Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 76!
With today's listening we reach the end of Toscanini's penultimate season at NBC, and the beginning of the end of this project. It's been a lot of fun, and I've learned a lot in process. It will also be a bit of a relief to not have to base my daily activities around the blog, at least for a while. Sooner or later I will miss the daily writing, and I'm sure there will be more I can add to this blog as the months and years go by.
It is, however, a little too soon to shed the goodbye tears. There are still five days to go, and many wonderful pieces to listen to. Today's listening featured one wonderful piece, and another that was once thought to be wonderful (though not by me).
Cherubini: Anacréon Overture - March 21st, 1953
Amazingly, this overture was once a fairly standard part of the orchestral repertoire. Many of the leading conductors of the first half of the twentieth century (Furtwängler, for example) recorded it, and I still don't really know why. I find there to very little to like in the way of melodic interest or formal shape. Whatever the reason for its earlier success, Toscanini performed the work four times with the NBC Symphony. This recording is taken from the last of those four broadcasts. This is a competent enough performance, but if there is more to like in this overture than meets the ear I didn't get it from this recording.
Beethoven: Missa Solemnis - March 30th and 31st, 1953
Toscanini conducted the Missa Solemnis for the first time in 1934, when he was sixty-six years old - this studio recording came nineteen years later. If you believe Toscanini biographer Harvey Sachs, a considerable transformation in the maestro's interpretation occurred during that time. Sachs compares three of the surviving Toscanini performances of the Missa Solemnis: a New York Philharmonic broadcast from 1935, an NBC broadcast from 1940, and this 1953 studio recording.
Sachs notes of the earliest of these performances that "most of his tempi are the slowest I have ever heard in any performance of this work…There is great flexibility in the handling of every section, and the total effect is uniquely gripping and moving." Of the 1940 NBC version, Sachs believes that "the general conception has become less massive, more dramatic." And finally, of the studio recording, that "the tempi become faster, but the modifications within those tempi have been reduced to the barest minimum: everything is done with the greatest simplicity."
Comparing these three recordings that took place over the course of eighteen years can be taken as a microcosm of the orthodox view of the evolution of Toscanini's interpretations: that they became faster and tighter over the years. Sachs himself cautions against reading this as a generality of all of Toscanini's work because it happens to be true of the Missa Solemnis, and the more recent biography by Mortimer H. Frank is particularly vociferous about there being no hard and fast patterns in this regard. I would agree with them to some extent, but aging is most certainly a pattern, and it is a fact that certain views and manners are going to evolve with age. Preference for one view or another notwithstanding, there is no shame in one performing a piece differently at age eighty than one did at forty. This may be a result of degenerating physical or mental capacities, or it may simply be a matter of seeing things differently. Either way, some degree of change is inevitable.
I have not heard either of the earlier two recordings Sachs compares to this studio recording, but I can easily believe that things have become tighter by 1953. This is certainly not a spacious take on the Missa Solemnis, and that has its strengths and weaknesses. I would definitely not wish for a tempo any slower than Toscanini takes for the radiantly exuberant Gloria, and the military sounds that accompany the Dona Nobis Pacem have a shattering irony to them that I have heard in no other performance. Yet the overall effect is one of breathless and very much earthbound momentum. This defeats the timeless expression of eternity that resonates within Beethoven's creation. For music like this, temporal considerations should be unimportant to anyone but the union representative.
That is my view of this recording at the age of thirty-one. I'm sure I will view it differently at sixty-one. Got a problem with that?
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That's it for Day 76!
Check back tomorrow for a tragic look at the life of a wannabe knight, and also a trip to Italy.
Happy Tuesday!
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