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[INDEX]
The Letters of Arturo Toscanini
Harvey Sachs, editor.
Knopf ISBN 0-375-40405-8 (hardcover US $35)
 This
provocative new book presents several hundred letters by Italian conductor
Arturo Toscanini which were discovered in archives, private collections,
and auctions by author-editor Harvey Sachs after his authoritative Toscanini
biography was published in 1978.
Any new data about a figure as historically important as Toscanini must
be welcomed. The temperamental Italian maestro was a major figure in the
musical life of Europe and America from the 1930s until his death on January
16, 1957. Yet despite his fame and popularity, he left almost no written
legacy, being averse to any form of self-advertisement or publicity. Toscanini
never wrote an autobiography, musical essay, or program note. His public
life--including his clash with fascism, exile in America, and brilliant
career leading the NBC Symphony broadcasts--was documented by the press
and followed by the public, but he never authorized a writer to tell his
story. His biography has been deduced and inferred from the outside, through
witnesses, table talk, and analysis of his business practices and music-making.
This is why these letters are important, though not as significant or
informative as most reviewers have pretended. The New York Times exaggerates
when it calls this "a major contribution to our understanding of Toscanini."
Taken alone, they offer a distorted and distasteful portrait of a great
man. For a complete picture of the maestro, one should read these letters
in conjunction with Sachs's biography of the conductor.
Nor are these missives, as the Times again pretends, a "great read." Compared
to great letter writers such as Virginia Woolf and Dylan Thomas, Toscanini
was a telegrammatic scribbler. As literature, his writings are valueless,
since he was neither a poet nor a philosopher. Since he did not write
for posterity, you won't find the kind of treasurable aphorism, mature
wisdom, or illuminating anecdote that enlivens and enriches the writings
of Hector Berlioz, Richard Wagner, Erik Satie, Virgil Thomson, or Ned
Rorem, to name just a few great musician-writers who did have literary
style as well as a philosophical, aesthetic, historical understanding
of their art and the worldthey lived in.
Toscanini, on the contrary, was a man of acion. He lived violently. His
life was full of controversy, power struggles, and passion. Had he been
born in the Renaissance he would have been a condottiere, defending his
city-state, poisoning his enemies, and bedding his neighbours' wives.
His are driven by an idealism and perfectionism which delighted audiences
but alienated his underlings and enemies. He can be scathing to the inadequate.
Singers are "cretins" and "dogs," publishers crooks, Richard Strauss a
money grubber, Stokowski a pompous fool. Yet oddly, the patriarchal and
censorious Toscanini seems to have been clueless with respect to his own
family's peculiarities, particularly his granddaughter Sonia's lesbianism,
and his daughter Wanda's loveless marriage to the infantile, unstable,
homosexual Vladimir Horowitz.
In letters to Mussolini and President Roosevelt, Toscanini takes political
stands despite the risks to career and reputation. Unlike Richard Strauss,
Furtwangler, and other quasi-fascist figures, Toscanini opposed Fascism
and suffered for it. To his credit, he was as tough on himself as he was
on his enemies. These letters reveal a very Catholic sense of guilt, insecurity
and self-criticism. "I am incapable of hypocrisy," he wrote. From a medical
viewpoint, he seems to have suffered from chronic melancholy, misanthropy,
and pessimism.
While these letters offer no revelations that will alter Toscanini's place
in music and political history, his hitherto secret sex life is laid bare.
He was constantly unfaithful to his wife. In several letters he begs his
mistress for pubic hairs and a handkerchief spotted with her menstrual
blood. These fetishes he wears inside his clothes when he conducts.
One closes this book with a sense of fatigue and satiation, blinded and
deafened by a life lived at white heat. Toscanini's emotional intensity
was High Romantic; his erotic passions and fetishism were Edwardian; his
political idealism that of a medieval martyr; his musical vision, expressed
in action not theory, was in the noble line of Beethoven, Berlioz, and
Wagner. Today Toscanini could not exist. Union orchestras would not tolerate
him. Record companies and publicists would airbrush away his rough edges
and steer him clear of politics. His famous temperament would have been
tamed by Prozac and Paxil. Treasurably, regrettably, he was the last of
the sacred monsters.
[INDEX]
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