In his black high-collared rehearsal coat, Arturo Toscanini walked into NBC's Manhattan Studio 8-H and launched a Robert Shaw-trained chorus and a handful of soloists into the music he loved: Verdi's melodramatic, tearfully tender Aïda. With cajolery, threats and sarcasm ("Mr. Tucker," he inquired scathingly of Tenor Richard Tucker, "do you love a woman?"), he shaped a magnificently precise and passionate performance, presented to NBC televiewers and listeners in the spring of 1949. When RCA Victor decided to cut records from the broadcast tapes, Toscanini returned from retirement in 1954 to conduct at Carnegie Hall portions of the opera which did not satisfy him—namely, Soprano Herva Nelli's O Patria Mia and Ritorna Vincitor! (TIME, June 14, 1954). Last week Victor released (on three LPs) Toscanini's composite and deftly sound-doctored Aïda, the opera in which he made his conducting debut in Rio de Janeiro 71 years ago at 19.
The Maestro's last word on Aïda ranks with his recording of Verdi's Otello and Falstaff as his operatic testament. The NBC Symphony plays with brilliant coloring and syllable-sharp instrumental detail ; the singers—some less than top drawer—are whipped almost beyond their powers to high moments of musical exaltation. The Met's Tucker, singing the full dramatic tenor role of Radames for the first time, has big, ringing power when he needs it, joined to a fervent, melting lyricism. Titian-haired Herva Nelli, Toscanini's favorite soprano, sings perhaps the finest Aïda of her career with rare intensity in a voice both sweet and sure.
"Bene!" Although Aïda is the last of the studio-recorded Toscanini music, Victor still has half a dozen unpublished recordings from rehearsals and performances approved by Toscanini during the last two years of his life and scheduled for release. They include Brahms's Double Concerto, Haydn's Toy Symphony and a Vivaldi Concerto Grosso. Toscanini's son Walter estimates that there are some 30 other approved recordings in Riverdale, among them the complete Romeo and Juliet music of Berlioz and the Second and Fourth symphonies of Sibelius. The recordings are the fruits of a plan RCA Victor worked out with Walter Toscanini in 1954 to get the Maestro to approve or disapprove every scrap of his music recorded since 1937, when the NBC Symphony was formed.
To overcome Toscanini's dislike of recordings (he was infuriated by their failure to reproduce the sound of his orchestra as he remembered it), Walter Toscanini built a sound studio in the billiard room in the basement of Toscanini's house in Riverdale (the Upper Bronx), piped tape-recorded music up to a giant speaker in the living room. When the spirit moved him, the old man sat in the living room listening to and judging the full-volume thunder of his orchestra. If a note or a phrase displeased him, he moved his head almost imperceptibly from side to side, frequently erupted into red-faced tirades if the music continued. In two years of listening, he gave an immediate, unqualified "Bene" to only one recording—a six-minute Ride of the Valkyries.