CD Review: Stoki's expressionistic Beethoven with the NBC

The destiny and legacy of the NBC Symphony and Arturo Toscanini are so inextricably bound that it is sometimes easy to forget that each had a life of its own, occasionally even far apart. Throughout the orchestra’s existence they collaborated with a long rotating list of guest conductors. But for a brief period spanning the 1941 – 1942 season, the Maestro split altogether, fallout from a fracas with NBC’s management. Though he eventually would return, Leopold Stokowski was appointed his replacement during the interregnum, enlivening the repertoire with a number of world and local premieres of the sort of music Toscanini never touched.

Stokowski also was, as a recent compilation from Pristine Audio reminds the listener, himself a superb Beethoven interpreter, if of a totally different type from his elder colleague. Whereas Toscanini cultivated a lean and tight sound that highlighted the music’s freshness, Stokowski’s interpretations of Beethoven’s Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh are dark-hued, imposing, and Romantic; with flexible tempi, grand rhetorical gestures (listen to the opening “fate” motif of the Fifth), and a quasi-cinematic breadth of sonority. Stokowski had recorded Beethoven before and would do so again much later, but these NBC interpretations arguably capture him at his best. 

The gem of this compilation may be his Reubenesque rendering of the Seventh, which has a voluptuousness of tone rarely heard in Beethoven (or from the NBC Symphony, for that matter). It is songful, yet heaven-storming; with an “Allegretto” whose funereal cast is like something out of the expressionistic world of Murnau and Lang. Nothing drags, however, and it is followed by propulsive and vigorous readings of the final two movements that leave one clutching their seat. How the audience at Studio 8-H managed to keep themselves from screaming their heads off at the vertiginous excitement that Stoki goaded from the NBC strings at the finale’s coda is beyond me.

Of his various recordings of the Beethoven Fifth, this NBC performance may be Stoki’s finest, aided by a touch of rhythmic tightness that sharpens the contours of its drama. When the finale’s blaze of light erupts upon the scherzo, Stoki conveys a sense of implacable triumph: Nothing can (and does) stop Beethoven’s victory.

Stoki’s super sleek approach to the Beethoven Sixth, fine performance though it is, has little of the earthy bumptiousness this music demands. (It is the “Pastoral,” after all.) His is very much an urbanite’s glossy daydream of country life rather than the thing itself; the central scherzo sounding more like the frolicking of impeccably airbrushed models for The Gap, than that of peasants.

Also in this collection are some of Stoki’s Wagner performances with NBC; appropriate given the conductor’s Wagnerian approach to Beethoven, including a steamy, XXX-rated rendition of the “Prelude to Act I” and “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde that practically scorches one’s speakers.

While this material has been made available before, the sound restoration by Andrew Rose polishes it further to a lustrous gleam. Nowhere can this be heard better than on Stoki’s NBC Beethoven Seventh, previously heard on a deleted Cala disc which suffered from an unusually over-filtered transfer. Bad memories of that CD are immediately cast aside by this present reissue, with the strings especially taking on a vivid presence nothing like the boxiness one normally expects from this venue.

Here’s to hoping Pristine keeps the treasures from NBC’s vault coming.

Lustrous and bold: Stokowski’s Beethoven with the NBC Symphony.

The Lion's Swan Song: Arturo Toscanini's Final Concert

It is one of those curious twists of cosmic fate that Arturo Toscanini and Wilhelm Furtwängler, arguably the two most famous orchestral conductors of their time, both had the curtains unwillingly pulled upon their careers in the same year. The latter would die in Baden-Baden in November 1954 after a brief bout of pneumonia. Just a few months prior across the Atlantic, his rival (and grudging admirer) stood before an orchestra for the final time. Though he would live on for another few years, the frailty of the octogenarian Toscanini’s faculties could no longer bear the stresses of a career that had lasted nearly seven decades: Longer than the entire lifespans of a number of his contemporaries and rivals. 

He had, in fact, been convinced to return from retirement to head the then newly formed NBC Symphony—a formidable task at any age, but especially for a man nearing 70. Toscanini met the challenge with his characteristic drive and determination; and, as recordings gratefully preserve, the musical results evinced a vigor that betray nothing of his age. 

As the early 1950s wore on, however, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the partnership between conductor and orchestra could not go on much longer. For one thing, there was the increasing unprofitability of maintaining a full-size symphony orchestra year after year, not to mention the dwindling of the radio audience at the dawn of mass television—although David Sarnoff’s personal admiration for Toscanini staved off the machinations of NBC’s board of directors. More dire was the physical state of Toscanini himself. 

