A link to the article is here: The Toscanini Wars | The New Yorker
Read this a couple of weeks ago and have been meaning to start a thread about it.
The article itself is fascinating. A brief biography woven in with discussion of the way that Toscanini’s approach was revered and then how his musical interpretations fell out of favor, along with vivid descriptions of his approach to the some famous pieces. Really cool for pretty much any music lover.
But what hit me between the eyes was this basic characterization of Toscanini:
[QUOTE=David Denby in The New Yorker]
What comes through in Sachs’s long chronicle is the extent of Toscanini’s role, witting and unwitting, in transforming the way that classical music was produced and consumed in the twentieth century. In his seventy years as a performer, he moved opera, as Sachs says, from entertainment to culture. The nineteenth-century conductor—a necessary time beater, presiding over a mixed lot of players—by degrees metamorphosed, in the most talented examples, into a spiritual mentor and charismatic culture god. The mechanical reproduction of music, which became popular with such novelties as a foggy four-minute recording of Caruso singing “Celeste Aida,” from 1902, gave way to complete recordings of symphonies and operas transmitted through every available medium. We are now immersed: the entire recorded history of music lies open, much of it free, to any listener who has the curiosity to discover it.
[/QUOTE]
I didn’t realize that the “culturing up” of symphonic works was “necessary,” so recent, nor that it was embodied so strongly in one person. I am of course fully aware that many, many people and forces were at work, but given this thesis in this article, it was fascinating to read about.
It seems that Toscanini developed an approach to tightening up and structuring the interpretation of symphonic works, at a time when recordings were appearing that captured performances for posterity. His approach appears to focus on establish a “clear through line” in the work that made it easier for the players to latch onto and stay in form. Later orchestras have come to see this as heavy-handed, but if he was such an organizing force in Classical, it is easy to see how this approach paved the way - and recorded more easily for listeners to follow.
A Sunday morning ponder - if you know this stuff, please share if you’ve read the article and what you think about it and Toscanini’s place in Classical music.
