In this week’s magazine, I have an article about the conductor Arturo Toscanini, who was once one of the most celebrated musicians in the world and who is now largely forgotten, except by people who like their classical music lean, suave, and fierce. The occasion for this article is Toscanini’s hundred and fiftieth birthday; he was born in Parma, south of Milan, in 1867, and died in New York, in 1957. Two events will mark the anniversary: the music historian Harvey Sachs, who wrote a biography of Toscanini in 1987, has produced a completely new book, “Toscanini: Musician of Conscience,” and Sony Classical, which has taken over the old RCA Victor catalogue, has reissued some of Toscanini’s performances in a new twenty-CD box called “The Essential Recordings.” The collection includes symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, orchestral pieces by Mendelssohn, Berlioz, and Strauss, complete operas by Verdi and Puccini, and a selection of Wagner-opera excerpts that Toscanini did with hair-raising effect. Most of the recordings were made with the NBC Symphony, the orchestra that RCA created for Toscanini and that he conducted from 1937 to 1954, but several others—among the greatest ones—were made with the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
I have some quarrels with the choices, which were made by Sachs and by Christopher Dyment (a historian of conducting styles), and I hasten to add that virtually all the selections, and many other Toscanini performances, are available from music sites such as ArkivMusic (though at a higher collective price). In addition, many of Toscanini’s recordings are available for free on YouTube, including the marvelous Beethoven’s Seventh with the New York Philharmonic, from 1936, and the entire Beethoven symphony cycle, from 1939, with the NBC Symphony. These performances are available in a new restoration process called 3-D sound (look for that heading), in which the music has been “restored down to the noise floor of the recording system.”
The audio engineer who performed the restorations, Paul Howard, tells me that he has used digital techniques not to only remove clicks and hisses but to remove a patina of effects from the mastering and equalizing of the original sound—that is, the effects accumulating from attempts to improve the original. If you scrape away all that, you get close to what was recorded in 1939. To my ears, the restoration reveals the characteristic, unreverberant sound of the recording space, Studio 8-H at 30 Rock, but also a clear and beautiful reproduction of instrumental groups and solo playing. You are close, very close, to the musicians. If you listen with good headphones, the experience is so intense that it’s almost bruising.
After 1950, RCA recorded the orchestra at Carnegie Hall (mainly during live broadcasts), and the sound gets better—warmer, with greater solidity in the basses and cellos and more air around the winds and brass. But the sound is never ideal, and that’s the price you pay for entering an existence of greater intensity than your own.
Toscanini’s tempos were generally fast, his manner sinewy and decisive, his feeling for clarity of outline and of structure predominant over sensuous detail. We must all rush toward the end, toward fulfillment—or toward the knowledge that there is no end, no satisfaction, only a drive for perfection that brings us up against the limits of life and of human effort. Any prolonged spell of listening to Toscanini can make you a little crazy, just as any attempt to live life at its most intense makes you crazy. Naturally, you withdraw. But it’s good to know that you can live in that place and return to it, at least for a while.
I have made an annotated playlist, below, of what I take to be Toscanini’s greatest recordings, from both those in the new collection and those omitted, and I have noted where the recordings were made. For additional details about the NBC years, see Mortimer H. Frank’s voluminous book, “Arturo Toscanini: The NBC Years,” and B. H. Haggin’s touching and at times powerful “Conversations with Toscanini.”
Included in the “The Essential Recordings”:
Beethoven: Seventh Symphony; New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, 1936. Name-drop alert: James Levine once told me, the single time I’ve spoken with him, that this was the most perfect orchestral recording he knew of. It’s certainly more relaxed, with sweeter and deeper string tone, and a greater feeling for silence and mystery, than the later hard-driving, almost angry Seventh, recorded with the NBC Symphony in 1951.
Brahms: Haydn Variations, New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, 1936. Astonishing virtuosity, exquisitely nuanced.
Debussy: “La Mer,” Philadelphia Orchestra, Academy of Music, 1941. The first time I heard this recording, while driving back from Cape Cod, I had to pull over during the ecstatic final bars for fear of driving off the road. It is perhaps the most exciting performance of this great work ever recorded. The old sound is damaging to your enjoyment, however, especially if you don’t know “La Mer” in all its amazing detail. If you want to experience that detail, expertly shaped, I recommend Claudio Abbado’s video-recorded performance with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, from 2003. It’s ravishing with good headphones, and Abbado is wonderful to watch.
Rossini: Overtures to “L’Italiana in Algeri” and “Semiramide,” New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, 1936. This was the kind of perfection that astonished audiences eighty years ago.
Schubert: Ninth Symphony (“The Great”), Philadelphia Orchestra, Academy of Music, 1942. This performance is a little more relaxed than the later NBC version, but, still, Toscanini’s way with this majestic piece was unique—swift, sharply accented, with enormous cumulative power. If you want a more exploratory and spontaneous approach to the work, listen to Furtwängler’s performance with the Berlin Philharmonic.