Though he was capable of summoning reserves of willpower that steeled him through increasing frailty for the sake of music, there was no escaping mortality’s inexorable grasp. Toscanini had already suffered the devastating blow of his wife Carla’s death in 1951. In those final months of his career, the remorseless grinding of time upon his body was becoming impossible to ignore. 

“I am not well, and nobody believes me, the asses, but I’m not the same as I was. . .,” he wrote to a friend in 1953. “All in all, a poor unhappy man—and [NBC has] had the bad taste to force me to accept another year of concerts. . . I’m old, very old, and can’t stand it anymore!”

More than “bad taste,” it was Toscanini’s concern for the well-being of his musicians, who would certainly be (and were) disbanded upon his retirement that goaded him into conducting one more season. 

A few months later in January 1954 while rehearsing Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera for broadcast performances, the conductor was terrified to discover that the words of this opera he had loved since boyhood were suddenly eluding his memory. Age forced him to act decisively. 

On the morning of March 25, 1954—his 87th birthday—Toscanini affixed his shaky signature to his letter of resignation from the NBC Symphony (likely drafted by his son Walter): “And now the sad time has come when I must reluctantly lay aside my baton and say goodbye to my orchestra.”

His final concert—all Wagner—shortly thereafter on April 4 was of a piece with the somewhat ramshackle mood of the occasion, the program being a relatively late switch for the Brahms Ein Deutsches Requeim which Toscanini had originally intended as his farewell. Given the events that transpired during this performance and its rehearsals, it is not surprising that it has become one of the most talked about in Toscanini’s career. 

The rehearsals themselves were marked by several lapses in the conductor’s memory, stoking the fire of his infamous temper. Things soon came to a head and he finally stormed off in a rage. The situation was concerning enough to NBC that they had clandestinely notified Erich Leinsdorf, then music director of the Rochester Philharmonic, to stand ready in the event of a Toscanini no-show at the concert. It proved a false alarm—the Maestro would show up to his final concert after all. 

Confusion was in the air on that Sunday. While the audience filled into Carnegie Hall, NBC distributed leaflets with copies of Toscanini’s resignation letter (and network general manager Sarnoff’s reply) to members of the press, listeners in attendance and tuned into the radio were not informed. Finally the curtain rose. Toscanini and the NBC Symphony began with the Act I prelude to Lohengrin, followed by the “Waldweben” from Siegfried. The conductor failed to indicate changes in meter, but the orchestra stayed on its toes, expertly navigating through the score on its own. Continuing were the “Siegfrieds Rheinfahrt” and “Trauermarsch” from Götterdämmerung, which were dispatched smoothly. Then came the Paris version of the overture to Tannhäuser—a performance which has since become the stuff of legends. 

During the “Bacchanale,” Toscanini momentarily lost track of what he was conducting. He turned pale, stopped conducting, and covered his eyes with his left hand. For a moment the ensemble slipped, unsure of what was occurring, until cellist Frank Miller began cueing entrances for his fellow players, restoring unanimity, and guiding Toscanini back into the performance. But in the moments while this was being sorted out, panic had ensued in the NBC control room. Aghast at what was happening, Guido Cantelli insisted to the radio personnel to take the concert off the air, which they promptly did. While the announcer feigned technical difficulties, the opening of the Brahms First Symphony had incongruously been interpolated. 

Despite the rough seas, both orchestra and conductor had made it to shore, finishing the piece together. Toscanini was furious with himself, nearly stomping off until Miller reminded him that there was still the prelude to Meistersinger left to play. He nodded wordlessly, motioned the upbeat, and launched into the work, only to abruptly leave while the orchestra was in mid-tutti at the coda, ignoring the clamoring of his audience to return for a bow. 

Hearing the concert today nearly 70 years later, one can hardly hear anything of the black legend that has since swirled around it. Toscanini’s late recordings can sometimes sound dry, unyielding, much too tight. None of that is discernible in this performance. Instead one finds here a sense of measure and poise, of shaping each phrase breath by breath that is often missing in the conductor’s contemporaneous recordings. Even the notorious Tannhäuser performance has a chamber-like intimacy and beguiling luminescence which reveals little of the troubles which had nearly unraveled it. Samuel Chotzinoff would later relate that “the men stopped playing and the house was engulfed in terrible silence” when Toscanini suffered his memory lapse. Aside from a brief spell of ensemble unease, the recording evinces nothing of that. What comes through instead is the NBC Symphony’s professionalism (as well as sincere affection for their conductor) in ensuring the maintenance of order. 

