Day 80: All Good Things...

Hey everyone! Welcome to Day...

I can't say it. This project has been a labor of love, and I'm very sorry to see it end. This is the 80th day of 80 Days of Toscanini, which means that things must finally come to an end. The support I've gotten from my friends and family has meant a lot to me, and I cannot thank you all enough.

Unfortunately, all good things, as they say, must come to an end. 80 Days of Toscanini has run its course, and I am very proud of the project. Although I will mourn its end, I'm sure the time will come to add Toscanini-related thoughts to this blog as the months and years go by, but it will not be on a daily basis anymore.

Today's listening comprises the last three works that Toscanini approved for release from the final year of his career.


Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 4 - February 26th, 27th and 28th, 1954

Toscanini once told B.H. Haggin that he objected to the Italian Symphony because of its saltarello last movement. He evidently felt this tarantella-like music was something of a national slur (though I wonder if Toscanini would have felt the same way had the exact same music been written by a composer born in Milan rather than Hamburg). This did not stop the maestro from programming the symphony four times at NBC, and his conception was actually quite traditional in its orientation. This conception was also extremely compelling. There have been faster, more brilliant performances of the Italian Symphony, but the extraordinary clarity Toscanini gets out of the NBC strings makes the issue unimportant.

Toscanini was always very good at creating the illusion of great speed from the remarkably clear-textured sonorities he elicited. This was not always a good thing (his performances of Brahms and of 20th century music often suffered from too much obsession with clarity), but this approach worked perfectly for Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony. Even briskly-paced performances of this work can bog down when the execution is imprecise, and Toscanini avoids this with the the qualities he was both admired and detested for. You just can't please everyone.

Boito: Prologue from Mefistofele - March 14th, 1954

Good lord, this is intense.

Arrigo Boito had a profound effect on the early career of Arturo Toscanini. With Verdi nearing the end of the road, Boito was among the most dominant figures in all of the Italian artistic world at the end of the 19th century. He had composed the hugely popular opera Mefistofele in 1867, and written the librettos to Verdi's final two operas, Otello and Falstaff (as well as the revised edition of Simon Boccanegra). In 1897 Boito became Vice President of the governing board of La Scala, and was the leading voice in appointing the thirty-one year old Arturo Toscanini to be musical director of that organization.

Boito had enthusiastically followed Toscanini's career since attending the conductor's Turin productions of Götterdämmerung and Falstaff in 1895. He also repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempted to convince Verdi to observe Toscanini's rehearsals at Turin's Teatro Regio. In all likelihood Verdi never saw Toscanini conduct, although they had one very significant musical meeting, as we shall see.

Toscanini was appointed musical director of La Scala in 1898, and the relationship between the maestro and Boito was to remain strong until the latter's death in 1918. Toscanini posthumously returned the favor Boito had done him early in his career by orchestrating and supervising the completion of Nerone, an opera Boito had worked on off and on since 1877.

Boito's only significant musical composition was the opera Mefistofele, which Toscanini conducted a number of times throughout his career. The Prologue, in which Satan and a celestial chorus place a wager on Faust's soul, remains a popular concert piece. Toscanini led three concert presentations of the Prologue, the last of which was this intense 1954 NBC broadcast.

Mortimer H. Frank summarizes this performance as "one of Toscanini's most remarkable achievements of his last years. His fabled control, which seemed to be ebbing in his final season, is fully evident here. The shape, dramatic contrasts, and stunning climax that he produced are astonishing, especially  when judged in the context of what must have been the strain of the approaching end of an activity he could not live without. It is as if, for a brief hour, a younger conductor were in charge."

Everything about this description is amazingly true. This performance is almost mind-blowing in its visceral power. It is the musical equivalent of a monumental Renaissance fresco that overwhelms you with its spiritually-charged emotion. That the elderly Toscanini could produce an achievement like this is testament both to the extraordinary depth of his musical powers and to the closeness of a friendship that was personally and artistically enriching to two of the greatest figures in all of Italian art.

Verdi: Te Deum - March 14th, 1954

"I've asked you whether you're religious, whether you believe! I do - I believe - I'm not an atheist like Verdi, but I don't have time to go into the subject. I'll do it some other time."

