Gramophone: Mike Schman: Toscanini's last stand

[Frank Forman]

I have a homemade tape of the actual broadcast. The station suddenly switched
to a recording of the Brahms first symphony but reverted to the concert
pretty soon after. Music and Arts sold and maybe still sells a stereophonic
recording of the entire concert (with the bad playing replaced). The
orchestra just before did not come "dangerously close to disaster," at least
not to me. You may go listen to my tape at
http://www.filefactory.com/file/5r79x761ic2t/F0079a%20(only)%20%20Toscanini's%20last%20concert%20as%20broadcast).mp3

Mike Schman: Toscanini's last stand
http://www.gramophone.co.uk/feature/toscaninis-last-stand

This article originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of
Gramophone, reposted Tue 3rd January 2017

The great Toscanini's final concert with his beloved NBC Symphony Orchestra
came dangerously close to disaster.

'I was hoping to close this season and be done with it once and for
all because I can't stand being Arturo Toscanini any longer...I would
like to rest for what little time remains to me and enjoy a peaceful
death.' In May 1953 Arturo Toscanini was 86 and on the verge of what
proved to be his last season with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in New
York, a series of broadcast concerts (reduced from the normal 14 to
10) that, if you take his correspondence at face value, was given
under duress. 'Unfortunately,' he continued to his daughter, 'my
ferocious resistance was beaten by the most ferocious ball-breakers'
- the executives who he said exhorted him to return to the podium.

But, as Toscanini's biographer Harvey Sachs comments (in The Letters
of Arturo Toscanini; Knopf: 2002), 'it is clear that Toscanini
accepted the 'exhortations' to conduct another season because this is
what he really wanted to do in his heart of hearts'. There was also
the question of 'his' orchestra. Radio audiences were falling off in
the early 1950s, even for Toscanini concerts, and storm clouds were
gathering over the future of the orchestra. Sachs believes--from
recent research--that David Sarnoff (president of the Radio
Corporation of America, which ran the NBC concerts) had kept the
orchestra going against the advice of his corporation's board.
Toscanini was well aware that his continuing career and the
orchestra's livelihood were inextricable. It was against this
background--and the conductor's desire to continue making music set
against concern about his own abilities--that the 1953/54 season
began. Toscanini had wished it to include Bach's Second Brandenburg
Concerto (but his long-serving first trumpet told him he was too old
for the tricky high solo part) and two of his big choral favourites -
KodГЎly's Psalmus hungaricus and (for the last concert) Brahms's
German Requiem--which, in the end, he concluded he was not up to
preparing. At the start of the season, also, he had to miss two
concerts due to illness. He finally took the rostrum in November for
Brahms's Tragic Overture and Strauss's Don Quixote. The season
continued successfully; many of the performances were later selected
for release by RCA (the Strauss tone-poem, the Eroica, the Berlioz
Harold in Italy, the Mendelssohn Reformation Symphony and the
season's big project, a complete Un ballo in maschera in two parts).
In March 1954 Toscanini conducted his last Beethoven symphony (the
Pastoral), a fine performance of Verdi's Te Deum and an uneven one of
Tchaikovsky's PathГ©tique (Mortimer Frank in The NBC Years--Amadeus
Press: 2002 -says that it 'sounds like a first run-through of an
unfamiliar work by a highly skilled ensemble'; decide for yourself on
Music & Arts/Discografico Italiano).

On Toscanini's desk at the time was a letter of resignation to 'my
very dear David' (Sarnoff). Prepared by his son Walter, and perhaps
others (and in a most un-Toscanini-like style), it announced: 'And
now the sad time has come when I must reluctantly lay aside my baton
and say goodbye to my orchestra.' It took a while before, on his 87th
birthday, March 25, the letter was signed and dated. Copies of the
letter were, perhaps unwisely, distributed to New York's musical
press at Carnegie Hall on April 4.

After deciding against the Brahms Requiem for this last planned
concert, Toscanini opted for a familiar, but lengthy, all-Wagner
programme, items that had been consistently successful in his
American concerts. Alongside the Lohengrin Act 1 Prelude, the
Siegfried 'Forest Murmurs', the Götterdämmerung 'Dawn and Siegfried's
Rhine Journey' and the Meistersinger Prelude stood originally the
Tristan Prelude and Liebestod. For this, just before rehearsals
began, the Tannhäuser Overture and Bacchanale, a Toscanini speciality
among specialities, was substituted.

