Dangerous Melodies

by Jonathan Rosenberg

  That there was little tolerance in Hitler’s Germany, including in the creative sphere, was a reality Americans frequently confronted. Beyond this, as the decade unfolded, Germany’s brutal policies began to shape cultural life in the United States as an extraordinary group of classical musicians streamed across the Atlantic in an exodus that would vitalize the musical landscape for years to come.13 Illustrating the point, in early 1933, two distinguished artists, Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, both of whom would one day reside in the conductors’ pantheon, felt compelled to leave Germany. They would ultimately land in the United States. The plight of Walter, Jewish and Berlin-born, who would settle in Southern California, became well-known in America, as did the plaudits he received after leading performances in Vienna and London. In March, Walter’s German career came to an abrupt end when he was prevented from conducting in Leipzig, Berlin, and Frankfurt. Headlines were splashed across American papers from coast to coast, forcing Americans to contemplate the musician’s fate under a regime that had placed a chokehold on his professional life.14

  Thus, as early as 1933, the American public heard repeatedly about the grim transformation that was reshaping German musical life, as Hitler’s gang began implementing the anti-Jewish policies that would become increasingly sinister. The press trumpeted the growing horror, which became part of the nation’s cultural and political discourse. The saga of Otto Klemperer exemplified the fate of artists who had left Germany. As the American public would learn, even someone who was born Jewish and had converted to Catholicism years before could be barred from working as a musician.15 Leaving for the security of Switzerland in April 1933, Klemperer eventually reached the United States, where he would become the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.16

  That same year, German political developments began to resonate powerfully in the United States, as Toscanini severed ties with the Bayreuth Festival. Covered widely across the country, the Toscanini affair highlighted the insidious link between art and politics in Germany, compelling Americans to consider the threat Nazism posed to humane values.

  By the time Toscanini decided he would not perform at Bayreuth in 1933, he had been a leading figure on the international music scene for more than a generation, and his position as conductor of the New York Philharmonic made him one of the most esteemed maestros in the United States. Blessed with prodigious musical gifts, Toscanini was famed for the “fanatical” precision of his interpretations of the operatic and symphonic literature and his unyielding fidelity to the score.17 Clichés notwithstanding, he was born into humble circumstances in Parma, Italy, in 1867, and before age twenty he began a meteoric rise through the professional ranks after important figures on the Italian operatic scene recognized the extraordinary ability that would one day captivate musicians and audiences throughout the world. Having worked as a cellist and conductor in Italian opera houses, where his skill with the baton became legendary, Toscanini made his New York debut conducting Aïda at the Metropolitan in 1908, a performance critics received enthusiastically.18

  In time, Toscanini would also distinguish himself in the symphonic world, offering celebrated readings of Beethoven, Brahms, and Strauss, along with the works of many others. Assessing his 1926 debut with the New York Philharmonic, the first time he led an American symphony orchestra, Olin Downes of the Times wrote that Toscanini “worked his sovereign will” in unforgettable fashion.19

  Arturo Toscanini

  Enormously demanding, Toscanini was nevertheless revered by the players of the orchestra, whose respect for him was not diminished by the high standards he insisted upon at each rehearsal and every performance. In reflecting upon playing under Toscanini, legendary trumpeter Harry Glantz recalled, “He would inject himself into the orchestra. . . . He would draw the gift that you were endowed with out of you.” What the maestro possessed, Glantz claimed, was something no other conductor had: the ability to “instill in you his passion, his love, his gift and fire of music.” His players raved about his skill with the baton, a sentiment captured by the violinist Sylvan Shulman, who said he had the “most beautiful technique I’ve ever seen.” The violinist raved, “I’ve never seen a ballerina look more beautiful.” However lovely his beat, his temper could be terrifying. He would often cut you to pieces, recalled French horn player Harry Berv. But given the chance to live his orchestral life over again, Berv would not have wanted to play under anyone else.20