The Roman Catholic Church was both a source of deep scorn for Arturo Toscanini and the origin of a great deal of his being. He was not a church-goer, and held the Vatican in extreme suspicion for its ties to authoritarian regimes. He reserved special hatred for Pope Pius XI, whom he felt had enabled Benito Mussolini's odious political maneuvering. At the same time, the Church shaped Toscanini as a man in profound ways, and affected his personal relationships for his entire life.

Harvey Sachs has summarized Toscanini's religious beliefs as "intellectually pantheistic but, at a gut level, closely related to the superstitious and image-oriented Roman Catholicism typical of the time, place, and class in which he grew up. He was not, however, a practicing Catholic and is not known to have attended a mass after the age of seventeen or eighteen."

An example of how his religious upbringing affected his adult personality lies in Toscanini's bizarrely Catholic attitude towards marriage. Despite his incredible philandering, Toscanini genuinely took matrimony extremely seriously, and invariably ended friendships with anyone who had been divorced or had even remarried following the death of a spouse. In the case of his own marriage, he seems to have liked his wife well enough, but felt she was personally extremely cold. The surviving correspondence between the two show little in the way of shared affection. By contrast, Toscanini really opened up to a woman named Ada Mainardi, whom he had a long affair with. The letters he sent to Mainardi display his personality in vivid color and detail, and document his views on a wide range of subjects, including religion. The quotation I began with came from one of the letters Toscanini sent to Mainardi.

I cannot be sure about Verdi's religious views, but Toscanini was evidently under the impression that the composer was an atheist. If so, the Four Sacred Pieces that ended Verdi's creative life are particularly curious. These works, of which the Te Deum is one, are among the most sublimely beautiful Verdi ever composed. Their profound feeling appears so deeply felt that it is hard to imagine them not coming from a true believer.

Toscanini performed the Te Deum like a true believer. The unearthly sense of reverence that exists in his 1954 performance is breathtaking in its sustained power. The Robert Shaw Chorale gives one its greatest performances in this music. The spiritual affinity between Toscanini and Verdi's Te Deum can perhaps be explained by an important meeting between the conductor and the grand old man of Italian music.

In 1898 Toscanini conducted the Italian premiere of three of the Four Sacred Pieces in Turin. Toscanini was troubled by the Te Deum's pacing, and felt that the work required some unwritten rallentandos. Having secured an audience with Verdi, Toscanini asked the composer to play the Te Deum on the piano, to which Verdi replied "No, no, you play it." Toscanini sat down and played the music as he felt it, with the tempo modifications he felt were necessary. "Bravo," said Verdi. Toscanini stopped in his tracks and said, "Maestro, if you knew how much this has been bothering me…Why didn't you write the rallentando?" Verdi replied that "If I had written it, a bad musician would have exaggerated it; but if one is a good musician, one feels it and plays it, just as you've done, without the necessity of having it written down."

This meeting deeply affected how Toscanini thought about musical pacing, and was to have a tremendous impact on his finest performances. By the time Toscanini had become the old maestro, his performances had frequently become rigid and unyielding. But not this time, and not in any other work that lay deep within him. I cannot say whether or not Toscanini's religious beliefs shaped how he conducted the Te Deum, but the sublime beauty that he achieved in this music suggests a belief in something higher.

Arturo Toscanini was a very difficult man, and one who did some very bad things over the course of his life. He could be nauseatingly belittling to the musicians that played for him, and the disgusting extent of his infidelities caused terrible pain upon his family. But his greatest performances show that he was a man who understood beauty, and in the end that may be the most important characteristic to a person's soul. Beauty - true beauty - is what separates good from evil, and I believe that what Arturo Toscanini was able to express in his most inspired music-making was the very definition of beauty.

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That's it for 80 Days of Toscanini!

Again, thank you all so much for the support you've given me since last September. I apologize to anyone I may have inadvertently ignored as a result of my involvement in this project! Thanks are also due to the Toscanini scholarship of Harvey Sachs, Mortimer H. Frank, Robert C. Marsh and others that have proven invaluable aids in this project. Some thanks must also go to google, facebook and twitter, which have made this process much more democratic, and allowed a person like me to get his thoughts out to the world.

Thank you all, and Happy Saturday!