Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 30!
For today I listened to three short Rossini works and a, well, rather interesting account of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony.
Rossini: Passo a sei from William Tell - June 8th, 1945
William Tell was one of only two Rossini operas that Toscanini conducted in the theater (the other was The Barber of Seville). The Passo a sei is the only excerpt from the composer's massive final opera that Toscanini performed in concert aside from the famous overture. What is amazing about this piece is how well it evokes Switzerland while still sounding completely like Rossini. Toscanini's performance is graceful and charming without becoming sugary.
Rossini: Il Signor Bruschino Overture - June 8th, 1945
This is a perfectly respectable performance of a justly little-performed overture. There is a reason why other Rossini overtures are performed with great frequency and this one is not.
Rossini: Siege of Corinth Overture - June 14th, 1945
All that I had to say about the overture to Il Signor Bruschino…ditto this.
Mozart: Symphony No. 41 - June 22nd, 1945 and March 11th, 1946
One of the most vapidly wrong-headed commentaries on Toscanini's musicianship that I have ever read was penned by the late music critic John Ardoin, who wrote for the Dallas Morning News for many years and and authored generally excellent books on the recorded legacy of Wilhelm Furtwängler and Maria Callas. In The Furtwängler Record there is a passage where Ardoin compares the German conductor's sense of pulse to that of Toscanini, noting that "Rests were a troublesome aspect of a Toscanini performance because they often minimized that all-important downbeat. Rests became walls that had to be vaulted, and he leapt over them as though afraid they would stop the flow of the music. Furtwängler, on the other hand, went by phrase rather than by measure, allowing the music to follow its own physiognomy rather than imposing one upon it."
This is ridiculous for several reasons. First, the length of a given measure happens to be the very "physiognomy" that the composer has imposed upon it. Western music is by its very nature divided into measures that are equal to small phrases that add up to bigger phrase-lengths of larger numbers of measures. Granted, bar-lines did not evolve into a standardized format until the 17th century, but even in the earliest days of music there was a natural pulse that divided the beats into groups of four or eight or some other number. These groupings served the same function as measures, and the gradual introduction of bar-lines into printed music only served to reinforce this.
Second, any representative sampling of Toscanini's recordings will show that he most certainly did not impose his own phrase-structures into the music he conducted by vaulting over rests. In any of his finer performances a beautifully singing phrase structure is palpably audible, in which rests became an inherent part of the musical line (Toscanini's one-time assistant George Szell was known to say that "rests are not for resting"). Unfortunately however, there are certain Toscanini performances in which Ardoin's charges do carry a kernel of truth, and this recording of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony is one of them.
It would be all-too-literal to call this recording "restless". Things begin relatively well with a first movement that is overly driven, but no more so than most of Toscanini's performances of 18th century music. Where things get ridiculous is in the second movement, where even rests of short duration get lopped-off as though Toscanini was desperate to get out of the recording studio. The result is an absolute musical disaster in which phrases do not breathe and Mozart's structure suffers from hyper-tension. Things don't improve much in the final two movements, in which the music continues to be ruthlessly driven to the breaking point. One Amazon reviewer of this album notes that Toscanini "presses the tempi of the work about as far to the fastest possible articulation in the final movement as can be achieved by an orchestra of human players (or perhaps even beyond it!)." While that statement may not be literally true (it was, after all, recorded this way) it is certainly true that human listeners are unlikely to be persuaded by such a conception of this masterwork (or at least this human).
I don't fully understand why Toscanini could be such a fine interpreter of the music of, say, Beethoven, but so unpersuasive in the music of the late 18th century. There were, after all, only thirteen years separating the composition of Mozart's final symphony and that of Beethoven's first. But it must be remembered that widespread interest in the music of the past is a relatively recent phenomenon. Toscanini grew up in a world where music that was more than fifty years old was performed quite infrequently (Harvey Sachs notes that between 1881 and 1886, when Toscanini was a teenager and playing cello in the orchestra of Parma's Teatro Regio, the house's repertoire did not include even one opera written more than fifty years earlier). Although Toscanini occasionally gave outstanding performances of music that was not part of his core repertoire (Petrouchka comes to mind), his finest readings were of music that he conducted regularly and felt deeply. There should be nothing surprising to this; it is a natural part of being human, and even an extraordinary human like Toscanini was not immune to this. Nonetheless, it is quite unfortunate that Toscanini could not or would not reach down into the depths of his extraordinary musicianship to elicit a performance that was equal to the level of Mozart's final symphonic masterpiece.
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That's it for Day 30!
Check back tomorrow for three more Rossini overtures, some Verdi, and we may even have time for a little ice-skating.
Happy Friday!
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