cornered him and made him talk about the NBC Symphony. I recall quite clearly a number of the things he said. "Every musician in the country would give their right arm to play for Toscanini," he said. "Anyone who was a good musician would try to get into that orchestra. I was one of the lucky ones." In my lame sixteen-year-old way I asked him "so, like, the NBC Symphony was really good, then?" He put his hand on my shoulder in that "sit down, son" kind of way and said that "the NBC Symphony was the greatest orchestra the world has ever seen. It is impossible that we will ever see anything like it again." It's easy enough to dispute that statement just by comparing the NBC recordings with the ones Toscanini himself made with other orchestras, but what Walter said made a huge impression on me. It still does.

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That's my take on why I decided to embark on this project. I hope it makes some sense.

Things officially begin tomorrow with the La Scala orchestra recordings from 1920 and 1921, the very first recordings Arturo Toscanini ever made. Stay tuned for daily updates.

"I drove to Tower Records, but it became an Apple Store!"

Since over the course of this project I'll be writing about recordings I'm hoping people will want to hear I thought I'd go over how to go about actually obtaining the Toscanini records.

If you're like me and prefer actual, physical cds you're going to find the future a bit unpalatable. The Toscanini Collection that RCA released in the early 90s is now virtually impossible to find in the few remaining record stores. If you do happen to run into one of those cds it's almost certainly going to be of major repertoire like Beethoven's Ninth. The more obscure repertoire has to be ordered online, and there are only a few sites where they can be located.

The most comprehensive resource by far is Amazon, which currently has all seventy-one volumes available. Most of these are used copies where the price is set by the individual seller, and these range from dirt cheap to ridiculously expensive.  I have picked up some cds for as little as fifty cents, while others are going for thirty dollars or more. Amazon is a superb resource, but it's not the only one.

Another resource is Arkivmusik, a wonderful website specializing entirely in classical recordings. They currently have about half of the Toscanini discs. To the best of my knowledge these are all reproductions of the original discs RCA released (presumably with permission). Their prices are generally reasonable, but in many cases the same cd can be found on Amazon (in its original incarnation) for less money.

The third resource is of course ebay. I have ordered cds from them in the past, and there certainly are gems to be had. The problem is the same as Amazon, that since the seller sets the value there is a huge variety of reasonableness to the prices. As near as I could tell, about a third of the Toscanini recordings are available on ebay at this moment and that of course can change wildly, so it's worth checking back regularly if there is something specific you are looking for.

We now come to the world of MP3s, which I avoided for as long as I possibly could, but I have now realized this is a losing battle. These days I frequently download classical material from Amazon and iTunes. The selection of modern and historical records continues to get better, and hopefully the day will come when high-quality editions can be found of whatever repertoire you are looking for. We are not there yet, and the options for locating Toscanini's work are a bit limited.

In the late 90s RCA remastered a good deal of the later Toscanini recordings and released them in a collection called Toscanini: The Immortal over twelve volumes. These contain a good amount of his core repertoire, such as all the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies and the major works of Wagner and Verdi. These are also out of print, but most of them are available for download from Amazon and iTunes. To my knowledge only the Wagner and French music volumes are not available at this time.

There are two problems with this, the first being that these remasterings have generally gotten poor reviews. Although the sound is a bit more smooth and polished, something just sounds wrong about them. There is an air of falseness about these editions, which could be fake stereo or some other trickery that had been avoided in the earlier editions. Toscanini scholar Mortimer H. Frank, in his generally excellent Arturo Toscanini: The NBC Years, lists only six works that were improved in the new transfers and I mostly agree with him. The other problem is that these newer editions only have the later Toscanini repertoire, leaving out some of the remarkable work of his earlier years with the NBC Symphony. Nothing before 1949 made it into the new edition, which leaves a false impression of Toscanini's work if you rely only on these more recent recordings.

Going back to the original RCA edition from the early 90s I am very sorry to say that only the tiniest bit of it is available for download at this time. To my knowledge only two volumes of the original collection are available for download, both from Amazon. These consist of some Wagner excerpts and the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1. Both of these volumes are excellent, but that is all that is currently available.

