Act I

Va' fuori d'Italia, va' fuori, ch'e l'ora, Va' fuori d'Italia, va' fuori, stranier!*

Thus, prophetically, did the passionate choruses of Garibaldi serenade their Austrian oppressors back in 1866, when most of northern Italy was still under the yoke. Garibaldi's War Hymn lived on as one of the most stirring of Italy's patriotic airs until Mussolini suppressed it in favor of the Fascist Giovinezza.

Last week the son of a Garibaldi veteran decided it was time to sound Garibaldi's hymn again. In a Manhattan radio program to be short-waved to Italy, Arturo Toscanini conducted the NBC Symphony in his own special arrangement of the song, added the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth (V for Victory) Symphony, the overture to William Tell, The Star-Spangled Banner, and then broke into tears. Toscanini called his program "Victory, Act I." He Was preparing two more acts.

No one was more entitled to make these artistic gestures than Arturo Toscanini. The most famous of all living Italians except Mussolini and the most famous living embodiment of the art of music, the little, white-haired 76-year-old maestro had for years been using the lever of his prestige to pry at the roots of Fascism. To most Italians, who rate music as important as food and wine and a good deal more important than politics, that lever was a powerful one. To music-loving Germans (who gave him a smashing reception as conductor of the Bayreuth Wagner Festival) it was only a shade less powerful.

Feeling and Belief. Toscanini's personal fight with Fascism began in 1922, when he first defied a request to play Giovinezza at Milan's La Scala Opera House. When the Fascists started to agitate for control of La Scala's policies in 1929, Toscanini resigned as director. Two years later, at a concert in Bologna, the peppery little maestro again refused to conduct Giovinezza, saying publicly that, in his opinion, it was not music at all. After the concert a Fascist mob beat him up, Fascist authorities temporarily confiscated his passport, and the Fascist Party surrounded his Milan home with carabinieri. He was under incessant attack in the Fascist press.

Last week in LIFE Toscanini brought his political platform up to date, denounced Vittorio Emanuele and Badoglio and called fervently for a democratic Italy. Said he: "Italy will certainly have a revolution as a result of the current war; the Allies will either favor and help it, or hinder it. The Allies' attitude will determine whether the revolution will, or will not, result in an orderly democratic government. . . ."

* "Get out of Italy, get out, it's time, Get out of Italy, get out, foreigners!"

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