  Revered by critics and adored by musicians, Toscanini would become one of the most admired musicians in the world, and his politics played a critical part in the transcendent status he achieved in twentieth-century American life. Even before his break with Bayreuth in 1933, the conductor’s career had become enmeshed in fascist politics. And still earlier, Toscanini had received praise for his fearless service during the Great War. The conductor, who would be decorated for valor, performed nobly in 1917, when the military band he had established performed under fire during the battle of Monte Santo. According to a newspaper account, the maestro conducted the band during a furious Austrian barrage, leading the ensemble to an advanced position, where, protected by an enormous rock, they played until word reached Toscanini that the Italian soldiers had taken the Austrian trenches, a feat accomplished with the sound of “martial music” in their ears. After each piece, Toscanini reportedly shouted, “Viva l’Italia! ” He and his musicians emerged unhurt, though the same could not be said for the bass drum, which was torn by shrapnel.21

  With the First World War over, Toscanini crossed paths with Benito Mussolini. While uncertainty remains about when precisely the two men first met, the musician was initially impressed by the Italian journalist, who was laying the groundwork for the regime that would one day wreak havoc in Europe and beyond.22 Attracted to what, for some, were the appealing principles of fascism, Toscanini backed the party’s program in 1919, which at the time was ideologically different from what it would soon become.23 In that year’s parliamentary elections, Toscanini allowed his name to be placed on a list of candidates for Mussolini’s party, though the organization believed it stood no chance of winning. While the maestro did not engage in active campaigning, he did donate 30,000 lire to the party, which had little effect on the outcome. Receiving only a few thousand votes in Milan, the party was trounced in the election and even Mussolini was defeated. Thus ended the musician’s formal political career, an ignominious experience that caused him considerable regret in later years, especially as he became a determined foe of Mussolini.24

  Indeed, in Milan a few years later, the conductor engaged in a musical wrestling match with Mussolini’s backers, who had come to power after resorting to violence and assuming an antidemocratic posture, a stance that turned Toscanini’s early enthusiasm into overt disgust. During a performance of Falstaff at La Scala in December 1922, supporters of the Italian autocrat demanded that the conductor play the Fascist Party hymn, “Giovinezza” (“Youth”), as he entered the pit to begin the opera’s third act. Ignoring the chants, Toscanini began to conduct the Verdi, but was soon forced to halt the proceedings as the boisterous demands persisted. After breaking his baton in anger, the maestro stormed from the pit, shouting and cursing, and a long wait began. A member of the company’s staff announced the fascist hymn would be played at the end of the opera, whereupon Toscanini returned and completed the performance. The manager then told the performers to stay where they were and to sing the hymn accompanied by the piano. Toscanini would have none of it. “They’re not going to sing a damned thing,” he declared. “La Scala artists aren’t vaudeville singers.” He then ordered everyone to their dressing rooms, after which the hymn was played at the piano, with Toscanini claiming the orchestra did not know it.25

  As the incident suggests, and there would be many such episodes along the way, the maestro had a penchant for assuming unyielding, unambiguous, and even unpopular political positions in the face of what he perceived to be antidemocratic behavior by the powerful. A few weeks before the Falstaff e
pisode, after Mussolini had come to power, the conductor had declared, “If I were capable of killing a man, I would kill Mussolini.”26 Just as holding singers and instrumentalists to exacting standards was one of Toscanini’s signal characteristics as a musician, in the political realm, he refused to truckle to immoral behavior. One must adhere to one’s ideals, whether one was a soprano, a violinist, a political leader, or the head of a celebrated music festival.

  While there were other clashes between Toscanini and the Mussolini regime,27 in 1931, tensions between the conductor and the Italian fascists led to a celebrated confrontation, which attracted considerable attention across the United States. Appearing in Bologna in May for two concerts, which overlapped with a Fascist Party meeting, Toscanini, now working in New York, was once more drawn into Italian politics. Yet again, Italian patriotic music was the catalyst.28

  On the day of the first Bologna concert, Toscanini was asked to conduct the fascist hymn and the royal anthem because government ministers would be in the audience that night, a request he refused. A few hours later, an arrangement was worked out that was agreeable to Toscanini by which a military band would play the anthems in the theater’s lobby as the ministers entered the building. But soon afterward, that plan was altered, and the conductor was ordered to play the patriotic pieces, a directive he again rejected. Finally, the maestro learned the ministers had decided not to attend the performance, meaning there would be no nationalistic melodies. But Toscanini’s unwillingness to comply with the earlier requests had circulated among a group of fascists who gathered outside the theater that night to await his arrival, whereupon they demanded to know whether he was willing to play “Giovinezza.” He would not, he declared, and as the maestro tried to enter the theater, the young ruffians began hitting him in the face and head. His chauffeur, along with Toscanini’s wife and a friend, hustled the musician back into the car and sped to their hotel. Inside the theater it was announced that the concert would be postponed because Toscanini was ill, a declaration greeted with derision and shouts of “It’s not true!”29

