“[Arturo] Toscanini. . . is a natural musician,” opined composer-critic Virgil Thomson in a 1947 essay saluting the Italian conductor on his 80th birthday. “[The] music that he makes is the plainest, the most straightforward music now available in public performance. There is little of historical evocation in it and even less of deliberate emotional appeal. It is purely auditory, just ordered sound and very little else. There is not even very much Toscanini in it.”

Slyly back-handed though Thomson’s observations were, they bear the ring of truth. Toscanini’s simplification of the musical experience, which dispensed with politico-cultural allusions, and put forward the belief that “Allegro con brio” meant only that and nothing more was an epochal revelation in America, wherein the mantra of “less is more” was already deeply ingrained in the national character long before Mies van der Rohe had even dreamed of coining the concept. No surprise, then, that Toscanini triumphed over his Wagnerian rivals who arrived on American shores, whose metaphysical mists provoked distrust in a society already wary (if often in awe) of Teutonic influence. Gustav Mahler, Willem Mengelberg, and Wilhelm Furtwängler (and by extension the cultural universe from which they emerged) all would be trod underfoot by the Italian juggernaut.

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss Toscanini as a one-dimensional musician who applied the same formula to any score he conducted. His live recordings of repertoire as disparate as Bruckner, Elgar, and Shostakovich are sufficient and eloquent proof of his nuanced artistry. Whether the listener agrees with its results or not, his performance practice was born from a highly disciplined sense of willpower; a self-imposed need to restrain his personal fancies, which paradoxically were channelled into the highly-charged performances that he was rightly famous for. Yet in a select few works, that rigid self-denial would with infinitesimal subtlety yield to something more personal, verging upon the Romantic. Toscanini’s performances of Verdi’s Requiem, undoubtedly, fall into this category.

Across the span of nearly half a century, Toscanini would conduct the Requiem twenty-nine times. The first time was at La Scala on January 27, 1902 to mark the one-year anniversary of Verdi’s death. By the occasion of his last performance, 49 years later to the day, Toscanini was living in a nation and world altogether different; and the toll of his 83 years had become impossible to ignore. He was plagued with circulation problems, tooth decay, worsening vision; and was deeply concerned for his wife, Carla, who was recovering from a recent stroke. Perhaps most pressing of all in those weeks preceding his last performance of the Requiem, he was also enduring chronic leg pain that had become so acute, he was forced to cancel all his appearances during the first half of the 1950 – 1951 season of the NBC Symphony Orchestra.

“I’m quite a mess,” he wrote to his wife while he was in Philadelphia awaiting treatment, “. . . I hope I’ll be well enough [to conduct the Requiem], but in the meantime the weeks go by and I’m forever agitated and I haven’t tried to conduct.” Later he poured out his despair over the frightening state of the postwar world to her: “My God, so much sadness! And the [Korean War]! And the atomic bomb. . . ! I see black, everything black. . . I’m very agitated, my brain is full of nasty thoughts and my heart is full of bitterness.”

Another irritant was the NBC Symphony’s ejection from its longtime home at Studio 8-H. They eventually made Carnegie Hall their new home, though Toscanini remained worried about the slashing of the Peacock Network’s investment in classical music, to say nothing of the depreciation in his prestige that would occur as a result.

Despite these personal and professional concerns, he prepared himself mentally and physically for the Requiem. By the time of the first rehearsal on January 10, 1951, Toscanini betrayed little of the aforementioned vulnerabilities. With a splendid vocal quartet composed of Herva Nelli, Fedora Barbieri, Giuseppe di Stefano, Cesare Siepi, and an augmented Robert Shaw Chorale, Toscanini led on January 27, 1951 his final performance of Verdi’s Requiem; an event which RCA Victor was documenting for posterity. Nevertheless, he was profoundly dissatisfied with the performance. Although the orchestra had a few minor lapses in ensemble coordination and unanimity of pitch, the most glaring problems were with di Stefano and especially Nelli, who suffered a meltdown in mid-“Libera Me.”

“I did my best in order to reach a good performance worthy of the circumstance,” he wrote to an admirer who thanked him for the concert. “[Instead] I failed entirely. . . the performance of both [Requiem] and [Te Deum] failed to be as good as I hoped. . . I felt unhappy and ashamed of myself.”

Reviewing the tapes of the performance, Toscanini initially rejected them for commercial release. He later relented once RCA Victor demonstrated that faulty sections in the live performance could be patched up with sections recorded from the rehearsals. It was this modified recording that has become the best-known of Toscanini’s several recordings of the Requiem.

Yet the story of this recording does not end there. Years after the conductor’s death, tapes began to circulate among collectors of the unedited live performance from 1951. Still more revelatory was the fact that another microphone aside from NBC’s had captured the performance onto a seperate set of tapes, which also had survived. It was, therefore, theoretically possible to assemble both sets of recordings into “accidental stereo.”

Some important allowances on the part of the listener must be conceded. “Accidental stereo” is not the same as the real thing, as a cursory listening of this recording will immediately reveal. The sound can be simultaneously diffuse and congested, with the sonic perspective randomly swerving from left to right and back at various intervals. Each tape is treated to divergent production methods, resulting in a sometimes uncomfortable synchronization. Nonetheless, the opportunity vouchsafed here to gain a truer sense of what Toscanini sounded like in the flesh cannot be underestimated.

Then there are the technical shortcomings of the performance itself.

All of these things, ultimately, pale before the essential might of Toscanini’s—and Verdi’s—vision here. Numerous flaws notwithstanding, what remains is a performance of remarkable emotional power. Although he harbored an anti-clerical bent, Toscanini was not quite the agnostic that Verdi had been, as he confessed to intimates. He was perhaps what would much later be referred to as a “cultural Catholic”: An individual who no longer practices the religion, but remains in the sway of its imagery and traditions. Some of the residue of that deep-seated belief can possibly be heard here on this recording, especially in the terrifying din that he rouses in the “Dies Irae” and “Tuba Mirum;” which in his hands accrue, ironically, a Mahlerian grandeur. The comparative inflexibility of his phrasing and tempi in this performance imbue it with a nervy drive that approaches the unbearable. Death by this point had considerably singed the edges of Toscanini’s existential horizons. It was no longer the thing of youthful fantasy and romanticization. It was a real, dull, and onerous thing that made its presence known to him in any number of ever-increasing physical ailments, as well as in the passing of colleagues and friends. Only a few months after this performance, he would be mourning the passing of his ailing wife.

“There’s a sadness that can’t be healed,” he wrote to his daughter Wally a short time after.

An intimate awareness of death, as if he had come face-to-face with it, permeates this performance. Not to say that it lacks energy for all that. There is defiance, there is lamentation. But in the end, by the time the listener arrives at the final “Libera Me” there is, if not quite acceptance, then at least resignation of the inevitable by a man who understood that he was narrowing towards the end of a long road.

A moving and humbling document from an artist who, at least in this recording, imparted very much of himself into it.

(This essay will be included as the liner notes for a future release by ATS of Toscanini’s live 1951 Verdi Requiem.)

From 1953: A rare shot of a grandfatherly Toscanini wearing spectacles. [Wikimedia Commons]