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When his career was still in the making 45 years ago, he resigned from Milan's famed La Scala rather than submit to what he considered the artistic outrage of encores. Once in Palermo, hot-blooded Sicilians threatened to mob him because he wouldn't respond to their cries of Bis! bis! (encore). He was only saved by a Mafia leader who admired his courage. He got into repeated tiffs with edgy prima-donnas during his seven-year stay at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House. When one told him, "You cannot treat me like this, I am the star," he replied: "Madam, there are only stars in the heavens, there are no stars in my performances."
Corpses & Flowers. He hates to take bows, refuses to take them alone when there are soloists in the performance. He was visibly furious when the soloists in Otello tricked him by going offstage by another exit and hiding until Toscanini was forced to face the bravoing audience alone.
He believes that all credit is due to the composer (he repeatedly tells his musicians in rehearsal: "It is not I who want this fortissimo, it is Beethoven"), and considers himself the mere unworthy agent of the music. After one stirring performance with the New York Philharmonic-Symphony years ago, a huge floral wreath was brought to the stage for him. Toscanini was so angry and so flustered that he ran offstage, kept running until he reached his suite in the Astor Hotel, a dozen blocks away. (Of floral tributes, he says, "They are for primadonnas and corpses; I am neither.")
Bread & Water. Firebrands are not uncommon; but firebrands that burn with the hard and gemlike flame of Toscanini are rare. How did the little giant (he is a little over five feet) get that way? His ancestors were of peasant stock; his father was a poor tailor in Parma; neither his father nor his mother was interested in music.
Yet, at nine, young Arturo was already nicknamed "Genio" by his classmates at the Parma Conservatory. He had enrolled as a cello student, but his first love was opera. He would sneak into the "piano cell" (Toscanini remembers the conservatory as "monastic") and play passages from operas for hours. When he was caught at it, he was put on bread & water for a week. But when he graduated con lode distinta at 18, his certificate included "an award for piano and composition. (Toscanini has never since tried his hand at composition. The conservatory, however, still treasures his schoolboy manuscripts.)
Batons & Frock Coats. Arturo got his next lode distinta one night a year later in Rio de Janeiro. The opera was Verdi's Aïda, and the house was jammed. Just before curtain time, the Brazilian conductor quarreled with his Italian musicians, and refused to conduct. Both the assistant conductor and the chorus master were booed from the podium. Then orchestra men reminded the frantic impresario of the little cellist who seldom looked at his music when he played because he knew it all by heart. Young Arturo was hurried from the pit, bundled into an oversize frock coat and handed a baton.