There are also a variety of pirated editions available of much of the Toscanini repertoire, but I do not recommend going that route because the transfers are often of extremely poor quality. Some of the earlier Toscanini recordings can also be found at classicsonline, but these are not available in the United States. I suppose I should also mention that a number of these can be found on youtube, but I have decided not to provide any links to them both out of copyright concerns and as a symbolic gesture of the importance of buying these wonderful recordings, so that they will continue to be available for decades to come.

Best of luck with your search, and if you know of any resources I am not aware of please do let me know and I will post them here.

Profiles in Tutelage

Arturo Toscanini left an indelible mark on every orchestra he worked with. The daughter of one of his singers once remarked that "music never sounded before as it did when Arturo Toscanini conducted it, and there are legions of us today who are witness that it has never sounded the same since." While a statement like that is bound to be laced with hyperbole, there is no question that the sound Toscanini produced out of the orchestras he worked with had a quality that could only have come when he was on the podium. It is noteworthy that while the New York Philharmonic took a noticeable step back after Toscanini left them in 1936, they immediately returned to form on those occasions when he came back to guest-conduct (Although Bruno Walter made some stunning recordings with the New York Philharmonic in the 1940s, there are some who argue that they did not really return to top form until the Leonard Bernstein era in the 1960s).

I thought it would be interesting to write a brief profile of the five orchestras with whom Toscanini left official recordings. He was Music Director of these respective orchestras at the time of most of these performances, but in the case of the BBC Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra recordings we get the opportunity to hear him as a guest conductor with orchestras that already had their sonorities shaped by other charismatic maestros. These five orchestras all had their own unique sonority, but the common denominator throughout is the Toscanini sound.

La Scala Orchestra

Toscanini had two terms as Music Director at La Scala, Italy's most important operatic stage. The first began in 1898, when he was only 31 years old. During this time he changed many long-standing traditions of Italian opera, introducing the then-novel concept of lowering the house lights and forbidding singers from giving encores right in the middle of the opera. He also vastly improved the orchestral playing (occasionally through means that would not remotely meet union regulations today), which had been loose and disorganized for much of La Scala's history. In 1908 Toscanini left to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, a post he held until 1915.

Toscanini returned to La Scala in 1920. The theater had been shut down towards the end of World War I, and Toscanini came back as plans were underway to restore it to its pre-war condition. Toscanini formed a new orchestra and took them on a mammoth tour of Italy, the United States and Canada. It was during this tour that he made his first recordings. Between December 18th, 1920 and March 31st, 1921 Toscanini recorded thirteen short works with the La Scala orchestra at the RCA studio in Camden, New Jersey. These performances are of enormous historic importance, and will be discussed in Day 1 of the project on September 1st.

Toscanini remained at La Scala until 1929 when he again left for New York, this time to become conductor of the New York Philharmonic. His second term at La Scala produced what are often called the finest Verdi productions of the century, although there are no recordings to prove this. He left a long shadow at La Scala, and did not return until after World War II.

New York Philharmonic

Toscanini first conducted the New York Philharmonic in 1926, while Willem Mengelberg was Principal Conductor. Mengelberg's sound aesthetic was very different from Toscanini's, and their respective programming made for refreshing variety. That year Toscanini recorded two excerpts from Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream, his first set with an American orchestra. When he returned to New York as Principal Conductor in 1929 Toscanini made eight more recordings, including particularly memorable readings of the Preludes to Act I and III from La traviata. 1936 saw some of the most celebrated recordings in the history of American orchestras, including extraordinary performances of works by Rossini, Wagner and Brahms as well one of the most famous of all recordings of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7.

Already in his 60s at the time of his tenure with the New York Philharmonic, Toscanini was arguably at his greatest during these years. Still being early in the history of sound reproduction very little was left for posterity from this time, but what was left was of such extraordinary quality that Toscanini's name would have been secure in the history of orchestral recording were it only for these seventeen works.

Following his Farewell Concert in April of 1936 Toscanini left for Europe and what was presumed to be retirement. New York's concert-going public likely believed they had seen the last of him, but fate was to intervene the following year.

BBC Symphony

The British Broadcasting Corporation began using ensembles for radio broadcasts in 1922. By 1930 these ad hoc ensembles had evolved into the full-time BBC Symphony Orchestra under the musical leadership of Adrian Boult, one of the most outstanding of all British conductors. Boult remained with the orchestra until 1950 and turned it into one of the finest orchestras in Europe.

