The Toscanini Legacy

In his black high-collared rehearsal coat, Arturo Toscanini walked into NBC's Manhattan Studio 8-H and launched a Robert Shaw-trained chorus and a handful of soloists into the music he loved: Verdi's melodramatic, tearfully tender Aida. With cajolery, threats and sarcasm ("Mr. Tucker," he inquired scathingly of Tenor Richard Tucker, "do you love a woman?"), he shaped a magnificently precise and passionate performance, presented to NBC televiewers and listeners in the spring of 1949. When RCA Victor decided to cut records from the broadcast tapes, Toscanini returned from retirement in 1954 to conduct at Carnegie Hall portions of the opera which did not satisfy him--namely, Soprano Herva Nelli's O Patria Mia and Ritorna Vincitor! (TIME, June 14, 1954). Last week Victor released (on three LPs) Toscanini's composite and deftly sound-doctored Aida, the opera in which he made his conducting debut in Rio de Janeiro 71 years ago at 19.

The Maestro's last word on Aida ranks with his recording of Verdi's Otello and Falstaff as his operatic testament. The NBC Symphony plays with brilliant coloring and syllable-sharp instrumental detail ; the singers--some less than top drawer--are whipped almost beyond their powers to high moments of musical exaltation. The Met's Tucker, singing the full dramatic tenor role of Radames for the first time, has big, ringing power when he needs it, joined to a fervent, melting lyricism. Titian-haired Herva Nelli, Toscanini's favorite soprano, sings perhaps the finest Aida of her career with rare intensity in a voice both sweet and sure.

"Bene!" Although Aida is the last of the studio-recorded Toscanini music, Victor still has half a dozen unpublished recordings from rehearsals and performances approved by Toscanini during the last two years of his life and scheduled for release. They include Brahms's Double Concerto, Haydn's Toy Symphony and a Vivaldi Concerto Grosso. Toscanini's son Walter estimates that there are some 30 other approved recordings in Riverdale, among them the complete Romeo and Juliet music of Berlioz and the Second and Fourth symphonies of Sibelius. The recordings are the fruits of a plan RCA Victor worked out with Walter Toscanini in 1954 to get the Maestro to approve or disapprove every scrap of his music recorded since 1937, when the NBC Symphony was formed.

To overcome Toscanini's dislike of recordings (he was infuriated by their failure to reproduce the sound of his orchestra as he remembered it), Walter Toscanini built a sound studio in the billiard room in the basement of Toscanini's house in Riverdale (the Upper Bronx), piped tape-recorded music up to a giant speaker in the living room. When the spirit moved him, the old man sat in the living room listening to and judging the full-volume thunder of his orchestra. If a note or a phrase displeased him, he moved his head almost imperceptibly from side to side, frequently erupted into red-faced tirades if the music continued. In two years of listening, he gave an immediate, unqualified "Bene" to only one recording--a six-minute Ride of the Valkyries.

The rest of his performances had to be altered, either by making electronic changes in the sound or by splicing several tapes together. Walter Toscanini collected up to a dozen tapes of each Toscanini-conducted piece, some of them taken at rehearsal, some at the performance, some over the radio by fans. The Maestro listened to every taped version, gave qualified approval to the most acceptable, and indicated what passages from other versions he wanted substituted. In some cases he demanded only one or two inserts. But before he would approve a performance of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto in F, engineers had to make more than 100 splices in less than eight minutes of music. The recordings are therefore not so much historically accurate Toscanini performances as they are showpieces which indicate what kind of performance the Maestro would have liked to achieve if both he and the orchestra were infallible.

"Maybe." Victor will slowly add the "approved" recordings to its already bulging list of Toscanini disks. (In 17 years of recording for Victor, Toscanini sold better than any other classical artist in history--22 million record units, $40 million in retail sales.) The tapes his father definitely rejected, says Walter Toscanini, will never be released, although they will be preserved at Riverdale as historical documents. But of the 350 hours of Toscanini tapes to work from, roughly half are in a "maybe" category: papa liked them except for minor flaws. Record buyers may eventually hear some portions of them. "Sometimes," says Walter, "my father's standards may have been too high."

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