The fact that the broadcast has been preserved in decent early stereo only adds to the value of this document. Perhaps nowhere else can a listener more vividly hear the spectrum of color that Toscanini could draw from an orchestra. 

It is a performance that in many ways is unique in Toscanini’s discography. At times it even prefigures the much later work of Carlo Maria Giulini and Claudio Abbado. With typical self-deprecation Toscanini would later remark of it: “I conducted as if it had been a dream. It almost seemed to me that I wasn’t there.” Whether humility or humiliation provoked these words, his presence is unmistakable throughout this performance. We hear not the infallible musical demigod of American consumer mythologizing, but the vulnerable, imperfect man and artist who in his final years struggled against the dying of the light; and drew from within himself one last time to fashion beauty that defies the tragic impermanence of our existence. 

(This essay was commissioned by ATS in Japan for inclusion in their reissue of this broadcast.)

Toscanini, a few weeks before his death, speaking to (from left to right) Daniel Guilet, Emanuel Vardi, Wilfrid Pelletier.

“He will live on in the hearts of all of us”: Bruno Walter’s final tribute to Arturo Toscanini

Late in life, Bruno Walter would muse upon the didactic value of sound recordings to Columbia Records’ Arnold Michaelis. Tellingly, he singled out the recorded legacy of one conductor as being particularly valuable to future generations: 

“I am really very happy about this idea that the disappearance of all the traces of our lives as performing musicians is not anymore to be feared. That we really. . . can live on in our best efforts. . . It is a kind of school. So it is for young conductors who can hear how Toscanini conducted this or that.”

The conducting profession has never been conducive to the forging of warm friendships among its most famous practitioners, especially during the golden age of the maestro-auteur in the early 20th century. Walter himself was aware that his mentor, Gustav Mahler, had been a fierce rival of Arturo Toscanini’s when happenstance brought both conductors to New York City during the same period. The disparity of their respective backgrounds and ages notwithstanding, a firm friendship based on mutual respect would be forged between these two conductors which would endure their entire lives. 

They first crossed paths in 1926 when Walter, then among the leading lights of the German musical world, was invited as a guest conductor to La Scala. Writing about the occasion in his memoirs, Theme and Variations, Walter recalled: “The meeting, casual though it was, made a deep and lasting impression upon me. I wished I would come to know the man better and fathom the secret of so exponential a being.”

Toscanini, though sometimes grumbling disapprovingly over his colleague’s interpretations, was nonetheless appreciative of Walter as both friend and musician

“When I see the good Bruno Walter,” he confided to his mistress, Ada Colleone Mainardi, “I really feel that I’m ten years younger than he!”

Within less than a decade of their first meeting, the lives of both conductors would be tossed asunder by the epochal winds of history about to blow through Europe. Toscanini, by the late 1930s permanently residing in America, emerged from retirement to assume the role as music director of NBC’s newly created flagship orchestra. Though prone to professional jealousies, he extended guest invitations to conductors fleeing the Old World in search of refuge and a chance to restart their careers in the New World. Among those whom he helped was Walter, who had fled the Anschluss and the imminent invasion of France, and was mourning the murder of his daughter Gretel besides. He made his first post-exile American appearance in March and April 1939 with the NBC Symphony in a five-concert series—a generous engagement reflective of Toscanini’s admiration. This was followed next season with another five-concert guest series which included, among other things, an electrifying reading of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony which, gratefully, has been preserved. 

Curiously, Walter would not be invited to conduct the NBC Symphony again until February 1951, when he replaced Toscanini, then recovering from a knee injury. 

After Toscanini’s final retirement in April 1954, NBC disbanded what had by then essentially become “his” orchestra. Instead of walking away, the ensemble independently reconstituted as the Symphony of the Air, promoting itself as “the orchestra that refused to die.” Don Gillis, composer and former producer for the NBC Symphony’s broadcasts, cabled the ensemble’s former music director an invitation to lead their first concert. He politely, but firmly rejected the orchestra’s “touching and kind [message],” stating that his advanced age and frail health precluded any possibility of considering any conducting engagements. 

If not presiding in person, Toscanini’s spirit at least hovered over the orchestra as strong as ever, even while the man himself rapidly wasted away. By the time his former orchestra was planning its elaborate concert commemorating his ninetieth birthday, Toscanini mental faculties had deteriorated to such a degree that one wonders whether he was even aware of the forthcoming occasion. Early in the morning of January 1, 1957, Toscanini would suffer a debilitating stroke—two weeks later he was dead. 

 “I am too deeply shocked by the passing of my dear and revered friend,” Walter wrote in a memorial tribute. “In him was greatness and I am sure the memories of his glorious activities. . . will live on in the hearts of all of us.”

