I'm cutting it a bit close today, because I was out most of the day for the Spokane Symphony's opening concert. Between that and the opening of the college football season I was a bit hard-pressed to concentrate on Toscanini, but I immensely enjoyed today's listening. Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic had really begun to gel with these recordings. I don't always like what he does to these pieces interpretively, but the sound that he got out of the Philharmonic is a glory to behold.
Mozart: Symphony No. 35 - March 30th and April 4-5th, 1929
Toscanini is not generally a conductor one associates with over-refining a work and imposing upon it an absurd amount of rubato, but that is exactly what happened in this peculiar recording of Mozart's Haffner Symphony. The oddly drawn-out tempo modulations begin right in the sixth measure with a ritard so extreme one could easily imagine it being led by Stokowski or Mengelberg. Perhaps the most bizarre instance of this elastic conception of tempo is in the second movement, where the last three measures of the first time through the opening strain are so heavily ritarded it sounds like it has to be a joke. But then the repeat of the same measures are played almost in tempo. I've never heard anything like this from any other performance of the Haffner, and the fact it came from Toscanini makes you scratch your head in disbelief.
What may be even more strange about this version of the Haffner is how patrician it is, and so utterly lacking in rough edges. That the New York Philharmonic was even capable of playing like this is a tribute to their remarkable virtuosity, but it makes for rather unsatisfying listening. There is a bizarre stereotype about music of the classical period that it must always be played with lightness and elegance. This attitude seems to assume that this music was already 200 years old and in a museum at the time it was written. This is complete nonsense, as any reading of Mozart's letters demonstrates. "Light" and "elegant" are certainly not adjectives Mozart's friends would have applied to him (Mozart once wrote "I write as a sow piddles"), and it seems very strange to apply those characterizations to him in our own time.
All this said, in its own way Toscanini's recording of the Haffner is a remarkable achievement. The tonal sheen of the New York Philharmonic is breathtaking, clearly something that had been carefully and lovingly rehearsed by Toscanini. This recording would not make my Top 10 list of Mozart performances, but it is beautiful playing of one of the masterpieces of the 18th century.
Gluck: Dance of the Blessed Sprits from Orfeo ed Euridice - April 5th, 1929
The old vintage of this recording almost enhances the halo effect of the string sound. The Philharmonic's strings play with an ethereal repose that would have been an ideal accompaniment to a beautifully phrased flute solo, but such a performance was not forthcoming from the Philharmonic's principal flutist. The phrasing is flat and shapeless, and fails to float over the angelic sounds coming from the strings.
Rossini: Barber of Seville Overture - November 21st, 1929
This is the first recording Toscanini made with the New York Philharmonic as its Principal Conductor, and orchestra and conductor do seem to be really locking in together in this performance. The precision of this Rossini performance is remarkable, but it is a bit tired sounding. When I first listened to it I wondered if it had been recorded at the end of a very long day of sessions, but I have seen no evidence that this is the case. The humor inherent in any great performance of this music is there, but it is not played with the vitality that makes it Rossini.
Wagner: Siegfried Idyll - February 8th, 1936
After Toscanini's death certain myopic critics came up with the notion that he gradually sped up his performances as he got older, perhaps as a result of hardening arteries. There are some works where that actually is the case, but there are enough exceptions that it seems to me that there is no rule. Exhibit A is this recording of Siegfried Idyll, a performance that is significantly fleeter than his any of his later presentations with the NBC Symphony.
Toscanini's take on this piece does have some remarkable strengths. His Wagner oftentimes had a linear quality that produced a more powerful effect than that of his German colleagues. To me this seems to be taken to a bit of an extreme in this 1936 performance. A negative stereotype about Toscanini is that he was so obsessed with melody that he gave no attention to harmonic movement, and I can hear a bit of that here. It is phrased with great beauty, but Wagner's remarkable harmonic modulations seem to be glossed over.
