Day 6: When Leonore was invited to dance a magical scherzo.

Greetings and salutations to Day 6 of the Toscanini project!

Today I listened to the works Toscanini recorded with the BBC Symphony in 1938 and 1939. The ensemble of these performances were much improved from the recordings I listened to yesterday. Orchestra and conductor seem to be much more at ease with each other in these readings, and display great unity of purpose.


Mozart: Magic Flute Overture - June 6th, 1938

Arturo Toscanini's dénouement as a conductor of staged operas occurred at the Salzburg Festival in the summer of 1937. Of the four operas he conducted during that last summer before the anschluss the one that proved most controversial was his production of The Magic Flute. Toscanini was never renowned as a Mozart conductor, and his take on this opera was widely panned, even by his own singers. A recording of one of the performances survives, and although some have defended it (Harvey Sachs calls it "original, fascinating, and for the most part very beautiful") it has mostly been dismissed as the low-water mark of Toscanini's opera legacy (Joseph Horowitz states that "Toscanini's distance from mainstream Germanic norms proved revelatory in parts of Die Meistersinger; his Magic Flute, however, sounds merely perverse: Mozart rendered as Rossini.")

Outside of a few snippets that have worked their way onto youtube I have not heard this recording, so I cannot comment on the validity of Toscanini's conception of the complete opera. His take on the overture in this BBC recording is, however, quite outstanding. Toscanini was generally uninterested in the niceties of performance practice, but this particular reading does in some ways foreshadow the "historically informed" aesthetic that took hold a generation later. The tempo is brisk, the textures are light, and mannerisms are kept to a minimum. At the same time the sound is full and symphonic. Toscanini does not seem to have reduced the orchestra, and even at its lightest the sonority has a solemnity that reflects the Masonic orientation of the plot. This must rank as perhaps Toscanini's finest recording of a work of Mozart, maintaining the finest of the traditions of his own time while bravely looking towards the future.

Rossini: La scala di seta Overture - June 6th, 1938

This overture is certainly not Rossini's masterpiece, but Toscanini conducts it with great energy and vitality. The woodwinds of the BBC Symphony are particularly outstanding in this performance, playing with exceptional precision and clarity while not losing sight of the humor inherent to the piece.

Weber, orch. Berlioz: Invitation to the Dance - June 6th, 1938

One of the great mysteries of the history of music criticism is that for a very long time the music of Berlioz was considered to be cheap and lacking in substance (consider this back-handed compliment from the Norton Symphony Anthology: "With that brilliant orchestra, his verve, and his rhythmic vitality, he can carry the day, whatever his other shortcomings may be - which is why he is such a favorite with laymen."). This is doubly ironic when you consider that the most famous conductor in the world was a firm supporter of Berlioz's music. Toscanini once called the Love Scene from Romeo and Juliet "the most beautiful music in the world", and Berlioz biographer Jacques Barzun has also credited Toscanini as being largely responsible for the resurgence of interest in Berlioz at a time when most conductors were ignoring him.

Interestingly, the earliest recorded evidence we have of Toscanini's remarkable way with Berlioz's orchestral palate comes from a work by Weber. In 1841 Berlioz was asked to orchestrate something by Weber that could be used as a ballet for a production of Der Freischütz. Berlioz naturally chose Invitation to the Dance, and scored it in such a way that it sounds very much like the Waltz movement from the Symphonie Fantastique. Although Weber can still be heard in the work's melodic contours, Berlioz's use of the orchestra is so imaginative that the work almost becomes his own.

Toscanini's performance is remarkable, and makes one wish he had performed a wider variety of works by Berlioz. Toscanini only performed five Berlioz compositions and this Weber orchestration, but they were all performed with extraordinary passion and commitment.

Beethoven: Leonore Overture No. 1 - June 1st, 1939

This is a very fine performance, although I don't fully agree with Robert C. Marsh that it features "relaxed lyricism" and "plastic continuity". I find it to occasionally be a bit stiff in execution, but it nonetheless unfolds with great tensile power. Toscanini never recorded this piece with any other orchestra, and the BBC Symphony plays with such commitment that the conductor can be forgiven for not recording a second time.

Beethoven: Symphony No. 4 - June 1st, 1939

This is the prize of Toscanini's work with the BBC Symphony. It has all the forward momentum and propulsive strength of his later work with the NBC Symphony, and all the flexibility and richness of sonority of his New York Philharmonic recordings. Marsh goes so far as to call this performance and the Leonore Overture that preceded it the "foundation stones for the documentation of his unique powers as a Beethoven conductor". This may going a little overboard as Toscanini's unimaginably stunning first recording of the Eroica was to come less than five months later, but this performance of the Fourth symphony stands as both a superb reading and the culmination of five years of work with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

There are too many highlights from this fine recording to list here, but I wanted to note a few of the finest moments. The misterioso opening of the symphony has never sounded so sublimely veiled as it does here. The tensile strength of the following allegro keeps the exposition from sounding unnaturally sunny after the subdued hue of the introduction. Toscanini's conception of the first movement is more unified in its totality than any other performance I have heard of this piece. The scherzo likewise has remarkable rhythmic vitality from its driving hemiolas. This is exciting music-making of the most sophisticated kind.

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Three months to the day after these last two BBC recording sessions Germany invaded Poland and Europe entered World War II. Toscanini spent much of August conducting at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, and got out only two days before the fighting began. He was not to conduct in Europe again until after the war. For the next six years he would serve as a symbol of fight against fascism and would become an American icon through his broadcasts with the NBC Symphony Orchestra.

That's it for Day 6. Tomorrow we have the recordings Toscanini made during his first season with the NBC Symphony. Have a great evening and I will see you tomorrow!