Arturo Toscanini first appeared with BBC Symphony in 1935, marking his first ever appearance with a British orchestra. He returned every year until the advent of World War II. 1937 saw his first recording sessions with the BBC, and he was to leave eight approved recordings with that ensemble. These include three fine Beethoven symphonies and a variety of shorter works that can be rather difficult to locate. This is unfortunate, as these performances are among his finest.

NBC Symphony

Barely seven months into Toscanini's "retirement" the National Broadcasting Company sent pianist Samuel Chotzinoff as an emissary to Toscanini's villa outside Milan to broach the possibility of his participation in a bold project. NBC was interesting in creating a world-class symphony orchestra to use for weekly radio broadcasts of major orchestral repertoire, and they badly wanted Toscanini to be its conductor. There was at this time a war between the major radio networks to be the most cultivated, and landing Toscanini would have been a major coup that would give NBC instant cultural credibility.

Toscanini agreed to NBC's terms and was to serve the last seventeen years of his career with the NBC Symphony. The vast majority of his recordings were to be made during this time, and our understanding of his unique way with the orchestral repertoire must principally come from this period. As Toscanini was past 70 when he began working with the NBC Symphony, and the majority of his most famous recordings were made when he was past 80, it's debatable to what extant this period really reflects his best work. What we have been left with from the NBC years ranges from glorious readings like the 1939 Eroica Symphony and the 1950 La Mer to recordings that border on the perverse, like Mozart's Symphony No. 39 and Brahms's Symphony No. 3. What Toscanini's best and worst alike do show is that his personality fully inflected every performance, and even the very worst of his recordings show profound commitment. His finest recordings are among the monuments of recorded sound.

Philadelphia Orchestra

The Philadelphia Orchestra has been one of the very great orchestras of the world for nearly 100 years. The unique sound the world came to know from them was derived from the work of Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy. Stokowski came to Philadelphia in 1912 and over the next twenty-nine years cultivated a sound that sparkled with richness of tone and depth of sonority. They remain one of the world's great orchestras, and their current bankruptcy mess is a terrible tragedy for music.

In 1941 Toscanini left the NBC Symphony (temporarily, as it turned out) for a complex series of reasons we will return to later. In November of that year he began a series of remarkable recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra that went unreleased for quite some time. Shortly after these were finished the American Federation of Musicians instigated a recording ban that was to last for two years, during which time the Philadelphia Orchestra switched from RCA to Columbia. RCA decided they would rather Toscanini remake these same works with the NBC Symphony, and the Philadelphia recordings were not returned to until after Toscanini's death. The Schubert Symphony No. 9 was finally released in 1963 and the whole set was not made available until 1976.

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Each of these orchestras had their own unique sonority, but they all possessed the Toscanini sound when he was on the podium. That even an orchestra like Philadelphia that had been shaped by the wonderful and very different Leopold Stokowski could sound like this is a testament to the charismatic genius of Arturo Toscanini. Every performance is different, because every orchestra and every conductor that leads them is different. If there was only one sound to aspire to music-making would not be the art that it is. Toscanini's sound is not the only one, as some of most misguided disciples preached in the past. But it is extraordinary, and it is endlessly enriching to hear it from a variety of fine orchestras.

Since you asked for it - some more stats.

And by "since you asked for it," I of course mean "no one asked for it," but I decided to post some stats anyway.

In my last entry I explored the topic of the many pieces Toscanini recorded multiple times, which in many cases is a valuable guidepost to what his preferred repertoire consisted of (I say "many" cases as there are a number of exceptions. The Die Meistersinger Prelude was programmed more frequently than any other work in the latter half of Toscanini's career, yet was only recorded once.) Today's topic deals with which composers Toscanini seemed to favor most.

Toscanini did not become a primarily symphonic conductor until the second half of his career, when he began to regularly conduct the New York Philharmonic in the late 1920s. Until then the vast majority of his work was in the opera house. Although his operatic work made him the most famous conductor in the world, he had basically given up working in the theatre by the time he began to record regularly. All that remains of his staged opera performances are a few scattered live recordings from the Salzburg Festival in the 1930s and one concert from La Scala in 1948. By default, his recorded legacy must therefore come down to his work in the concert hall. Here we have ample evidence of where his sympathies lay, as some composers were represented far more than others.

