Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) was the most highly acclaimed conductor of his time, both in Europe and in this country. But there was always a grudging undercurrent of objection to him. Many critics simply (and perhaps understandably) found it hard to believe, or at least to acknowledge, that anyone could be that good, that anyone could really be the world’s best in as tricky and rarefied a field as orchestral conducting. But Toscanini’s character and the way he ordered his life also seemed to provide justification for these objections.

He guarded his privacy fiercely, he gave very few interviews, and aside from his anti-fascist pronouncements (made early and borne out by his actions), he did not hold forth publicly on music or any other topic—as many other prominent conductors did. Thus the legend grew that he was an uncultivated man who just happened to have a trick memory for scores and a phenomenal ear for orchestral sonority and balance—a sort of musical idiot savant.

This view also involved a certain ethnic snobbery. Most of Toscanini’s greatest contemporaries among conductors—Hans Richter, Arthur Nikisch, Karl Muck, Gustav Mahler, Felix Weingartner, Bruno Walter, Wilhelm Furtwängler—were of German or Austrian (or at least Central European) descent. Since German and Austrian composers had written most of our greatest music of the last two centuries, many critics easily assumed that Toscanini, as a mere Italian (and a lower-class Italian at that), lacked the cultural background necessary to put him in touch with this great tradition. Italian composers, on the other hand, had excelled mainly at opera, long patronized as an impure and somewhat inferior genre. Since Toscanini had got his start in the opera house rather than in the concert hall, it seemed natural to assume further that that was where he belonged, conducting Verdi and Puccini rather than attempting Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, or even Wagner, who had pointedly set himself apart from operatic tradition.

These assumptions could not have gained currency so easily if Toscanini had made more recordings during the 1920’s and 1930’s. But he hated the whole process, which in 78-rpm days demanded that everything be recorded in four-minute snippets. His first records were made in 1920, at exactly the mid-point of his sixty-eight-year career, and he produced relatively few others until the tape era, which did not arrive until he was about eighty. Hence the vast majority of what were undeniably his greatest performances are lost to us forever.

Finally, there were the stories of Toscanini’s colossal temper, his baton-smashing rages at rehearsals. These only served to heighten the image of him as an undisciplined and uncultured Italian peasant who had no business trying to plumb the profundities of the Germanic spirit. Moreover, many of these rages involved his insistence that the music be played exactly as the composer had written it. Tradition, he was fond of telling his various orchestras, is merely another name for the last bad performance.

In the years since Toscanini’s death, several fine books have appeared that expose the falsity of the various myths that surrounded him during his lifetime and bear out the simple truth that he was indeed the greatest conductor of our century. The late B. H. Hag-gin’s Conversations With Toscanini (1959, 1979) and The Toscanini Musicians Knew (1967) are still the best introduction to the man and his work. Also valuable are This Was Toscanini (1963) by Samuel Antek, a violinist who played with the NBC Symphony during the seventeen years that Toscanini conducted it (1937-54), and Harvey Sachs’s biography, Toscanini (1978).

Recently, however, a new round of Toscanini-bashing seems to have got under way. Its most important manifestation is Joseph Horowitz’s Understanding Toscanini, published last year by Knopf and now issued in paperback.¹ Though it has been widely praised as exciting, adventurous, original, even brilliant, Horowitz’s book is sloppily researched and haphazardly written, just a chic rehash of all the old myths from a new angle.

“My topic,” Horowitz tells us at the outset, “is less Toscanini than the manner in which he was perceived, procured, appreciated, marketed, and used.” Though he does acknowledge that “Toscanini can legitimately be called a ‘great conductor,’” the Toscanini that interests Horowitz is Toscanini the (alleged) “high priest of the musical appreciation movement of the 30’s and 40’s.” Now of course it is true that from the time Toscanini first came to the Metropolitan Opera in 1908 to his retirement as conductor of the NBC Symphony in 1954, a great deal of very effective publicity—or “ballyhoo,” to use a pet word of Horowitz’s—was exerted to sell him, and with him classical music, to the American public. But surely one’s final judgment of those efforts, and of Toscanini himself, must depend on the worth of the product that was being sold, the music that Toscanini performed, recorded, and, in later years, broadcast.

