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The rehearsal was over; the guest conductor stepped down from the podium. Said Maestro Toscanini, who had been sitting quietly in a back seat scrutinizing the score: "Now! That man really knows how to play that music ... I play it like a pig!" The little knot of courtiers around Toscanini hastened to assure him that it wasn't so. The old man turned on them with one of his sudden, unpredictable thunderclaps: "Oh, so you think I don't know music?" As he marched off he sputtered: "The trouble with all of you is—you have all been poisoned by me!"
For 62 years now, the "poison" of Arturo Toscanini has been seeping out into the world. Drugged by it, millions of music lovers (and not a few critics) have come to regard all of the Maestro's music with dumb and unquestioning adoration. Certainly he has brought the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner and Verdi to life as no other man has. He is now a white-haired little man of 81, and when a human being reaches that age, his critics, remembering his finer hours, are apt to temper their judgments with mercy.
No one need make that kind of apology for Toscanini—and no one ever has. The "poison" that he spreads has only grown more potent and magical with the years. Today, the crowds that choke Manhattan's Radio City on Saturday nights for the Maestro's broadcast concerts hear the music of a man who is without question the greatest living conductor. They also look upon—and this is Toscanini's secret —an incorruptible man in a corruptible world.
Words & Music. Last week, Maestro Toscanini was busy brewing one of his favorite prescriptions in his own precise and painstaking way. Next week in Carnegie Hall he will conduct the Verdi Requiem in a charity performance for the New York Infirmary. And at $5 to $25 a seat and $250 a box, Carnegie Hall is already sold out, for the biggest gross in its history.
No one has ever had to beg Toscanini to play for charity—although he has refused to play for dictators. And he venerates Verdi above all other composers. For the past two months he has been teaching Verdi's score to his soloists. In his long, low-ceiling dressing room on the eighth floor of the RCA Building, he has sat at the piano, croaking and gesticulating at red-haired Soprano Herva Nelli, while a picture of Verdi stared at her from the piano's littered top. "Nelli," he pleaded, "please do use the expression on your face that you feel in the music. That will bring out the words and the music too." It was an old insistence of his. In rehearsal for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony he had stopped a soloist and asked him, "Do you know what you are singing about? You are singing of brotherhood, but in your face you look like you hate everyone. That will show in your music."