The fullest correspondence, though—almost a thousand telegrams and letters from Toscanini, adding up to something like 240,000 words—was with Ada Mainardi, a pianist with whom he was besotted for seven years, beginning in 1933. They met rarely—she was in Italy, with her cellist husband, and he was mostly in America—which may explain why the relationship in all its intensity lasted so long. These letters are a revelation of his day-to-day doings, his ideas, his feelings. And he wrote, compulsively, of his passion: “I’m like a madman, I could commit a crime!!… When, oh when, will we be able to possess each other completely, clinging together, deep inside each other, our mouths gasping, united while awaiting the supreme voluptuousness at the same moment? When—when?” His erotic impulses toward Ada grew ever stronger—and stranger. Sachs tells us that “he had begun to send her a fresh handkerchief each month, with increasingly insistent requests that she stain it with her menstrual blood and send it back to him so that he could suck it—or so he claimed—‘since I can’t quench my thirst directly at the delightful fount.’” Apparently, “she often complied, and he gleefully and blasphemously described each handkerchief as the Holy Shroud.” To each his own.
What eventually undermined the relationship was not their geographical separation but his increasing distaste, then disgust, for her political leanings and casual anti-Semitism. “You hurt me when you say that you don’t love the Jews. Tell me, rather, that you don’t love the human race,” he wrote to her in 1939. He had been deeply moved by his experience three years earlier, when—at no fee and paying his own expenses—he inaugurated what would become the Israel Philharmonic. By that time, he was famous throughout the world for his implacable hatred of Fascism and Nazism. One of the many ways he demonstrated his hostility to Mussolini was his defiance of the law that the Fascist Party’s anthem, “Giovinezza,” be played at the start of every public performance. In response, in 1931 he was beaten by Fascist thugs outside the opera house in Bologna, and his passport was taken from him. Only in the face of an international outcry was it returned.
In 1933, after several extraordinarily successful seasons at the Bayreuth Wagner festival—Toscanini was the first non-German conductor to perform there—he informed Winifred Wagner, Wagner’s English daughter-in-law now in charge (and a close friend of Hitler’s), that given the conditions obtaining in Germany since the Nazis had taken over earlier that year, and despite a flattering personal letter from the Führer himself, he would not be returning. “For my peace of mind, for yours, and for everyone’s, it is better not to think any longer about my coming to Bayreuth.” Nothing could better demonstrate both his unbending loyalty to principle and the astounding position he held on the world stage.
In the same spirit, early in 1938, after having triumphed for the third time at the annual Salzburg Festival, he decided that with the Germans poised to overrun Austria, he would not return. Mussolini again had his passport impounded, and again worldwide indignation forced the Duce to change his mind. On the very day that the passport was suddenly returned, the Toscaninis left Milan for America. “To flee, to flee—that was the consuming thought!” he wrote to Ada. “To flee in order to breathe freedom, life!”
He would not see his country again for eight years. Sachs tells us that when, at seventy-nine, he presided over the post-war reopening of La Scala, tens of thousands gathered outside the opera house and millions listened around the world: “For Toscanini, it was the culminating moment of his life as a musician.” Yet even at this moment of exaltation he kept his sense of humor. As he was walking from the stage entrance into the auditorium, someone offered to hang up his hat for him. “Thank you,” he replied, “but I’m not the prima donna—and I’m not even the baritone.”
* * *
THE TRAJECTORY OF TOSCANINI’S ARTISTIC PATH constitutes the main body of Sachs’s biography, and he gives us an extremely thorough chronicle of his activities and achievements. Here are the early galvanizing effects he had on opera in Italy and at the Met (where he led the world premiere of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West and the American premiere of Boris Godunov); the endless triumphs in Europe and South America; the revitalization of the New York Philharmonic; and on to the final seventeen years leading the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Sachs frequently steps over the line and in his ardor for his subject and his addiction to detail tells us more than most of us need to know. (For example, extensive lists of programs should have been relegated to footnotes or supplied as addenda rather than woven into the narrative.) And then there are nuttily detailed references to completely irrelevant matters, such as this passage about the villa the Toscaninis rented on the Isolino San Giovanni: “Through much of the first half of the twentieth century, it was rented to various wealthy people, including Vittoria Colonna di Sermoneta, the estranged wife of Leone Caetani, Prince of Teano; she had a passionate affair there with the painter Umberto Boccioni.” But these are failures of excessive zeal rather than failures of judgment. Sachs’s account of Toscanini’s career is persuasive and compelling in the important ways.