Not so, however, for Horowitz, who has been deeply influenced by the heavily theoretical Marxist writer Theodor Adorno. Toscanini was a particular bête-noire of Adorno’s. In his little book Minima Moralia he wrote: “No work of art, no thought, has a chance of survival, unless it bear within it the repudiation of false riches and high-class production, of color films and television, millionaire’s magazines and Toscanini.” Any attempt to teach “music appreciation” was to Adorno just one more weapon in the class war, one more method of further enslaving the puppets of capital by turning them into a narcotized captive audience, consumers of yet another mass opiate. Disseminated to a mass audience, even (or perhaps especially) the greatest music inevitably becomes “fetishized,” degraded to mere entertainment, a commodity packaged by the ruling class to distract the masses from “the problematic social conditions that cause the individual to seek satisfaction beyond immediate social reality, which denies him this satisfaction.” Not surprisingly, radio, through which Toscanini reached his largest audience, was for Adorno the villain of villains.

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Horowitz’s account of Toscanini’s three American careers—at the Metropolitan Opera (1908-15), the New York Philharmonic (1926-36), and the NBC Symphony (1937-54)—is disfigured by just the sort of innuendoes and distortions of fact that one would expect from an admirer of Adorno.

Much given to crude dialectical oppositions, Horowitz focuses his treatment of the Met years on Toscanini’s rivalry with Mahler, and that of the Philharmonic years on his rivalry with Furtwängler, who came to the Philharmonic as guest conductor for three seasons, in 1925-27. “Mahler, the pariah, was manic, morbid, insecure. . . . Toscanini was rooted, iron-willed, indestructible.” And similarly with Toscanini and Furtwängler: “The Italian was short, compact, decisive. The German was tall, gangly, visionary. . . . Furtwängler . . . radiated uplift. Toscanini demanded maximum polish and efficiency.” All the old, long-discredited rumors are dredged up yet again, in an attempt to prove that Toscanini, who “tolerated no rivals,” “routed” Mahler from the Met, and was somehow also responsible for Furtwängler’s not being invited back to the Philharmonic for the 1927-28 season.

Yet when Toscanini left the Philharmonic in 1936, he nominated Furtwängler to be his successor. By that time, with the Nazis in power, the political differences between the two men had become very sharp, and would surely have aggravated any personal or musical rivalry Toscanini had earlier had with Furtwängler. Rather than speaking out against fascism or refusing to conduct in Hitler’s Germany, as Toscanini had done, Furtwängler for the most part remained silent and played the game. Though he never joined the Nazi party, he allowed himself to be made a member of the Reich Music Chamber and a Prussian Councillor of State. Yet of the two men’s diametrically opposed attitudes toward Nazism, Horowitz, astonishingly, says only that “Furtwängler’s response was more concealed, less concise than Toscanini’s.” Though Horowitz cannot quite bring himself to blame Toscanini for Furtwängler’s failure to receive the Philharmonic appointment, he does blame “the Toscanini cult,” and he complains, again astonishingly, that “Toscanini never saw fit to speak up for Furtwängler’s candidacy”—even though it had been Toscanini’s idea in the first place! What he does not bother to mention is that Goebbels told Furtwängler that if he accepted the Philharmonic appointment, he would be barred from conducting in Germany.