There are few surprises here, as Toscanini seemed to generally prefer the composers who are most programmed today. What's interesting is that there are some works that he programmed with great frequency (Debussy's La Mer, for example) by composers he otherwise gave short shrift to. Toscanini only recorded three other works by Debussy and performed three others in concert (for the same concert in April of 1940).  The single work he recorded more than any other was the Scherzo from Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream, yet Mendelssohn otherwise did not figure prominently in Toscanini's concerts. Outside of the Midsummer Night's Dream excerpts, Toscanini only recorded four other works by Mendelssohn, with concert performances of five others.

I thought it would be interesting to list the composers Toscanini performed most, with the total number of works by that composer that he recorded. This is an entertaining if highly misleading way to determine the breadth of his interest in the composers he performed.  The exceptions can probably be explained by a variety of commercial considerations on the part of RCA as well as some unique circumstances of programming.

The composer who was likely deepest within Toscanini was Giuseppe Verdi, yet Verdi's works did not feature prominently in his concert programs. Yet to view this list you would think that Verdi was among the most frequently programmed composers in Toscanini's latter years. This has to do with the fact that RCA issued nearly every performance of a work of Verdi given during Toscanini's years with the NBC Symphony. Of the works that exist in the official discography only the Overture to La forza del destino, Act IV from Rigoletto, the Requiem, Te Deum and the potboiler Hymn of the Nations were given in performances that were not released commercially. Even these pieces were only performed a combined nine times in versions that went unreleased. I suspect Toscanini's reticence to program Verdi's music in concert probably had to do with a reluctance on his part to hear Verdi's music played out of context. RCA nonetheless likely felt they could capitalize on Toscanini's close (and this may be stretching it) personal relationship with Verdi by releasing as many recordings of his music as they could. Fortunately for us, Toscanini gave his approval to most of these recordings.

Mozart is another interesting case, as Toscanini admitted in a conversation with B.H. Haggin that he found Mozart "boring". Excepting the Symphony No. 40 and the concertos, he said that Mozart's music "is always beautiful - but is always the same." Regardless of this, Toscanini ended up recording ten different works by Mozart, more than any composer outside of Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner and Verdi (and tied with Rossini). Mozart has always been a very "safe" composer to program, as he is unlikely to offend any concertgoers, and RCA likely considered his music commercial gold when accompanied by Toscanini's photo on the cover.

All this said, I still find it very interesting which composers ended up having a wide variety of works recorded. It says a great deal about both Toscanini's tastes as a musician and the commercial tastes of the time.

Here is the list of all the composers of whom Toscanini recorded two or more works. As one might expect Beethoven is right at the top, with twenty-four total works. For the purposes of this list I am counting operatic excerpts that were programmed separately as their own works. For example, the Overture and the aria "Quando le sere" from Verdi's Luisa Miller are counted separately, but operas performed in their entirety are considered individual pieces.

Twenty-four works

• Beethoven      

Eighteen works

• Verdi              
• Wagner           

Sixteen works

• Brahms           

Ten works

• Mozart            
• Rossini           

Six works

• Haydn             

Five works

• Cherubini        
• Mendelssohn   
• R. Strauss       

Four works

• Berlioz            
• Debussy          
• Respighi          
• Sibelius           
• Tchaikovsky    
• Weber             

Three works

• Schubert         

Two works

• Bizet               
• Catalani          
• Cimarosa        
• Franck            
• Glinka            
• Gluck             
• Saint-Saëns    
• Schumann      
• Shostakovich  
• Smetana         
• Sousa             
• J. Strauss        

We're now only three days away from the official beginning of the project. Stay tuned for more.

Some Stats

When you look at the discography of Arturo Toscanini two things leap out at you. A) The list is very long. B) The list is very familiar.

Toscanini was widely criticized for sticking to familiar repertoire to the detriment of modern music. This charge is both fair and unfair. The list of world premieres that he gave in the first half of his career is quite impressive, including such staples of the Italian opera repertory as La bohème and Pagliacci. Toscanini also championed many composers who were still considered daring in his youth, such as Claude Debussy and Richard Strauss. Composers like Brahms and Wagner were still very much active during Toscanini's youth, and it should perhaps be noted that the first symphony of Brahms was premiered when Toscanini was already nine years old.