He also gives us the man, with all his contradictions. Famous for his tantrums in rehearsal (breaking and flinging batons, shouting imprecations at musicians he found lazy or unprepared), he was unfailingly kind in person. He never fired musicians, even those he disliked; he was a warm host; and he was personally generous—donating his services and his orchestra to countless causes and instructing Carla to help out any musician in need of funds, no questions asked. Money was never of importance to him. The evidence makes it clear that everything he did was in the service of music, not of ego or success. He gave almost no interviews, had no press agent, shied away from applause, and conducted calmly and simply—he admired Leonard Bernstein but deplored what Sachs tactfully calls Bernstein’s “emotive podium style.” Typical of his lack of self-regard are remarks such as “Every time I conduct the same piece I think how stupid I was the last time I did it,” and his response after his retirement to someone who addressed him as Maestro: “Do not call me Maestro. I am no longer a maestro.”
His self-deprecation is especially telling in light of the torrent of praise that from the start he received from almost every contemporary conductor. Let Pierre Monteux stand for all: “I had before me, simply, a man of genius, a conductor such as I had never seen in my life, a true revelation in the art of conducting and interpretation.” And from Stravinsky, although he found Toscanini’s choice of repertory sadly old-fashioned: “I have never encountered in a conductor of such world repute such a degree of self-effacement, conscientiousness and artistic honesty.”
For those who want to comprehend how Toscanini inspired and affected the musicians who played or sang for him, I recommend B. H. Haggin’s Arturo Toscanini: Contemporary Recollections of the Maestro, in which almost a score of his musicians speak about him. It’s a unique and moving tapestry of fear, awe, and devotion, though Caruso anticipated them all when in 1909 he said, “Experience has taught me that I don’t know if I know a role until I sing it with the Grande Omino [great little man]!”
Of course there were naysayers along the way, particularly about matters of repertory. Toscanini had been a trailblazer in his earlier years, championing composers like Berlioz, Debussy, Ravel, Puccini, and Strauss. Later, he dabbled in Bruckner and Shostakovich but resisted Mahler, Bartók, Schoenberg, Wozzeck. “I can’t get modern music to enter either my head or my heart! I’m too old, and my faculties have calcified,” he wrote to Ada. He would instead “keep conducting the same music!”—Beethoven, Wagner, Brahms, Verdi—and continue to deepen his understanding of it. And although he performed Gershwin (he admired Porgy and Bess—“a true American opera”), Grofé, and Barber, he was often reproached for neglecting American composers. (He did conduct Copland’s El Salón México—once.) Charles Ives, Sachs tells us, “reviled ‘Toscaninny’” for his conservatism, and the brilliant critic/composer Virgil Thomson never ceased complaining about the retro nature of the maestro’s tastes and his reliance on s
uperb execution rather than depth of interpretation.
* * *
ON THE OTHER HAND, Toscanini approved of many of the young post-war artists. He had launched Renata Tebaldi on his return to La Scala in 1946, and he very much admired David Oistrakh and Kathleen Ferrier (“that divine voice”), while in 1951 he had this to say: “I find this Callas woman very good, a beautiful voice and an interesting artist, but her diction is unintelligible.… You must hear every word, otherwise it’s a concert.” Nothing had changed since in 1908 he offended the young diva Frances Alda by asking her politely, after a rehearsal of Louise, “In what language were you singing?”
