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.