At the same time, as he got older Toscanini became increasingly conservative in his programming to the extent that his concerts became a bit repetitive. In his excellent Toscanini and the Art of Conducting, music critic Charles C. Marsh lists sixteen works that Toscanini programmed thirty times or more in the last 29 years of his life. Marsh lists a further twenty-six works that Toscanini programmed between twenty and twenty-nine times during the same period. All the works on both lists are very much standard to the symphonic repertory. Of the modern music he did play in the second half of his career it is quite striking how low the overall quality is. Pieces such as Kent Kenman's Night Soliloquy and Vittorio Rieti's Symphony No. 4 aren't exactly considered required reading in musical analysis classes. The few modern pieces of high artistic worth that Toscanini performed in his latter years were generally quite conservative, the most important example being the 1938 world premiere of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings.

Given Toscanini's age it is tempting to forgive him this indifference to the less accessible works of the modern repertory, but it should be remembered that other long-lived conductors have performed challenging and unfamiliar music for the duration of their careers. Leopold Stokowski was an outstanding example of this, while the 86-year-old Pierre Boulez still shows the same devotion to contemporary music he did as a young firebrand in the 1950s.

While this lack of interest in modernity on Toscanini's part was lamentable, on the bright side we are left with a treasure trove of performances of the great standard repertoire that document the evolving views of a master musician. He left a total of six official recordings of the Scherzo movement of Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream (more than for any other work), and three recordings each for nine others. Forty-two pieces were given twice. Through these performances we can trace the ever-changing views of Toscanini towards the music he performed most.

This is the complete list of the pieces he recorded multiple times, accompanied by the year each recording was made. For the purposes of this list I am separating individual movements where applicable. Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, for example, was recorded in its entirety twice, but the last movement was also recorded separately in 1920. That movement is therefore listed as having been recorded three times.

6 times

• Mendelssohn: Scherzo from A Midsummer Night's Dream (1921, 1926, 1929, 1942, 1946, 1947)

3 times

• Beethoven: Leonore Overture No. 3 (1939, 1944, 1945)
• Beethoven: Movement 4 from Symphony No.1 (1921, 1937, 1951)
• Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 (1939, 1949, 1953)
• Beethoven: Movement 4 from Symphony No. 5 (1920, 1939, 1952)
• Mendelssohn: Nocturne from A Midsummer Night's Dream (1926, 1942, 1947)
• Mendelssohn: Wedding March from A Midsummer Night's Dream (1921, 1942, 1947)
• Schubert: Symphony No. 9 (1941, 1947, 1953)
• Wagner: Dawn and Siegfried's Rhine Journey from Götterdämmerung (1936, 1941, 1949)
• Wagner: Prelude to Act I from Lohengrin (1936, 1941, 1951)
• Wagner: Siegfried Idyll (1936, 1946, 1952)

2 times

• Beethoven: Egmont Overture (1939, 1953)
• Beethoven: Movements 1-3 from Symphony No. 1 (1937, 1951)
• Beethoven: Symphony No. 4 (1939, 1951)
• Beethoven: Movements 1-3 from Symphony No. 5 (1939, 1952)
• Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 (1937, 1952)
• Beethoven: Symphony No. 7 (1936, 1951)
• Beethoven: Symphony No. 8 (1939, 1952)
• Berlioz: Rákóczi March from The Damnation of Faust (1920, 1945)
• Berlioz: Queen Mab Scherzo from Romeo and Juliet (1942, 1951)
• Bizet: Aragonaise from Carmen (1921, 1952)
• Brahms: Symphony No. 1 (1941, 1951)
• Brahms: Tragic Overture (1937, 1953)
• Brahms: Variations on a Theme of Haydn (1936, 1952)
• Debussy: Iberia (1941, 1950)
• Debussy: La Mer (1942, 1950)
• Donizetti: Overture from Don Pasquale (1921, 1951)
• Dukas: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1929, 1950)
• Gluck: Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Orfeo ed Euridice (1929, 1946)
• Haydn: Symphony No. 101 (1929, 1946/1947)
• Mendelssohn: Overture, Intermezzo and Finale from A Midsummer Night's Dream (1942, 1947)
• Mozart: Overture from The Magic Flute (1938, 1949)
• Mozart: Symphony No. 35 (1929, 1946)
• Mozart: Movements 3-4 from Symphony No. 39 (1920, 1948)
• Mozart: Symphony No. 40 (1938/1939, 1950)
• Respighi: Roman Festivals (1941, 1949)
• Rossini: Overture from The Barber of Seville (1929, 1945)
• Rossini: Overture from L'Italiana in Algeri (1936, 1950)
• Rossini: Overture from Semiramide (1936, 1951)
• Rossini: Overture from William Tell (1939, 1953)
• Strauss: Death and Transfiguration (1942, 1952)
• Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1 (1941, 1943)
• Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 (1942, 1947)
• Thomas: Overture from Mignon (1942, 1952)
• Verdi: Overture from La Forza del destino (1945, 1952)
• Verdi: Prelude to Act I from La traviata (1929, 1941)
• Verdi: Prelude to Act III from La traviata (1929, 1941)
• Wagner: Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre (1946, 1952)
• Wagner: Siegfried's Death and Funeral Music from Götterdämmerung (1941, 1952)
• Wagner: Prelude to Act III from Lohengrin (1936, 1951)
• Wagner: Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde (1942, 1952)
• Weber: Overture from Der Freischütz (1945, 1952)
• Weber/Berlioz: Invitation to the Dance (1938, 1951)