Once over some confusion about whether Toscanini was beating two or
four in the Lohengrin excerpt, the first rehearsal (there were three
altogether) continued until, in the Götterdämmerung music, the
conductor decided that the timpanist had come in a bar too early
after the offstage horncall at the start of the Rhine Journey. The
player incorporated Toscanini's (erroneous) belief that his entry was
after 13 bars and everything then went smoothly--including what
critic BH Haggin called a 'power all there' run-through of the big
25-minute Tannhäuser excerpt at the second, Friday rehearsal--until
the final Saturday afternoon rehearsal. When the timpanist came in
correctly according to the score, Toscanini went into a rage;
principal cellist Frank Miller advised the player to 'make it 13
measures' and, amid cries from the conductor of 'Shameful!
Shameful!', the passage was repeated. With comments of 'At last!' and
'The last rehearsal', Toscanini walked off and the rehearsal ended,
without the Tannhäuser or the Meistersinger Prelude being played
again.

At the concert the next day, Haggin reported in Contemporary
Recollections of the Maestro, 'power was not exercised' in the
Lohengrin, Siegfried and Tannhäuser excerpts. Toscanini, according to
members of the orchestra later, had forgotten to beat some changes of
time signature in the 'Forest Murmurs' but, after the climax of the
Bacchanale in the Tannhäuser, he stopped conducting altogether with
(and this is an account reported to Haggin by players he knew) 'his
right arm gradually dropping to his side, his left hand covering his
eyes'. Guided by some hints from Frank Miller the orchestra continued
playing. Toscanini then left the podium, was reminded (by Miller)
that he still had Meistersinger to play, beat through that work but
left the platform while the orchestra was still playing the final
chords.

What radio listeners heard was more dramatic. When Toscanini stopped
beating, the two musicians in the radio control room--Samuel
Chotzinoff and Guido Cantelli--panicked. First the transmission was
taken off the air and there came 14 seconds of silence. Then
announcer Ben Grauer spoke of technical difficulties down the line
from Carnegie Hall. After more silence, the opening half-minute of a
Toscanini recording of Brahms Symphony No 1 (an ironic, but perhaps
the only available, choice) was played and then transmission was
resumed.

Listening objectively to a CD of the concert as heard in the hall
(for example, Music & Arts CD3008) with all that information is hard.
It's also initially seductive because, as in the previous March
concert with the PathГ©tique, the warmth and grace of Toscanini's
orchestra (even under slightly straitened circumstances) can at last
be heard in stereo. There is definitely something afoot, a stiffness,
a nervousness about the readings. The Tannhäuser still has the
wonderful space and warmth (try after 7'30" and 13'10") Toscanini
brought to this score and a huge and impressive climax is worked up
to around 14'30". After that it feels for a little time almost as if
the conductor is observing and listening to rather than leading the
performance. Chotzinoff (who was actually there) states in his
autobiography that 'the men stopped playing and the house was
engulfed in terrible silence'. We can now hear this is incorrect -
there was definitely a faltering, but not a breakdown.

While news of his retirement was announced by NBC, Toscanini dined
with family and Guido Cantelli, talking (according to Sachs) of
contemporary Italian composers and regretting that he had never
conducted Rachmaninov's Second Symphony. Later he observed: 'I
conducted as if it had been a dream. It almost seemed to me that I
wasn't there.' Toscanini was back in front of his NBC men once more
in June, in lengthy (and apparently sparkling) patch-up sessions for
his Ballo and Aida recordings. Although a comeback was discussed -
and there were even some casting discussions for a Falstaff at La
Piccola Scala to be directed by Luchino Visconti--he conducted no
more before his death in January 1957. The orchestra was disbanded,
but performed on for a decade as the Symphony of the Air. Their first
concert was given with an empty conductor's rostrum, in tribute to
Toscanini.

[leg rivers@hitmeonce.com]

do you all ways ignore second post like this from UPLOAD! Monthly reminder for
2017 February 3.
2 posts by 2 authors


why is it its all ways Mravinsky, Evgeny (2.4Gib)
More about him later.