Walter, himself an octogenarian and not in robust health, was moved to make out his last will and testament during this time. A few weeks later, his fragile physical state forced him to decline being a pallbearer for Toscanini at his funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. 

Already from the year before, when he was approaching his eightieth birthday, Walter was beginning to curtail his conducting engagements. In a letter to the New York Philharmonic’s manager, Bruno Zirato, he announced that he would not renew his regular guest appearances with the orchestra after the 1956 – 1957 season. 

“I feel the hour has struck for me to discontinue an activity which has meant so much to me,” he wrote. 

In his final years, he would cease performing live altogether, instead venturing from his Beverly Hills home only as far as a relatively short drive to Hollywood and Eagle Rock in order to conduct the pick-up Columbia Symphony Orchestra. These final recording sessions—covering repertoire ranging from Mozart to Mahler—have remained Walter’s best known, with the fire and verve of his early years mellowed (some would argue “dulled”) into agreeable geniality. 

But on February 3, 1957, as he (along with Pierre Monteux and Charles Munch) stepped before Toscanini’s old orchestra for the last time, much of that old fire returned in a triumphantly blazing performance of the Beethoven Eroica that is perhaps the finest of all Walter’s extant recordings of the symphony. 

Unsurprisingly given the occasion and ensemble, the performance has a Toscanini-like grip quite unlike Walter’s contemporary performances, be they in the studio or the concert hall. It also is a reminder of the orchestra’s reluctance to play according to Walter’s preferences. Violinist Felix Galimir remarked that members of the NBC Symphony would often “not even watch whatever [the guest conductor] was doing.” 

Replying to an admirer who had also commented on this unique aspect of this performance, Walter wrote: “I presume your impression may be explained by the fact that it was an orchestra which had played the same work under Toscanini for many years.”

The performance does not suffer in the least for all that, which is markedly superior to the stereo commercial recording he would make shortly afterwards. From the moment those twin E-flat chords pound forth, Walter’s interpretation surges with an irresistible sense of momentum tempered by subtle flexibility of line and sonority. It is tempting to wonder whether Walter’s traversal would have earned the admiration of Toscanini had he lived to hear it. Certainly it proves to not only be a fitting tribute to his recently deceased friend, but an inadvertently touching memento of the elemental power that Walter still managed to rouse from himself on occasion. 

Just over a month later, on March 7, 1957, he suffered a heart attack, the first of two that year, leaving a permanent mark on his career and performance style. The final curtain upon Bruno Walter’s career had begun to be drawn. 

Walter and Toscanini, unlikely friends, looking cozy in Leipzig during the latter’s 1930 European tour with the New York Philharmonic.

“Everything Black”: Toscanini’s Final Performance of Verdi’s Requiem

“[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]

Feeling The Spirit: Toscanini’s 1939 Beethoven Cycle

If ever there was a single figure of whom it could be said was the representation in music of what Henry Luce had famously dubbed the “American Century,” then no better example could be found than the Italian-born conductor Arturo Toscanini. Throughout the last decades of his life‍, and even years after his death in 1957, the diminutive, mustachioed, white-haired man was in the United States practically the embodiment of the art over which he ruled virtually unchallenged. Even in a time and place where men like Leopold Stokowski, Serge Koussevitzky, Bruno Walter, and many others were not only active, but commanded their own wide legions of admirers, Toscanini stood apart. His purported ideal of com’e scritto—fidelity to the score, eschewing of personal idiosyncrasies, consistency of tempi—became the defining paradigm of musical performance in the postwar era, with its echo continuing to resound into our present day. 

While this remarkable achievement was owed primarily to Toscanini’s blend of musicianship and sheer tenacity in achieving his artistic objectives, there is no doubt that he was also aided enormously by the American press machine. Practically from the time of his arrival in the United States, Toscanini was spoken of by the nation’s critical establishment mostly in tones of adulatory praise that verged on the hysterical, some of it embarrassing by contemporary standards. 

“Only American audacity would dare to approach the god of all conductors; and having won, proceed to build an orchestra worthy of him‍,” gushed Marcia Davenport in a 1937 issue of Stage magazine wherein she reported on the orchestra that David Sarnoff had created for Toscanini. While it would be tempting to dismiss this as merely an example of NBC’s marketing, the American cult of Toscanini worship was thriving years before the advent of the Peacock Network’s flagship orchestra. In the late 1920s, Lawrence Gilman of the New York Herald-Tribune declared the conductor to be the “custodian of holy things” and “vicar of the immortals.” Meanwhile his counterpart at the New York Times, Olin Downes, rhapsodized: “If ever there was a man who justified the theory of aristocracy built upon the fundamental conception that men are not born free and equal, that some are immeasurably superior to others, and that their superiority is justification for their control of others’ acts and destinies, that man is Arturo Toscanini.” Not for nothing did an anonymous Musical Times author sarcastically roll his eyes when commenting upon the conductor’s recent appearance at the London Music Festival for the June 1939 issue of the periodical: “Can the king do no wrong?” 

