Umpa Umpa Stuff

Giovinezza, gio-vinezza, Primavera di bellezza, Nel dolore e ne I'ebrezza II tuo canto esultera!*

Exuberantly Mediterranean, dear to the hearts of Young Italy, are these words which open the chorus of the official Fascist anthem. But the accompanying music, though certainly no worse than that of many another patriotic song, is what Variety calls "umpa umpa stuff." It is more singable, more lively than "The Star-Spangled Banner" but immeasurably less musical than "Die Wacht Am Rhein," the Tsarist anthem, or the Haydn tune which the Austrian Empire took for its national hymn. It was natural, then, that the whole world of music should have risen in arms during the last month because a Fascist official demanded that Arturo Toscanini play "Giovinezza" at a memorial concert in Bologna devoted to the works of his friend, the late Giuseppe Martucci (1856- 1909). It was even more natural that the world should become indignant because a group of Fascisti assaulted him for his refusal to do so.

In a villa high above St. Moritz in Switzerland, a pale and haggard Toscanini was last week recovering from Fascist buffets. Soon he would go to Wahnfried ("Dream-Peace"), the villa Richard Wagner built at Bayreuth. There, as guest of Frau Winifred Wagner (widow of the late Siegfried and director of Bayreuth affairs), he was to begin rehearsals for the opening concert of the summer festival. Because his art demanded tranquillity, he wished no further discussion of the incident. But Italy was behind him; at last the world could view his case whole.

As everyone knows, Conductor Toscanini is violently antiFascist. His political views as well as his low opinion of the musical value of "Giovinezza" prompted him long ago to refuse to play it, and il Fascismo once became so irritated as to threaten him with its famed, ugly castor oil cure. It was no new experience for him when Leandro Arpinati. Under Secretary of the Interior, and Boss of Bologna, requested that before the Bologna concert last month he perform the Fascist tune and the ''Marcia Reale" (royal march of the house of Savoy). Though Conductor Toscanini suspected no trap, he stoutly refused. Boss Arpinati suggested that the Bologna town band be permitted to play the pieces. "Impossible !" cried the maestro. It was an evening in memory of his dead friend. "That would be a masquerade, not a concert!"

At the entrance to the concert hall that night an angry crowd awaited him. "A morte! (Kill him!)" they shouted. "Is it true you refused to play the Fascist hymn?" He stood firm, his eyes flashing, his moustache bristling. "Yes, it is true!'1 Then their blows rained upon him . . . his mouth gushed blood. . . .

In the confusion of reports that followed the press of Italy was unanimous in its condemnation of Toscanini. The maestro's friends insisted that the attack was a carefully-planned ambush. A cautious French press made no mention of the incident. Carabinieri. soldiers, detectives watched the Toscanini house in Milan; he was a prisoner; his passport was withdrawn; he would be disciplined, it was said, by Dictator Mussolini. Last week his passport was returned and it was reported that he had been guarded only because civil authorities feared further incidents.

From a world quick to conclude that Art had been insulted, came expressions of indignation. Students at the Bologna Conservatory of Music shouted Evviva Toscanini! and were at once clapped into jail. In Berlin, Leopold Stokowski of the Philadelphia Orchestra cried: "The Fascists will kill that man yet. He is so sensitive that he will never be able to stand the shock!" Sergei Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony cancelled a contract to conduct a June festival at La Scala in Milan, called the incident ''an insult not only to him but to artists generally!" Hastening from Zurich to Milan. Ossip Gabrilowitsch of the Detroit Symphony, who had also cancelled La Scala contracts, visited Toscanini and sent off an indignant signed article to the New York Times. But one able conductor, Fritz Reiner, who until this year led the Cincinnati Symphony, amiably complied with vociferous requests and performed the two patriotic airs at a La Scala concert.

As for the maestro himself, he cabled his U. S. secretary: "I am tranquil." And in sunny, quiet St. Moritz last week he was unmolested. Visitors were told he would see no one. Said a neighbor: ''Something goes on until two or three o'clock in the morning. Lights are turned on in the villa. A piano answers softly to the master's hands. Then the music stops and the lights go out. These musicians have their own way of resting."

-- Youth, youth, Springtime of beauty, In sorrow and in joy Will your song rise!

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