Yesterday I began my survey of the recordings Toscanini made with the Philadelphia Orchestra between November of 1941 and February of 1942. Let's continue with:
Debussy: Iberia - November 18th, 1941
Of all the works that were staples of Toscanini's repertoire during the latter half of his career, Debussy's Iberia was the one most recently composed. Of the sixteen pieces Toscanini conducted thirty times or more during this period, only Iberia and another work by Debussy, La Mer, were composed in the 20th century. Considering Toscanini was active until 1954, I can't say that's a good thing.
Toscanini has been widely criticized for playing as little modern music as he did, and for the extremely conservative bent of the few contemporary works he did perform. His defenders have tried to justify this by placing Toscanini in his broader historical context. Harvey Sachs notes that "When Toscanini was born, in 1867, Rossini was still alive… Brahms was not quite thirty-four years old…Bizet, Tchaikovsky Dvořák, Massenet, Boito, and Grieg were all in their twenties; and Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Mascagni, Richard Strauss, Sibelius, and Busoni were under the age of ten." Sachs further notes that Toscanini entered Parma's Royal School of Music during the same month as the world premiere of Brahms's First Symphony, and that when Toscanini made his conducting debut in 1886 Bartók was five years old and Alban Berg was only one.
It is genuinely quite remarkable that a musician from Toscanini's era lived so long into the age of recorded sound and produced so many documents for posterity. Given his age, it can be quite tempting to forgive Toscanini for his indifference to challenging modern music, but in the end I don't find this to be a persuasive excuse. Other long-lived conductors have shown devotion to the music of their time for the duration of their careers. Leopold Stokowski was an outstanding example of this, and I have seen first-hand the remarkable devotion of the 86-year-old Pierre Boulez to the propagation of challenging new music. In 2008 I performed in the world-premieres of two works by wonderful composers who were in their twenties at the time under the baton of Maestro Boulez, who had guided them tirelessly through the process.
It is hard to imagine a person like Toscanini ever taking part in project like that. He showed great interest in the new music of his youth but as he got older eventually began to turn his back on what was unfamiliar. While you cannot blame a conductor for wanting to primarily promote the music he understands best, the extent to which Toscanini emphasized the music that was most familiar to him can all too easily result in musical hardening of the arteries. The great masterpieces of music are performed frequently for a reason, but for them to stay fresh they have to be played alongside music that is new and unknown. Obviously not every new work is going to be a masterpiece, but if we don't regularly perform new music we will never get to the good stuff that will last for posterity.
Toscanini did wrong by modern music, but he was certainly a musician who followed his convictions. He knew what he liked, and performed his favorite music with consummate skill and professionalism. Iberia was clearly among his favorite pieces, and this stunningly atmospheric Philadelphia Orchestra recording is breathtaking in its evocation of musical exoticism. The French loved the very idea of Spain, and Toscanini exploits their conceptualization of the exotic with phenomenal flair and vitality. I just wish he could have played modern music with the same level of conviction.
Respighi: Roman Festivals - November 19th, 1941
Toscanini knew Respighi well and played a great deal of his music, including the premiere of Roman Festivals in 1929. Twelve years later the music had lost none its intensity in Toscanini's interpretation. Although the sound of the Philadelphia Orchestra is a bit too smooth to really let Respighi's exuberant sounds burst in full exhilaration, this is a fabulous recording of a score Toscanini obviously cared about very much.
Strauss: Death and Transfiguration: January 11th, 1942
Toscanini's admirers evidently have a very difficult time with the conductor's devotion to this great Strauss tone poem. Robert C. Marsh writes that "the material in Death and Transfiguration is dangerously close to vanity in its simplest form, and its treatment is frequently obvious and pretentious. " The slightly more charitable Mortimer H. Frank believes that Toscanini's take on Death and Transfiguration makes "what some feel is not quite a top-drawer score sound better than it actually is" (this would have been the perfect place for a "transfiguration" joke).
I have yet to find a commentator who is squarely in Toscanini's camp to say a kind word about this tone poem, which might make you think that the kind of person who likes Toscanini's interpretations in principle just doesn't seem to like this kind of music. This is of course entirely paradoxical, as Toscanini himself obviously had tremendous affection for this piece. I do as well. As a devout agnostic I have no defined view of what happens after we die, but I'm enough of a Romantic to long for a perfect and idyllic afterlife where, to quote Revelation, God will wipe every tear from our eyes. I can hardly imagine any more sublime image of this afterlife than the Transfiguration of Strauss's tone poem. Music can't always be defined by the sum of its working parts, and what Strauss created in this music is something that goes beyond the limits of analysis.
As for Toscanini's performance, the Philadelphia Orchestra plays with all the unity of purpose and beauty of sonority that you would expect from this ensemble. Marsh believes that a person who is predisposed to enjoy this music would be unlikely to find Toscanini's version of it compelling: "The person who is fond of this score presumably admires some its defects and, if record sales are any guide, enjoys a broad, rhetorical performance in which the melodrama is played for all it's worth. Toscanini, as one would expect, does not comply." No, he doesn't comply, but that makes his performance all the more powerful. Toscanini presents the work with a raw, honest emotion that in its own way is much more powerful than the maudlin tears of a clown. And Toscanini's interpretation is actually very close to that of the composer, whose 1944 recording of this work with the Vienna Philharmonic is in many respects quite similar to this Philadelphia performance. Beauty is, as they say, in the eye of beholder, but Toscanini's eye is in very good company.
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That's it for Day 18. Tomorrow I will finish up the Philadelphia recordings. Until then!
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