Throughout these chapters, and even more in those dealing with Toscanini’s years at NBC, which had a more high-powered publicity apparatus than either the Met or the Philharmonic, Horowitz repeatedly suggests that Toscanini was in dark (though perhaps unconscious) collusion with his corporate masters. “Toscanini tolerated no stunts or press agents,” he writes, “yet was inevitably a prime beneficiary of the growing public-relations mentality.” And the mere fact that Toscanini’s 231 NBC Symphony broadcasts were organized by one vast capitalist enterprise, NBC itself, and were sometimes commercially sponsored by various other such enterprises—General Motors, Socony Vacuum, Reynolds Metals—leads Horowitz to lump them indiscriminately together with other quite different commercially sponsored ventures:

To many a lay listener, who turned the radio dial to the NBC Symphony via “Your Hit Parade,” “Death Valley Days,” or “Saturday Night Serenade,” and whose NBC Symphony recordings were shelved beside albums of Frank Sinatra and Benny Goodman, Toscanini’s redundant Beethoven and Weber, Dvorak and Elgar were as instantly and effortlessly preoccupying as a drawn six-shooter at the movies or a three-and-two count, bases loaded, at the ball park.

And again: “Life, The Good Housekeeping Guide to Musical Enjoyment, . . . Bob Hope, Reader’s Digest . . .—these were the elements articulating the meaning of Toscanini.”

Of course this is all nonsense. It was Toscanini himself who articulated his meaning for his listeners, and though some of them may have come for the ballyhoo, those that stayed did so for the music. Horowitz cites with approval a passage from Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment in which, after adducing Toscanini as an example, they write: “The fusion of culture and entertainment that is taking place today leads . . . to a depravation of culture.” But exactly what depravation or dilution or vulgarization of culture resulted from Toscanini’s broadcasts, or from his many recordings, or from his earlier performances at the Met and the Philharmonic? As one who listened both to Toscanini’s broadcasts and to “Your Hit Parade,” who bought both Toscanini and Benny Goodman records, and who frequented movie theaters and ball parks during the period in question, I can testify that I did not confuse these various sources of pleasure. The fact that Toscanini’s performances came to me commercially sponsored and through a mechanical contrivance did not reduce me to what Adorno called “regressive listening” arrested at “the infantile stage,” or deprive me of my “capacity for conscious perception of music.” And I have no reason to think that my experience was unrepresentative.

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Horowitz’s real gripe against Toscanini turns out to be that he did not perform enough 20th-century music, particularly American 20th-century music. “No major conductor previous to Toscanini,” he writes, “had been so divorced from the important music of his time.” Thus it is Toscanini, his enthusiastic “cult” of followers, and his corporate sponsors who are to blame for the fact that today we find “no more than 25 percent of the active symphonic repertoire consisting of music composed since 1900.” (In the later, endlessly drawn-out chapters of Horowitz’s book, Toscanini also gets blamed for the alleged anonymity and impersonality of most present-day musical performance, the early burn-out of several promising young American pianists, the popularity of Luciano Pavarotti, and much more that there is no point in going into here.)

There are several things to be said in response. First, Toscanini was born in 1867, and the modern music of his formative years was composed by Wagner, Brahms, Debussy, and Richard Strauss, all of whom he championed vigorously in the face of opposition that it is now hard to recall ever existed. Anyhow, no artist has an obligation to perform music that he does not find congenial; his only obligation, to himself and to his public, is to perform the music that he does find congenial as well as he can. And it is worth noting that Toscanini made no effort to interfere with the performances of 20th-century music he did not find congenial by such Philharmonic guest conductors as Erich Kleiber and Otto Klemperer or such NBC Symphony guest conductors as Leopold Stokowski and Ernest Ansermet.

Second, Horowitz himself cites some interesting statistics that undermine his argument. As early as 1865, he tells us, 76 percent of the repertoire of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra was made up of works by dead composers. And this was also true of the major orchestras of London, Paris, and Vienna. So it can scarcely have been Toscanini (or the hype surrounding him) who brought about the present-day focus on music of the past at orchestral concerts.