Strauss: “Death and Transfiguration,” NBC Symphony, Carnegie Hall, 1952. Hair-raising. Everyone else’s performance of this work, including Karajan’s with the Berlin Philharmonic, sounds trivial.
Verdi: “Otello,” with Ramón Vinay, Herva Nelli, Giuseppe Valdengo, NBC Symphony and Chorus, Studio 8-H, 1947. James Levine’s nomination for the greatest opera recording ever made. Very intimately recorded and harrowing.
Verdi: “Falstaff,” with Giuseppe Valdengo, Nan Merriman, Herva Nelli, Frank Guarrera, NBC Symphony, and Robert Shaw Chorale, Studio 8-H, 1950. Tremendous brio, of course, but tenderly lyrical, too.
Verdi: “Rigoletto,” Act IV, sometimes known as Act III (at any rate, the last act), with Leonard Warren, Jan Peerce, Zinka Milanov, Nan Merriman, NBC Symphony, and New York Philharmonic combined, and the All City High School Chorus and Glee Club, Madison Square Garden, 1944. Buoyant, with springy rhythms, and the greatest musical storm in history. Milanov takes off at one point, in sensational fashion. The sound is solid and clear.
Wagner: Excerpts from the operas, the New York Philharmonic, NBC Symphony. Overwhelming, all of them, including “Siegfried’s Death and Funeral March” from “Götterdämmerung,” recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1952; extended excerpts sung by Lauritz Melchior and Helen Traubel from “Die Walküre” and “Götterdämmerung,” recorded in Carnegie Hall in 1941 with somewhat compressed sound. You’ve never heard Wagner like this—absolutely no pomposity, fast, electric, thrilling.
Omitted from “The Essential Recordings” but available on CD or YouTube:
Beethoven: “Missa Solemnis,” Jussi Bjorling, Zinka Milanov, Bruno Castagna, Alexander Kipnis, Westminster Choir, NBC Symphony, Carnegie Hall, 1940. The sound is gritty and blaring (look for a restoration), but the performance of this daunting work is the greatest available—not to be confused with the less great 1952 recording, also with the NBC Symphony.
Beethoven: Third Symphony (“Eroica”), NBC Symphony, Studio 8-H, 1939. In this, the greatest of all symphonies, in 3-D sound (YouTube), Toscanini accented the entrances of strings, horns, and winds much more sharply than other conductors; he shortened tutti chords, made the brass bite off their notes at the ceremonial heights of the funeral march. He shaped lyrical phrases for drama or pathos, but they, too, were kept in tempo. The combination of discipline and lyricism, decisiveness and suavity, is exhilarating—and a little exhausting. The 1949 and 1953 performances with the NBC Symphony, at Carnegie Hall, are also great.
Beethoven: Eighth Symphony, NBC Symphony; Carnegie Hall, 1952. A tremendous little symphony, which Toscanini conducted with rhythmic drive and fluent lyricism (listen to the winds shaping their phrases, even at top speed).
Beethoven: Ninth Symphony, Jan Peerce, Eileen Farrell, Nan Merriman, Norman Scott, Robert Shaw Chorale, NBC Symphony, Carnegie Hall, 1952. Hair-trigger attacks and control of the continuous line in the first movement, with the eruptive beginning of the recapitulation done as no other conductor has; the adagio is too fast for my taste, but the finale is tremendous.
Brahms: Fourth Symphony, NBC Symphony, Carnegie Hall, 1951. Swift, sure, a Beethovenish view of Brahms.
Verdi: “Requiem,” Herva Nelli, Fedora Barbieri, Giuseppe di Stefano, Cesare Siepi, NBC Symphony, Robert Shaw Chorus, Carnegie Hall, 1951. Tremendous excitement and forward drive; severely restricted sentiment; at times, unnervingly intense. Listen for Toscanini screaming for more at the height of the “Tuba Mirum” section.
Wagner: “Parsifal,” the Prelude and “Good Friday Spell,” NBC Symphony, Carnegie Hall, 1949. Mysteriously absent from “The Essential Recordings.” Toscanini could choose deliberate tempos in old age, as these performances show.
Not currently available:
Berlioz: “Romeo and Juliet” (complete), Gladys Swarthout, John Garris, Nicola Moscona, NBC Symphony and Chorus, Studio 8-H, 1947. The greatest performance of the complete score.
Brahms: First through Fourth Symphonies, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Festival Hall, 1952. The Philharmonia of the early fifties was one of the best orchestras in the world, and the sound is richer than that of the NBC performances from the same period. The Third Symphony is much more effective musically than the NBC performance.