  Though the conductor and his party reached their hotel safely, soon afterward, a few hundred fascist activists who had marched from party headquarters to the hotel (some singing the music Toscanini had refused to play) began demonstrating beneath the conductor’s hotel window, shouting threats and hurling obscenities his way. Upstairs, with cuts on his face and neck, Toscanini was in a foul mood, behaving, according to one observer, “like a caged bear.” Later that night, the Toscaninis were told that their safety could not be guaranteed and that they should leave the city by six in the morning. They heeded this advice shortly before 1:30 A.M., heading by car to Milan, which they reached at dawn. They were then placed under government surveillance and relieved of their passports, their fate uncertain. At this point the Italian government seemed unsure about what to do with the recalcitrant musician who had become a virtual prisoner in his own home.30

  From New York to San Francisco, from Baltimore to Los Angeles, the press presented the story of what had happened to Toscanini and his party: the attack outside the theater, the escape to the hotel where a mob had gathered, the drive to Milan, the confiscation of the maestro’s passport, the posting of soldiers outside his Milan home, the arrest of pro-Toscanini demonstrators in Milan, and the emotional stress the ordeal was causing the musician.31 The Toscanini affair exposed the American public to the gangsterism that characterized life in fascist Italy under Mussolini, who, for a time, had maintained support among many Americans, especially in elite circles.

  Shortly after being chased from the theater in Bologna, Toscanini wrote the Italian leader to explain what had occurred, in order, he noted, that Mussolini would not base his understanding of events on “false information.” While the contents of the letter were not published in the United States until years later, the American public learned about the conductor’s message to the Italian politician at the time it was sent, powerfully reinforcing the notion of an idealistic artist taking a principled stand against an oppressive regime. While Toscanini received no response to his letter, Mussolini was said to have observed privately, “He conducts an orchestra of one hundred people; I have to conduct one of forty million, and they are not all virtuosi.” And just after the attack, upon hearing what had happened, the Italian leader reportedly declared, “I am really happy. It will teach a lesson to these boorish musicians.”32

  But Mussolini could not have been happy with the outpouring of support in the United States and elsewhere for Toscanini, who remained holed up in his Milan home. Celebrated musicians, important figures in American academia like John Dewey, Frank Taussig, and Robert Morss Lovett,33 along with the general public expressed their admiration for the conductor, while proclaiming their hostility for the fascist regime and its shameful treatment of a musical icon. Americans read about the strong stand taken by Serge Koussevitzky, the conductor of the Boston Symphony. In a cable to La Scala, Boston’s maestro spoke of the “outrage” that had been perpetrated against Toscanini. As a result, Koussevitzky asserted, he would sever his relationship with the opera company, which led La Scala’s manager to respond that such a reaction was unnecessary.34 According to Koussevitzky, he had endured “too much from the Bolshevists to tolerate what the Fascists are doing to artists.” Toscanini belonged not merely to Italy, but to the world. An impassioned Koussevitzky insisted that artists should not “remain indifferent to the fate of a colleague who is exposed to blows and persecution” because he refused to “mix politics with art.”35

  Other musical leaders weighed in, including Ossip Gabrilowitsch, the Detroit Symphony conductor, who also withdrew from concerts scheduled in Italy. He, too, was “outraged” by what had occurred in Bologna: “A handful of ruffians simply appointed themselves as Toscanini’s judges and executioners and abused a man the whole world venerates.”36 Adding their voices to the chorus were conductors Leopold Stokowski and Walter Damrosch, the former calling for a protest among the world’s leading musicians. Toscanini was right not to play the Fascist Party hymn, Stokowski said. The concert hall was “no place for politics.” Recalling the dilemma some conductors faced in an earlier time, Damrosch supported Toscanini’s unwillingness to open the concert with “patriotic hymns.”37

