Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 70!
Today I listened to the first three recordings of Toscanini's sixteenth and penultimate season with NBC. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson in Mars Attacks, two out of these three recordings are excellent, and that ain't bad.
Brahms: Symphony No. 3 - November 4th, 1952
Oh dear. Oh…oh dear. Every now and then an absolutely inexplicable dud comes up in this project, and this unspeakably dreadful recording is one of them.
Toscanini was frequently an edgy conductor when it came to his basic conception of tempo (although not to the over-simplified extent bizarrely leveled at him by admirers and detractors alike). But when he did interpret a score in a slow, weighty manner, the work often attained monumental grandeur and supple flexibility. Not so in this off-the-charts awful Brahms recording, a performance that makes you say "but…wha…why??" The tempos throughout are crawlingly slow, but do not elicit any sense of breadth. Rather, the result is a limp, lifeless wet noodle that never comes to life.
Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks - November 4th, 1952
Toscanini always called himself a man of the theatre, and his long experience in that area made him a particularly ideal conductor of programmatic music. This recording of Till Eulenspiegel is an apt example of this, featuring a remarkable attention to dramatic content that is free of gratuitous sentimentality. The impish characteristics of the merry prankster are perfectly conveyed without degenerating into clownish caricature.
Since tempo is such an annoyingly ubiquitous topic with Toscanini discussions, I thought I would note for the record that this 1952 account of Till Eulenspiegel clocks in at fifteen minutes, thirteen seconds, which is precisely one second faster than the timing of the composer's own 1944 recording. I thought you might want to know.
Wagner: Overture and Bacchanal from Tannhäuser - November 8th, 1952
The news coming out of Penn State this week is making it frighteningly evident how easy it is for a career to end in shame, rather than in the blaze of glory that might have been. Arturo Toscanini was never plagued by the kind of scandal afflicting Joe Paterno right now, but I have no doubt that he considered the manner of his exit from the podium to be of the profoundest possible humiliation.
Toscanini's final NBC broadcast in April of 1954 marked the one time he ever entirely lost control of a performance. During that all-Wagner broadcast the maestro was overcome by what was likely a combination of emotion and loss of memory, and stopped conducting for a number of bars. The ensemble came close to falling apart, but cellist Frank Miller managed to hold things together by giving cues with his bow. NBC immediately yanked the broadcast from the air, and substituted it with a Brahms recording that had been held in reserve in case something like this were to happen. Toscanini resigned from NBC the next day, and did not conduct publicly again.
The reason I tell this story now is that the work that Toscanini was conducting when he lost control was the Overture and Bacchanal from Tannhäuser. This 1952 recording shows what Toscanini could do with this music when he was entirely lucid, and serves as a revealing gloss on what was to end up causing him so much trouble.
Only a year and a half before he lost it entirely, Toscanini was conducting this music with brilliant power and sweep. The moving dignity of the overture gives way to a bacchanal of furious intensity that in turn ebbs away into sublime silence. Toscanini led this opera at Bayreuth in 1930, and was intimately familiar with the work's dramatic content. The maestro led the Overture and Bacchanal in the concert hall throughout his career, and the theatrical element of the score was always a profound element of these presentations.
One moment of losing control did not destroy Toscanini's legacy, just as a disastrous action in 2002 cannot undo what Joe Paterno achieved at Penn State. But every person who achieves great things wants the story to end happily, and entirely on their own terms. Toscanini's extraordinary longevity prevented that from happening, but the many fine recordings he made over the course of his career will last more deeply in our collective consciousness than the pain of his final broadcast. This wonderful Wagner recording is a perfect example.
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That's it for Day 70!
Check back tomorrow for an even-numbered and even-tempered Beethoven symphony, an overture that shoves destiny down your throat with great force, and an organ recital that hides itself behind a large symphony orchestra.
Happy Wednesday!
Um, Toscanini was never known to ignore repeated hints that a direct subordinate was systematically committing appalling crimes. One doubts whether he would have been as forgiving as Paterno if, say, the NBC Orc.'s leader had turned out to be a Nazi spy or a member of a mafia gang.
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