By the post-war period, his fame and authority were so great that nothing could get between him and his adoring public, a vast popularity that had been pumped up by the blaring publicity machine of NBC and RCA, whose president, David Sarnoff, had lured him into leading the new NBC Symphony Orchestra. Toscanini was news—three times on the cover of Time; subject of spreads in Life; received by presidents. Yet he was never grand when off-duty, as when in 1950 on a six-week tour across America with his orchestra some of his musicians spotted him coming up the ski tow in Sun Valley. (He was eighty-three.) One of the more daring of them said, “Maestro, you are a brave man.” Without hesitation he replied, “I’ve never been afraid of anything in my life.”
The most scathing attack on him appeared in 1987, in Joseph Horowitz’s Understanding Toscanini (in which I had a hand), although it was more an attack on the “commodification” of him by NBC, RCA Victor records, and the reviewers who glorified him. Toscanini was “the priest of beauty.” “He has shown us, as St. Francis did, the startling and terrible beauty of that which is forever kindling and alight: that pure flame of the imagination, ‘burning in the void.’” Et cetera, et cetera. Horowitz was expanding (though with reservations) on the fierce views of Theodor Adorno about the commercialization of culture, and his examples are all too convincing, climaxed by the cult of personality created around Pavarotti and encouraged by him with remarks like “With all due respect, I do not agree with Maestro von Karajan’s remarkable comment that my voice is greater [than Caruso’s].” Well, no one ever claimed that tenors were modest.
There is, however, a disturbing antidemocratic slant to this assault on the popularization of musical culture—on, for instance, the simplicities of “music appreciation” for children. (“I’m sorry to say that Mr. Beethoven wasn’t a kind father at all and that was one of the reasons why Ludwig grew to have a strange, unhappy disposition.”) Yet better to be exposed to nonsense like this than that children grow up never having heard of Ludwig, or heard his music. It didn’t harm my eventual love of Schubert that in the fourth grade we were taught to sing along “This is … the sym-pho-ny … that Schu-bert loved but never fin-ished.” Horowitz’s book, when it isn’t strident, is invaluable in many ways, both historical and sociological, but Toscanini is its innocent victim: He didn’t want a cult; what he wanted was to make music. It was David Sarnoff who wanted glory—and profits.
Today, Toscanini is receding from our consciousness, notwithstanding his many recordings. (Can there be a greater live opera recording than his 1937 Salzburg Falstaff, despite the questionable quality of the sound, or greater orchestral recordings than those with the New York Philharmonic from 1936?) Creative geniuses can survive for centuries, even millennia; interpreters inevitably go over the cultural cliff. But that doesn’t detract from the crucial—the central—role Toscanini played in our musical culture for well over sixty years. Nor from the almost universal regard he was held in as a man. To Isaiah Berlin, for instance, he was “the most morally dignified and inspiring hero of our time,” and, closer to home, Walter Toscanini, who had for many years taken responsibility for his father’s welfare, is quoted by Sachs as saying that although he knew his father’s personal failings intimately, the “human side” of his character was even “greater than his musicianship.”
As for that musicianship, let Virgil Thomson, his most perceptive and persistent critic, have the final word. At the end of a “Birthday Salute” written for the maestro’s eightieth, he wrote: “We must enjoy him and be thankful for him and cherish him. For when he leaves there will be little left save a memory and a few gramophone records; and these give hardly any idea of his electric powers as a public performer. By a miracle we have him with us still and, by a greater miracle, in full possession of his powers. That those powers are without peer in our time cannot be denied by anybody. That they may long be preserved to him and to us is the prayer of every living musician and lover of music.”
The New York Times Book Review
JULY 2, 2017
Lenny!
LEONARD BERNSTEIN
IN 1966, Leonard Bernstein conducted The Rite of Spring and Sibelius’s Symphony no. 5 with the London Symphony Orchestra, and just recently that BBC event has been released on DVD for the first time. It’s a fascination—not only for the strong performance, but even more so for the chance to watch “Lenny” in action, close-up. Yes, all conductors have highly personal characteristics, but has there ever been one as theatrical, as showy, as hammy as he was? Or as exciting, as persuasive, as dedicated?