  The forceful reaction of the American music community, visits from Italian musical figures, a statement of support from composer Béla Bartók, and some fifteen thousand letters and telegrams that reached Toscanini from all over the world suggested that the 1931 affair was not, as Mussolini had claimed, “a banal incident.”38 Indeed, before the conductor left Milan on June 10 for a short rest in Switzerland, after which he would take up his baton at Bayreuth, the overwhelming sense prevailed that the sixty-four-year-old musician had bested Mussolini and his gang.39

  If the Bologna affair fortified America’s admiration for the Italian conductor, it also made vivid to many Americans the malevolence of European fascism. As a Philadelphia Inquirer editorial observed in May 1931, while some had believed fascism was beneficial for Italy, it was clear that the movement had become “a peculiarly mean kind of despotism.”40 The following month, a lengthy New York Times piece documented the entire incident. Describing the “Fascist assault” on Toscanini, the story asserted that the regime had sought to break his “spirit.”41 But he would not surrender to his tormentors, who had transformed the maestro into “a hero and a martyr.”42

  In April 1933, as I discussed at the start of the chapter, Toscanini again confronted fascism in Europe. Taking a stand as conductor of the New York Philharmonic against the persecution of musicians in Germany, the Italian maestro and ten others cabled Hitler. As Americans would learn, the original idea for sending the petition to the dictator had come from Maestro Bodanzky at the Met, who suggested in March that the support of celebrated figures from the American music world should be solicited for the task. American readers also learned that Toscanini was considering withdrawing from Bayreuth, and that he had been under p
ressure to do so from leading musicians who believed it would represent a forceful protest against the Nazi regime.43

  Providing the background story for the Hitler cable, news reports cited the correspondence from Ossip Gabrilowitsch to Toscanini and Berthold Neuer, an official of the Knabe Piano Company, whom Bodanzky had initially contacted about the idea, and who drafted the letter and arranged for its transmission to Berlin. Readers learned that Gabrilowitsch, upon receiving a draft of the cable from Neuer, wrote that he was not in the “least bit afraid” to include his name, adding, “I am not enchanted over the idea of addressing as ‘your Excellency’ a man for whom I have not the slightest respect.” Mincing no words, Gabrilowitsch declared, “Neither do I think it quite truthful to say ‘We are convinced that such persecutions are not based on your instructions,’ whereas in reality I am thoroughly convinced that Hitler is personally responsible for all that is going on in Germany.”44

  Gabrilowitsch’s concerns went unheeded. More significantly, newspaper readers could reflect on his correspondence with Toscanini concerning European developments. In trying to convince the Italian to participate in the effort, Gabrilowitsch said the cable would have little impact upon Hitler unless Toscanini signed his name. The Italian responded with conviction, proposing that his name top the list. Gabrilowitsch also raised the subject of Toscanini’s apparent willingness to conduct at Bayreuth in the coming summer, when “Hitlerism” was triumphant. As Gabrilowitsch pointed out, in 1931, it was reported that Toscanini had considered leaving Bayreuth because of his opposition to Hitler. If he returned this year, Gabrilowitsch suggested, that could be perceived by the world as reflecting “your approval of Hitlerism.” He then explained what Hitlerism represented, insisting it should not be seen “merely as an anti-Jewish movement.” That was one side of it, wrote Gabrilowitsch, the Russian-born son of a Jewish father. But Hitlerism was also “a mental attitude which advocates brutal force against liberty. It is the worst side of fascism.” Melding this to Toscanini’s personal experiences, Gabrilowitsch noted that the “outrageous insults to which you were subjected in Bologna” exemplify that attitude. He reminded his colleague that the world’s musicians had proclaimed their “indignation and sympathy” for him in 1931 and asked whether Toscanini was prepared to do the same for oppressed colleagues inside Germany. Would he conduct at Bayreuth? You might say that Bayreuth is “not responsible for Hitler.” But it was understood to be a center of “extreme German nationalism,” a place filled with Hitler’s friends and admirers. Gabrilowitsch drove the point home: “Under those conditions, will you . . . the world’s most illustrious artist—lend the glamour of your international fame to the Baireuth [sic] festival?”45