(4 of 8)
The audience settled down to enjoy at least a good laugh. This little scarecrow figure who closed the score before he started to play looked as if he might furnish some fun. But by the end of Act I, they were on their feet, cheering. At 19, Arturo Toscanini had won his first ovation as a conductor.
Ideas & Ideals. But all the bravos in South America and in Turin, where he conducted next, couldn't have kept Toscanini from a job he had his eye on. With his cello under his arm, he scurried to Milan to join the orchestra—as second cellist—that was preparing the premiere of Verdi's new opera, Otello.
To this day Toscanini thinks of Verdi with the same mixture of fear, awe, love and respect with which his own musicians now regard him. From Verdi, he got most of his ideas and ideals of conducting. Verdi, like most composers, was outspoken against conductors who felt they had to "interpret" (i.e., change) his music. Said he: "My manuscripts are clear enough, but I have practically never heard my works interpreted as I imagined them."
Certainly some conductors (and some famous ones) make the strings weep when the composer only intended them to sigh. But if all that is needed is to follow the composer's explicit directions, what's all the fuss about conducting? To the average listener, it might seem that a mechanical metronome would serve as well as a human one. There are other conscientious conductors, just as selflessly anxious as Toscanini to express the composer's intent. Why does Toscanini tower over them?
The answer is that there is much more to conducting than just keeping time; though even keeping time in a complicated score isn't always easy. At any given moment the flute player or the violinist is concerned only with his own note, which the conductor must blend—in time and volume—with the playing of 100 others. And while concentrating on the notes being played at any given moment, the conductor must also have one part of his mind listening to the entire piece. He must be on guard not to exhaust prematurely, in a too early climax, the excitement meant for a later one; to make each part shine for itself, and fit in a whole. It is not a metronome that is required, but taste, talent, culture and care—and some musical X besides. Toscanini has that X blazoned on his forehead.
In young Toscanini, Verdi found a conductor he could trust. Before a performance of Verdi's Quattro Pezzi Sacri, Toscanini once called on him, told him that he felt a retard was needed in one passage of the Te Deum. When Verdi heard him play it, he patted him on the back, said: "Splendid! That is just how I heard it in my mind." "Why didn't you write it that way?" asked Toscanini. Said Verdi: "I was afraid it would be exaggerated." Said Giacomo Puccini of Toscanini, who had conducted the world premiere of his La Boheme: "Toscanini conducts a work not just as the written score directs, but as the composer had imagined it, though his hand failed him when the moment came to write down what he heard so clearly in his head."