There’s the Lenny problem: Is he for real or is he an act? Do we love him or do we want to kick him in the ass? Is his heart only on his sleeve, or is there another one inside him? And do those of us who grew up with him in all his avatars respond to him the same way as those coming to him for the first time, with no history and perhaps no expectations?
Look at him up there, facing a cadre of highly disciplined, impeccably groomed Englishmen. (Not many women in the LSO in those days.) They watch him closely, of course—is it my fantasy that they watch him as if they were in striking distance of a dangerous tiger? His behavior to them is totally cordial and respectful—in fact, remarkably generous: hands shaken, pats on the shoulder, warm smiles. If he isn’t happy with their playing, you’d never know it.
But have they ever worked with a conductor not only this legendary but this over-the-top? It’s not just his notorious bouncing up and down. He grins, he grimaces, he thrusts and spasms; the emotional climaxes of the music are reflected on his face—he’s thrilled with excitement one moment, anguished the next. He nods and sways. He sweats. He mouths along with the music. Since he conducts without a score—his musical memory is famous—his inner concentration is unbroken. If a tragedian performed King Lear this way we’d probably hoot him off the stage. But just when we’re ready to find the whole thing risible, we begin to believe it. No, he’s not a charlatan; no, he’s not a joke. He’s a believer. It’s for real.
And yet …
The mystery of who and what Leonard Bernstein was is what draws us to accounts of his life, and now to a large collection of his letters, The Leonard Bernstein Letters, edited by Nigel Simeone. Surely the letters of such a well-educated and literate man, a practiced and effective writer—author of best sellers about music, important lectures, successful television scripts—will be revealing? Alas, it is not so. Despite his cleverness and charm, which definitely come through, we’re left knowing no more, really, than we knew before. The confusion between genius and narcissism, heroism and self-pity, generosity and exploitation, remains unresolved. His astounding energies both made him everything he was and undermined him. Was he a composer or a conductor? Was he “serious” (the Jeremiah Symphony, Chichester Psalms) or “showbiz” (On the Town, West Side Story)? Was he straight (his beloved Felicia, and their three cherished children) or gay (just about everyone else)? Was he loyal to his friends and benefactors or careless with them? Was he deeply emotional or merely sentimental? Did he use his extraordinary powers wholesomely or did he dissipate them? And what really mattered to him?
He’s not going to tell us, but the Letters, read in conjunction with Humphrey Burton’s excellent 1994 biography, Leonard Bernstein, suggest that there were three things that motored him: music, of course; his family, despite (or because of) the conflicts; his
Judaism (and his belief in Israel). The money, the celebrity, the sex were front and center, but not, in the long run, central.
* * *
LETTERS CAME EASILY to the young Bernstein—he’s as fluent a writer as he’s fluent at everything else—and he understands how self-centered he is. (To his great pal Kenny Ehrman, he once said, “Who do I think I am, everybody?” To Helen Coates, first his piano teacher, later, and for decades, his assistant, guide, life-support system: “Before I forget myself and write an ‘I’ letter, I want to wish you a very pleasant summer.” He pours out his heart to just about everybody. He’s met the perfect girl (boy). He’s written this, he’s done that. So-and-so complimented him, so-and-so is giving him a hand up. Always there’s the assumption that anyone he’s writing to wants to know everything about him—a narcissism that’s normal, even touching, in a young man, but less so in a (supposedly) mature one. Think how he would have taken to blogging!
He needs, obsessively, to be appreciated, to be admired, to be loved. He needs people. “You may remember my chief weakness—my love for people,” he writes Ehrman in 1939 (he’s twenty). “I need them all the time—every moment. It’s something that perhaps you cannot understand: but I cannot spend one day alone without becoming utterly depressed. Any people will do. It’s a terrible fault.” He needs to be witnessed—at bottom, he’s a performer, and his letters are performances. Only to a few people—his sister and brother, for instance—does he talk straight: When he tells them what’s been happening and that he loves and misses them, it’s the real Lenny who’s talking—if there is a real Lenny.
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