We're now just a little over a week from the official beginning of the project. Stay tuned for more over the next few days. 

Are you sure this is all legit?

An interesting question that crops up about Toscanini's discography is about exactly what constitutes an "official" recording. Simply put, it's any studio recording or broadcast performance (some are a blend of the two) the Maestro conducted that he approved for commercial release. From the beginning of his recording career in 1920 he was quite insistent that if a performance he gave was not up to his standards that he would not allow it to be distributed. No fewer than nine works taken down in studio sessions were rejected for release during his NBC years, which must have enormously aggravated the recording company due to the expense it took to make them in the first place.

All of Toscanini's American recordings were made by RCA Victor with the exception of two excerpts from Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream that were made by Brunswick Records in 1926. The eight approved recordings he conducted with London's BBC Symphony between 1937 and 1939 were made by HMV. These BBC items have had a rather shadowy existence in the cd era, mostly consisting of isolated unofficial releases by companies like Pearl and Naxos. Of the works recorded by the BBC to my knowledge only the Brahms Tragic Overture and Beethoven Pastoral Symphony have seen official release on compact disc, both by companies associated with EMI. The American recordings are generally much easier to locate, every one of them having been released by RCA between 1990 and 1992 over 82 discs. These recordings make up the great bulk of his recorded legacy.

Many commentators have expressed dissatisfaction about some of the choices that were made in putting together the "official" discography. All of the broadcast concerts Toscanini gave with the NBC Symphony can still be listened to at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. It is entirely possible to listen to every performance Toscanini gave of a certain piece during the last 17 years of his life, and in some cases he left performances that are widely considered to be superior to the recordings that were left in the official collection.

Perhaps the most well-known instances of this are Toscanini's performances of the Beethoven symphonies. Most of the official releases of these pieces come from recordings he led between 1949 and 1953, when he was past 80. Recorded in relatively good sound, these have understandably formed the most lasting public impression of his way with Beethoven. While they are obviously the work of a master musician, they lack the extraordinary fire that marked many of the earlier recordings. The Beethoven cycle Toscanini led during his third season at NBC in 1939 is widely considered to be among his finest work, featuring a stunning blend of passion and precision. Of the symphonies he led during these concerts only the Eroica saw official release in the RCA collection. We are quite fortunate to have this extraordinary performance, but it remains a bit of a mystery why the others weren't approved for release.

There are a number of other cases like this. Works like the Verdi Requiem, Tchaikovsky Pathétique Symphony, Wagner Die Meistersinger Prelude and the Fêtes movement of Debussy's Nocturnes all exist in performances that are widely considered to be, in varying degrees, finer than the recordings Toscanini approved for release. 

Why then, am I concentrating solely on the official discography for the purposes of this blog? First there is the issue of practicality. To get through every Toscanini recording in existence would take more than a year to do full justice to. Plus, living on the left coast, I have no immediate access to the large number of broadcast items that have never seen commercial release. More important is the fact that, for better or worse, the official items represent what Toscanini approved to be his legacy. The NBC broadcasts are sprinkled with many filler works such as Jacopo Foroni's Overture in C Minor and Don Gillis's Symphony No. 5 1/2. These pieces may have made for good concert fare, but Toscanini would probably not have wanted to leave them for posterity.

It's now exactly two weeks before the project starts, and I'm getting quite excited. I will continue to post periodically until then with any Toscanini-related thoughts that occur to me.

