Maestro's Furioso

No sooner had Leopold Stokowski patched up his squabble with the musicians and music lovers of Mexico City (TIME, June 5) than the National Broadcasting Company announced last week that it had fired him from his job as part-time conductor of the NBC Symphony. Behind the blow that knocked British-born, Irish-Pole Stokowski over Radio City's ropes was the fine Italian fist of his onetime pal, spry, bantamweight Arturo Toscanini, 77. The blow was the culmination of a friendship that has gone sour. Few maestros have held each other in such avowed mutual respect as did Toscanini and Stokowski in the '303. A frequent attendant at Toscanini's rehearsals, concerts and broadcasts, Stokowski publicly expressed his tremendous admiration for Toscanini. Toscanini, who seldom in his life has had a good word for a competitor who could possibly be considered a rival, recommended Stokowski to replace him when he decided to take a vacation from NBC in 1941. But the seeds of trouble had already been sown the year before, when Toscanini's South American tour took the bloom off Stokowski's later Good Neighborly trip with the All-American Youth Orchestra. The minute Stokowski took over at NBC he began making changes in the broadcasting technique of Toscanini's orchestra. He altered the traditional seating arrangement. He insisted that the stringed instrumentalists bow out of step, to produce the lush, powerful Stokowski tone. He improved broadcasting Studio 8-H with a new ceiling and a set of acoustical gadgets. The improvements left Conductor Toscanini (who had always kicked about the acoustics of Studio 8-H him self) biting his nails. Stokowski got a counterpunch in 1942 when he went east from California to make a bid for the U.S. premiere of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, and found that Toscanini had snatched it from under his nose. Last week's announcement solemnly promulgated the theory that it is undesirable for the NBC Symphony to divide its season between two conductors of such widely differing methods. (It noted no objection, however, to the Philadelphia Orchestra's Eugene Ormandy and the London Symphony's Malcolm Sargent, both of whom will share the NBC podium next year with Maestro Toscanini.)

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