Third, Horowitz frequently speaks, as in one of the passages quoted earlier, of Toscanini’s performances of “acknowledged masterpieces” as “redundant.” But redundant to or for whom? Precisely what makes masterpieces masterpieces is that they are inexhaustible, and hence constantly require new performances to explore their wealth of suggestiveness. Many of Toscanini’s most prominent colleagues, who had nothing whatever to gain by praising him (and besides had sizable egos of their own), made it clear that they learned from his performances of works that they themselves frequently performed. Stokowski, offered a free ticket to one of Toscanini’s Philharmonic concerts, insisted on paying, saying “Everyone must pay to learn something.” And Pierre Monteux spoke of a Toscanini concert as “a real revelation in the art of conducting and in the art of interpretation,” and called him “the greatest of all.” If the most gifted of Toscanini’s contemporaries did not find his performances of standard repertoire “redundant,” why should Horowitz do so? And why should he imply that ordinary music-lovers—had they not been narcotized by the publicity surrounding the performances—should have done so?

Finally, if the majority of the general public has continued to find a great deal of 20th-century music just as uncongenial as Toscanini found it, maybe that says something about the music itself rather than about any supposed brainwashing of the public by the sinister forces of commercialism and reaction. As Horowitz perhaps unwittingly makes clear, a great deal of ballyhoo was also expended in trying to sell the public on 20th-century music; it has just not paid off very well.

Horowitz is too young to have known Toscanini, or even to have heard him conduct, but he does of course have access to Toscanini’s recordings. Yet the long, pretentious chapter he devotes to them is no better than the sections of his book that deal with Toscanini’s background and earlier career. The only two recorded performances that he singles out for high praise are of Verdi operas: the 1937 Salzburg Falstaff and the 1947 NBC Otello. (Neither is available just now, but the Otello will soon be issued on compact disc by RCA.) Like many others before him, Horowitz concludes that “Toscanini’s art was based on the overt visceral energies of Verdian popular theater.” Thus his performances of Wagner lack “inner space,” and those of Beethoven are ambiguously characterized as “scorching Beethoven clean.” Unlike Furtwängler and other German and Austrian conductors, who were steeped in something that Horowitz repeatedly and admiringly (but somewhat vaguely) refers to as “tradition,” Toscanini “did not so much discard tradition as disdain ever acquiring it.” The style of all his later recorded performances “can be summarized in an all-purpose formula combining American urgency and efficiency with the theatrical melos of the Mediterranean.” The unsurpassed precision of attack, sensitivity of nuance, plastic shaping of phrase, and subtle feeling for continuity of impulse that were so admired by the greatest of Toscanini’s fellow-conductors—and that can be heard on many of even his last recordings—are dismissed by Horowitz as “smothering fetishism,” the result of a fixation on “perfect execution” at the expense of “historic and poetic allusions.”

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There is no point in quarreling, this late in the day, with so crude an oversimplification. It will be more helpful to mention some recent Toscanini issues that the reader can use for himself to test the truth of Horowitz’s statements.

Two of the greatest performances of the NBC years, the 1940 Verdi Requiem and Beethoven Missa Solemnis, are now available on compact disc (in sets CD-240 and CD-259), from Music and Arts Programs of America, Inc., P.O. Box 771, Berkeley, California 94701. The sound is far better than on any previous LP issue. The same distributor can also provide compact discs of a splendid 1938 Beethoven “Eroica” (CD-264); performances from the 1940’s of Mendelssohn’s Symphonies Nos. 3 (“Scottish”), 4 (“Italian”), and 5 (“Reformation”), along with selections from the music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (CD-268); and a 1938 Beethoven Ninth (not yet in the catalogue but available sometime this spring).

The Swiss Relief label has issued a compact disc of fine 1939 performances of Beethoven’s First and Fourth Symphonies with the NBC Symphony (CDCR 1861) and an LP containing rare New York Philharmonic performances of Beethoven’s Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, from 1936 and 1933 respectively (REL 821). And the Italian Fonit-Cetra label has issued on LP a set of Wagner excerpts from 1952-54 (DOC-17); Debussy’s La Mer, Ibéria, and Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun from 1953 (DOC-18); and the four Brahms Symphonies, together with his Haydn Variations and Tragic Overture, performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra in London in 1952 (DOC-52). (All of these recordings can also be ordered from Music and Arts Programs of America, Inc.)

