Sir John & the Maestro

Giuseppe Verdi composed his most fettlesome opera, Falstaff, when he was nearing 80. Last week, white-fringed little Arturo Toscanini, who learned how to play some of Verdi's operas from the famed composer himself some 60 years ago, proved he still had the pep at 83 to conduct a fettlesome performance of Falstaff.

He had given his opera of the year his usual patient and pernickety preparation, drilling his singers until they were ready to drop, illustrating passages by pushing his,hoarse old voice up into squeaky soprano register and down into roaring baritone range as well. At drill's end each day he dismissed a thoroughly exhausted cast --including Metropolitan Opera Baritones Giuseppe Valdengo (Falstaff) and Frank Guarrera (Ford), Contralto Cloe Elmo (Dame Quickly), Mezzo-Soprano Nan Merriman (Mistress Page) and Soprano Herva Nelli (Mistress Ford). But as they dragged themselves home, the inexhaustible maestro, 40 years the senior of the eldest of them, tramped out with a fresh and fearsome eye to rehearse his weekly NBC Symphony programs.

When he finally got around to putting the orchestra through Falstaff early last week, he found the orchestral parts full of wrong notes. Stopping the music, he would summon flutists and violists to the podium, hold the offending scores up to his nose so he could read them, then mock the publisher ("Viva la casa Ricordi!").

He had some different notions about staging this time. In his Otello and Aida broadcasts of 1948 and 1949, the singers had been grouped in front of the orchestra. Last week he mounted them on a platform stage behind the orchestra so they would have room to move around in their parts and thus, he hoped, gain greater expressiveness. The stage had to be just the right height, too. After one rehearsal, son Walter Toscanini told Producer Don Gillis: "Father wants the stage maybe six inches higher." Gillis began an impatient reply, finished it with a smile: "Tell father he can--have what he wants, as usual."

At week's end, when a jammed studio audience and NBC's: millions of radio listeners heard the first half of Falstaff, they found the result, as usual, more than worth all the fussing and finishing. They heard a Falstaff that was robustiously humorous without being rambunctious--all of it performed with the kind of brilliance, clarity and pace that brought the studio audience bravoing to its feet with the crash of the final chord.

This week, listeners will hear the concluding half. The following week, Arturo Toscanini will take his NBC Symphony Orchestra on its first coast-to-coast tour. In six weeks, traveling in a special twelve-car train, they will play in 20 U.S. cities. For his own part in the big tour, a grateful RCA is paying Conductor Toscanini one of the fattest fees in history: an estimated $150,000.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.