Searching for Arturo

Welcome to 80 Days of Toscanini! Beginning September 1st I will begin an 80-day-long project to listen to the entire official discography of Arturo Toscanini and write about my reactions to his vast recorded legacy.

This is a project that I've been thinking about for some time. Toscanini's recordings have had an enormous appeal to me since I was about 10 year old. My mother took me to a Tower Records in Seattle to look for a copy of a Brahms symphony, and I was immediately drawn to the hypnotic eyes of an elderly man dressed in black, sporting a remarkable mustache. The cover stated that this man's name was Arturo Toscanini. I had never heard the name before, but the old man looked important. I asked my mom if she had heard of Toscanini. "Well, of course," she said. "He was probably the most famous conductor in the world."

Between 1990 and 1992 RCA released 71 volumes of material that Toscanini had approved for release. These ranged from recordings of great masterworks like the Beethoven and Brahms Symphonies to ephemeral oddities like Liadov's Kikimora and Leopold Mozart's Toy Symphony. There were ancient recordings in dreadful sound dating from the early 1920s and a number from the 50s that still sounded very good. I collected as many of the recordings as I could and devoured them eagerly.

I've always felt that when learning a discipline it is of profound importance to study the work of the great masters. Painters should study Rembrandt, writers should study Melville, and filmmakers should study Kubrick. There is a long list of great conductors to study, from Abbado to Zinman, but the name of Toscanini will always loom large over the others. Why is this? Is it just because of his fame and enormous influence over the technical standard of orchestral performance, or is there a profound truth to his recreative musical skill that still has importance for the modern interpreter?

Returning to the Toscanini collection with fresh ears, I have found that even a superficial listening to his most famous recordings is enough to show that his work is every bit as relevant today as it was 50 years ago. His 1946 recording of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet is filled with an astonishing, crackling energy that bites with restless fervor. The 1936 Beethoven 7th is a monumental achievement. The 1950 La Mer is breathtakingly atmospheric. His Wagner recordings have an extraordinary linear power that I have heard from no other interpreter.

There are also clunkers. The 1951 recording of the Beethoven 7th is a monumental disappointment coming on the heels of his recording of 15 years earlier. His Mozart was often unidiomatic and stiff. The few American works he conducted had little of the flair that is required to make them come alive.

The fascinating thing is that there is something to learn from all of these. Even when the music he made was not of the highest level, it always said "This is Toscanini." No musician can perform at 100% in every single performance, but only a great one can stamp great and lesser readings alike with a distinctive sound that can only have come from one source. Toscanini's work has a ceaseless wealth of brilliant ideas to study.

This is where 80 Days of Toscanini comes in. Every day from September 1st until November 18th I will listen to a little over an hour's worth of his recordings, and over the course of 80 days get through the entirety of his official discography. For each of those days I will write my observations of that day's listening session. Naturally I hope that this will have some interest to the outside world, and I will do my best to make it entertaining.

Part of what interests me about this project is to see how Toscanini's recordings evolved over the 34 years he was making them. To this end I will be listening to these recordings in roughly chronological order, beginning with the early set he made with the La Scala orchestra in 1920 and 1921, and ending with his final discs with the NBC Symphony in 1954. It's not always possible to be strictly chronological, as his recording sessions for a certain piece were sometimes separated by years, and he may well have made many other records in the meantime. His recording of Beethoven's Symphony No. 2, for example, was done in sessions taking place on November 7th, 1949 and October 5th, 1951. The Franck Symphony in D Minor was culled together from radio broadcasts that took place six years apart. In most cases I will order the recordings based on when they were completed.

Toscanini approved recordings he had made with five different orchestras. His long career culminated in 17 seasons with the NBC Symphony, and these recordings make up the vast majority of his recorded legacy. Earlier in his career he made recordings with the La Scala orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

If all goes according to plan my schedule will run as follows:

• La Scala recordings: September 1.
• New York Philharmonic recordings: September 2-4.
• BBC Symphony recordings: September 5-6.
• NBC Symphony recordings, seasons 1-4: September 7-16.
• Philadelphia Orchestra recordings: September 17-19.
• NBC Symphony recordings, seasons 5-17: September 20-November 18.

I'm very excited about all this, and I look forward very much to hearing your comments and suggestions throughout this project. I will post again in a few days with more about exactly why I decided to do this.