A very important 1935 performance of Beethoven’s Seventh with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which has never been issued in any form before, is in the three-LP EMI Angel set 1C-6156. The set also contains Toscanini’s equally fine prewar BBC commercial recordings of Beethoven’s First, Fourth, and Sixth (“Pastorale”) Symphonies, along with the Leonore Overture No. 1 and a Prometheus Overture that is also previously unissued. BBC performances of Debussy’s La Mer and Elgar’s Enigma Variations, also from 1935 and also previously unissued, are on English EMI EH-2913451 (which may be ordered from International Book & Record Distributors, 40-11 24th Street, Long Island City, New York 11101).

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Almost all of these performances were recorded noncommercially from broadcast concerts. Therefore their sound varies a great deal. Except for one 1926 78-rpm record, all of Toscanini’s commercial recordings were made for Victor and RCA Victor, and are thus the property of RCA. Many of his NBC Symphony recordings suffered from the dry acoustics of NBC’s notorious Studio 8H, from which his broadcasts were made until the fall of 1950, when they were transferred to Carnegie Hall. Others, apparently with his permission, were artificially beefed up with added reverberation. In the years since Toscanini’s death, RCA has continued to mishandle his recordings—a process scrupulously documented by Haggin in the two editions of Conversations With Toscanini.

The mishandling continues even today. A few years ago Japanese RCA issued ten Toscanini compact discs that were so bad that they were soon withdrawn and a second ten-disc series was canceled.² RCA in New York then announced that it would soon begin issuing its own Toscanini compact discs, and since it fully acknowledged the Japanese fiasco—for which indeed it was partially to blame—one expected better things. Yet the first two discs, of the Beethoven First and “Eroica” (RCD1-7197) and the Beethoven Second and Seventh (RCD1-7198), were, incredibly, disfigured not only by added reverberation but also by added stereo effect! This was also true, though to a lesser extent, of the next two discs issued, some Wagner excerpts (5751-2-RC) and some works by Berlioz (5755-2-RC).

The Beethoven performances, which date from 1949-51, are not so good as the ones of the same works mentioned earlier, but they are well worth having nonetheless. The Wagner disc is notable for a 1941 concluding scene of Act I of Die Walküre, with Lauritz Melchior and Helen Traubel, and for the superb 1952 Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan; the Berlioz disc contains a fine 1953 Harold in Italy. In the best of all possible worlds, RCA would call in these flawed discs and remaster them; since that is not likely to happen, they should be purchased by anyone who wants to experience the plentiful “inner space” of Toscanini’s Wagner and to see how he actually dealt with Beethoven in his later years.

The producer responsible for these four discs has now, happily, left RCA and been replaced by Arthur Fierro, an independent producer who worked with the Toscanini family in transferring their disc archives to tape. The four compact discs prepared under Fierro’s supervision that have so far been issued are a great improvement over their predecessors. The magnificent 1952 Beethoven Ninth (5936-2-RC) and the fine 1951 Brahms Fourth (6216-2-RC) were both transferred to digital tape directly from the original master tapes, with nothing added and with no change in equalization. On both discs one hears the full, warm, lustrous sound of the pre-renovation Carnegie Hall.

The 1944 Beethoven C-Minor Piano Concerto, with Arthur Rubinstein as soloist, and the 1940 Beethoven Violin Concerto, with Jascha Heifetz (5756-2-RC), were both recorded in Studio 8H. While the former accurately reproduces its drier but by no means disagreeable sound, the latter seems to have had reverberation added. If so, it was not added by Fierro, who had to work from a tape prepared in 1975 for RCA’s “Heifetz Collection.” (And I should add that the producer who prepared that tape says he does not recall adding any reverberation.)

Finally, there is a disc of “Light Classics” (6205-2-RC). The sound is full, rich, and natural on all selections except a 1945 Stars and Stripes Forever that has been made blowzy by the addition (though not by Fierro) of both reverberation and stereo. Outstanding are the thrilling 1953 Rossini William Tell Overture and the spacious, relaxed 1950 Smetana Moldau.