Wagner: Dawn and Siegfried's Rhine Journey from Götterdämmerung - February 8th, 1936
This opera excerpt was the work Toscanini programmed more often that any other during his seventeen years with the NBC Symphony; ten radio broadcasts and two studio recordings. It was programmed less frequently with the New York Philharmonic, but you wouldn't know that from the resplendent tonal richness of this recording. The New York Philharmonic reached heights of orchestral sonority in this performance that I have rarely heard elsewhere.
Rather like the Mozart Symphony however, the drawback to this recording has to do with its lack of rough edges. At this point in Götterdämmerung Siegfried has just spent his first night with Brunnhilde and is about to set forth for exciting adventures up the Rhine. This piece should explode with youthful exuberance, but it's almost too beautifully played for that. I am nonetheless happy to accept this fault for such a remarkable performance.
Wagner: Preludes to Act I and III from Lohengrin - April 9th, 1936
Toscanini was introduced to Wagner's music when he played cello in a Parma production of Lohengrin at the age of seventeen. He later recalled that this was when he "acquired a great, marvelous awareness of Wagner's genius. From the first rehearsal, or rather from the first bars of the Prelude, I was overwhelmed by magical, supernatural feelings; the celestial harmonies revealed a new world to me, a world of whose existence no one had even the slightest intuition until Wagner's transcendent sprit discovered it."
Toscanini's performance of the Lohengrin prelude with the New York Philharmonic is filled with such mystical wonder. The shimmering quality of the strings is utterly breathtaking in its luminous stasis. The climax of the Prelude is one of the great moments in all of the Toscanini discography, filled at once with heartrending emotion and meditative serenity. The boisterous Prelude to Act III is the perfect tonic to all of this, with superb playing from the Philharmonic brass section.
I find great significance to the fact that Wagner held such a place in Toscanini's soul, and that Lohengrin was the work that showed him the way. Wagner's music was so appallingly abused and perverted by the Nazis that some people still have a hard time separating Wagner from Hitler. Whatever Toscanini's shortcomings as a man (and there were many), his struggle against fascism was one of the most courageous stands a musician has ever taken. He was Mussolini's enemy from the day he took power in Italy, and refused to conduct at his beloved Bayreuth Festival when Hitler came to power in Germany. Hitler even sent a personal request to Toscanini that he reconsider his decision to not conduct at Bayreuth; Toscanini's negative and very terse response resulted in a ban on his name being used in German radio. That Toscanini took a stand like this in 1933, long before the beginning of World War II and the Holocaust shows an extraordinary integrity that might have prevented the atrocities had more people stood up and followed his lead.
Toscanini never bought into the idea that great art could be taken over by evil. He programmed a number of Wagner pieces in the concerts he conducted with the orchestra that was to become the Israel Philharmonic in 1936, marking one of the last times Wagner's music was performed in Israel until Daniel Barenboim broke the embargo several years ago. Wagner was not a good human being by any stretch, but his music is great art, and art can never be understood, let alone usurped, by the forces of darkness. I find it very significant that the closing scene of Charlie Chaplin's film The Great Dictator uses the Lohengrin Prelude to underscore the moving speech about the futility of tyranny:
"Look up! Look up! The clouds are lifting - the sun is breaking through. We are coming out of the darkness into the light. We are coming into a new world. A kind new world where men will rise above their hate and brutality.The soul of man has been given wings - and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow - into the light of hope - into the future, that glorious future that belongs to you, to me and to all of us. Look up. Look up."
Charlie Chaplin and Arturo Toscanini did meet once, in London in 1952. What they talked about I don't know, nor do I know if they were aware of the connection they shared through their understanding of Wagner's art. What I do know is that these two men fully comprehended the ability of art to triumph over evil, and that is something we need more of in our own time.
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That's it for Day 3. Tune in tomorrow for the last of Toscanini's recordings with the New York Philharmonic, including the famous recording of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7.
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