As we approach the third decade of the 21st century, the luster of Toscanini’s legacy has dimmed concurrently with the dramatic reappraisal of conductors like Wilhelm Furtwängler and Willem Mengelberg, rivals who were each in their respective ways the antithesis of the Toscaninian ideal. Perhaps more importantly, however, is the fact that the most widely available of Toscanini’s recordings, his RCA sessions from the 1950s, can sometimes not quite match the hype that surrounded them long ago. One must regret the timing of the conductor’s retirement, which occurred at the very dawn of the hi-fi era. How his posthumous legacy would have been enriched had he been given the chance to record in “Living Stereo” can only be guessed at. Suffice to say that though his late recordings reward the careful listener with their own hard-won beauties and insights, the Apollonian brilliance and energy, the near Technicolor panoply of sound that had so excited his admirers is rarely found there. To find that Toscanini, one must turn to his earlier recordings from the 1930s. Among these, perhaps nowhere else is his art displayed at its consistent finest than in this 1939 Beethoven cycle for NBC which, gratefully, has been preserved. 

Expectations for the cycle ran high at the time. Many anticipated it to be the most important showcase to date of this musical partnership, while others hoped it would symbolize the fulfillment of Sarnoff’s stated hope that the orchestra would “further stimulate and enrich musical appreciation” in America. 

Writing to his mistress, Ada Colleoni Mainardi, Toscanini expressed his wonder over this already virtuoso ensemble’s development: “Impossible though it seems, I can tell you that the orchestra has improved even more.” 

By this point, the composer’s symphonies and orchestral works had become long-recognized specialties of the conductor’s, and he was much in demand to perform them. In fact, this NBC cycle had been preceded by another that he had led across the Atlantic only months earlier with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Notably, this 1939 cycle was also one of the rare occasions in which Toscanini led his own arrangement of the Septet, and was possibly the only time he performed the Choral Fantasy. (Vladimir Horowitz had recommended to his father-in-law the engagement of his friend, Ania Dorfmann, as soloist for the latter work.)

The hectoring inflexibility and dullness of tone that sometimes mars his late recordings is nowhere to be found on this cycle. Nevertheless, the listener must permit certain allowances, such as the powder-dry acoustic of Rockefeller Center’s Studio 8-H. Even after the acoustic modifications performed upon it in 1939, its cramped sound could hardly mislead anybody into thinking that it was the Musikvereinsaal or Concertgebouw. 

Caveats notwithstanding, the melodic suppleness, rhythmic flexibility, and variety of nuance on display here have few equals in Toscanini’s discography. 

Critical and popular reactions were predictably rapturous, with NBC’s marketing team ever ready to capitalize on the occasion. 

“Toscanini’s Beethoven ‘heard’ by Helen Keller,” blared a New York Times headline from November 1939, which described in breathless prose the deaf-mute author-activist’s attendance of one of the Beethoven cycle concerts. “You are just as I always pictured you,” she was quoted saying of Toscanini, adding that his conducting had left her “overcome with joy” for allowing her to “feel the spirit of Beethoven.” 

The enthusiasm of American musical critics was only slightly less euphoric. Olin Downes led the way, remarking in a review of the cycle’s final concert: “Every element in the score took its place as part of one thought and design. Every idea glowed with life and beauty…. Each element was merged in the conception of a single despotic spirit—that of Toscanini—and, together with Toscanini, glorified Beethoven.”

Even at the time, this 1939 Beethoven cycle was considered one of the peaks of Toscanini’s already storied career. Posterity has only confirmed this verdict. He himself had accorded tremendous importance to the cycle, sparing no effort in its preparation. 

“Oh, how hard it is to repeat the same music after a short lapse and to find a way to make new life flow into all of it!,” he wrote on the eve of the first concert in the cycle. “I can still bring off this miracle! At least I think so!!!” 

Eighty years later, the miracle he pulled off in this series of six concerts continues to burn as brightly as ever, a vivid testimonial to the truth and vitality of Toscanini’s art. 

This essay will be included in the liner notes for a forthcoming reissue by ATS of Toscanini’s 1939 NBC Beethoven cycle.