RCA has plans for a very extensive Toscanini reissue series on compact discs, which may later include some of the Philharmonic recordings from 1929 and 1936. If Arthur Fierro can only be permitted to remain at the controls, we may at last be seeing an end to the years of abuse to which Toscanini’s recordings have been subjected by RCA.

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It may seem strange that I have bothered to note two and even three different Toscanini versions of the same piece. At one point Horowitz characterizes the comparison of such different versions by the same conductor as “trivial,” even as an “addiction” that attests to the “fetishism” of the members of the Toscanini cult. Yet precisely because masterpieces are inexhaustible, one can learn a great deal from seeing what a great artist like Toscanini decides to do with a given work on different occasions.

In Toscanini’s case, moreover, such comparisons also help to undermine the myth that he was, in his later years, a rigid and driven conductor who took everything too fast and cranked out performances by applying an “all-purpose formula” to the bare notes on the page. To study the different ways in which Toscanini tried, for example, to manage the entry of the second subject in the first movement of the “Eroica,” or the steady build to the climax of the Prelude to Tristan, is not only to learn something about the expressive potential (and the problems) of these works; it is also to experience for oneself the results of what so many musicians who worked with Toscanini have spoken and written about: the ceaseless effort and restudy that he put into each new performance of a familiar work. And this is equally true of the different performances of, say, the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth recorded by Furtwängler, whom Horowitz sets up, in opposition to Toscanini, as the main upholder of Germanic “tradition.”

There was in fact no hallowed, traditional way of conducting Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, and the other great Austro-German composers that was freer, more personal, more “poetic” than Toscanini’s way with these masters. Turn-of-the-century critics make it clear that Richter was strict and even-handed where Nikisch was often free to the point of self-indulgence. And with later conductors, where we have many recordings to go by, anyone can hear for himself that Furtwängler, Muck, Walter, and Weingartner were as different from one another as any one of them was from Toscanini. Toscanini and Mahler, who disagreed on many things, were at one on the question of tradition. When Mahler first came to the Vienna Opera, he was told that his tempi in Wagner were not traditional because they were not those of Richter, who had learned the scores from Wagner himself. What you call tradition, Mahler memorably told his accusers, is nothing but your own indolence and slovenliness (“Bequemlichkeit und Schlamperei”).

Wagner’s son Siegfried, a gifted conductor and composer in his own right, had grown up hearing the Bayreuth performances of Tristan conducted by Richter and others of the Wagnerian inner circle. Yet he was so impressed by the Toscanini Tristan he heard at Milan’s La Scala in 1901 that he resolved then and there to invite Toscanini to Bayreuth—though he did not succeed until 1930, owing to the objections of other Wagner family members to non-German conductors. And Mahler himself praised Toscanini’s Tristan to his protégé Walter: “Toscanini conducts it in a manner entirely different from ours but magnificently in his own way.” We, who are blessed in having so many recordings at our disposal, are still freer to enjoy both Toscanini and Furtwängler conducting Wagner, Toscanini and Walter conducting Brahms, Toscanini and Weingartner conducting Beethoven—and to learn from the differences.

The testimony of Toscanini’s greatest recordings, of many of his most distinguished colleagues, of competent critics who listened long and carefully to him during his prime, and of the men who played for him does seem to indicate that he really was—to return to our starting-point—the best. He combined, at a higher level and more consistently than anyone else of his time, the technical and imaginative gifts required of a conductor with the sustained concentration and the iron discipline needed to weld a hundred players into a single responsive instrument. But to affirm this is not to engage in idolatry or to brand oneself as a member of any supposed Toscanini “cult.” As he was the first to admit, he had bad days as well as good, and his substantial recorded legacy naturally reflects this unevenness. It is, nonetheless, one of our most precious cultural possessions.

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¹ University of Minnesota Press, 493 pp., $12.95.

² For details see my article, “The Toscanini Sound,” in the February 1986 issue of the Atlantic.