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Golden Age. In the 50 years since Puccini and Verdi gave their imprimatur to Arturo Toscanini, the world has learned how right they were. La Scala had 15 of its most glowing years under the Maestro's baton. With Toscanini in the pit, and Caruso, Melba, Scotti, Destinn and Sembrich on the stage, Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera saw its golden age. Salzburg and Bayreuth acclaimed him. The New York Philharmonic-Symphony, which paid him the highest salary it has ever paid a conductor—about $80,000 a year—has never been the same since he left it in 1936.
Toscanini has always left orchestras when he felt blocked—by money or managers—from achieving what some consider his fantastic standards of perfection.
Ever since NBC Musical Director Samuel Chotzinoff (whom some call NBC's Vice President in charge of Toscanini) persuaded the Maestro to come back from his native Italy ten years ago, promising him an orchestra all his own, the fear that he might walk out again has roamed the corridors of Radio City, unnerving strong-nerved executives.
For dictators are no match for Toscanini. Once a friend of Mussolini, he had been his running mate on the socialist ticket in the general elections of 1919 ("we got about three votes each"). But when the Duce marched on Rome, Toscanini publicly and violently denounced him.
He refused to play the Fascist anthem Giovanezza (because, he says, he didn't consider it music). He was once set upon by Fascist hoodlums, but Mussolini recoiled from taking official action against him. He refused to play in Germany under Hitler. He has never played in Russia, although he was invited by both the Czars and the Soviets.
Drive & Energy. Some say that Toscanini is a dictator himself. He certainly seems to run his own orchestra tyrannically. But few of his musicians can agree on exactly how he works his magic on them. Fear and respect, naturally. Some also explain it by the inexhaustible energy he still has at 81. Others find an indefinable inspiration in his physical embodiment of the music: not so much in his croaking of themes as the orchestra plays, but in the exultation that sometimes lights his face, and in the meaningful sweeps of his left hand (his right hand marks the time; his left signals the expression he wants). He is surely one of the world's greatest natural actors—and on the podium he acts with complete naturalness, absorbed in the music and oblivious of the audience. No windmilling conductor, he leads with the economy of motion that Shakespeare asked of actors.*
When Toscanini is not on his podium-pinnacle, his musicians usually feel free to joke with him, drop into his dressing room to tell him how a solo passage feels to them (he doesn't always agree). He was particularly pleased when Local 802 of the A.F.M. made him an honorary member (he carries a gold card) because, he says, he likes to feel close to his men. They have learned to take his tantrums as he means them: impersonally. They know, as he often pleadingly tells them, that "there are two Toscaninis."