Arturo Toscanini, Milan, 1953. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
On 30 June 1886, in Rio de Janeiro, the audience boos the conductor and the evening is in danger of collapsing. The Italian company on tour sends to the podium its second cellist, who is nineteen, studied in Parma, and in those weeks has copied out all the parts. He closes the score and conducts Aida from memory, in its entirety. His name is Arturo Toscanini, and from that evening until 1954 he will be a conductor.
Memory, in his case, was not a circus act: it was severe short-sightedness. He could not read a score on the stand at a normal distance, so he learned it all. From that physical limit came a way of standing on the podium that changed the profession, because someone who knows every note by heart does not accompany, he commands.
What he does at La Scala from 1898 concerns music less and behaviour more, and it is worth listing because today it seems normal and then it was a war. He abolishes the encore, that is, the repeat of the applauded aria, which was the main reason half the audience came to the theatre. He has the house lights turned off during the performance, which had not been done before, because people also went to the theatre to see each other. He forbids entry once the performance has begun. He demands that ladies take off their hats. He obtains the lowered orchestra pit. In a single phrase: he imposes that in the hall people keep quiet and look at the stage.
On the musical level his battle can be summed up in two words: as written. In the nineteenth century the great singers modified the parts: they added high notes, reshaped the vocal line, cut what did not suit their voice, and the audience went to hear them. Toscanini puts the composer’s text back at the centre and removes from the singers the right to rewrite it. The gain is enormous: pieces that had become encrusted over two generations go back to sounding as they were conceived. The loss shows today and is just as great: from that moment the performer stops being a co-author, and a heritage of living practice that was passed on by word of mouth is lost in thirty years.
On the evening of 25 April 1926, at the world premiere of Turandot, having reached the point where Puccini’s manuscript breaks off, he lays down the baton, turns towards the hall and says that here the maestro had finished writing. Then he walks out. The finale completed by Franco Alfano was performed from the following evening. It is the most theatrical gesture in the history of conducting and it is also a technical statement: up to here there is the author, from here there is someone else.
On 14 May 1931, in Bologna, he refuses to play the regime’s anthem before a commemorative concert and is assaulted at the entrance to the theatre. From that moment he does not conduct in Italy again until after the war. In 1937 NBC builds an orchestra in New York expressly for him, and for seventeen years his performances go out on the radio across the continent: he is the first conductor whose fame is born from a mass medium and not from the theatres.
The balance sheet, without rhetoric in either direction. Toscanini verifiably raised the average quality of performance, cleaned up scores, imposed rehearsal discipline and made the conductor the central figure of the system. In the same movement he shifted the centre of gravity from creating to reproducing. The silent concert, the untouchable text, the conductor as sole authority are all children of that season, and they are also the conditions in which new music stopped being the centre of the programme.
He died in New York in 1957, at eighty-nine. His tomb is in the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan. In 1946, at the reopening of La Scala rebuilt after the bombings, he had conducted the inaugural concert before three thousand people, in a theatre that three years earlier no longer had a roof.