Porco & Poses UNDERSTANDING TOSCANINI

By Michael Walsh

Dictators might have envied the cult of personality that centered on Arturo Toscanini in America. For a half-century he reigned supreme in the popular estimation as the world's greatest conductor, and when he died in 1957 at the age of 89, the New York Times spoke for the nation: "Both as an operatic and symphonic conductor, he achieved a stature no other conductor before him had attained."

Or did he? Although revisionists set to work soon after the maestro's death, Understanding Toscanini is the most detailed examination yet of the man, his work and his audience. "To study how Americans perceived Toscanini is to study how they perceived themselves," argues Joseph Horowitz, a former music critic for the Times. "As a personality, even as a musician, Toscanini embodied 'self-made' virtues distinguishing the New World from the parent culture of Europe. As the dominant figurehead for Great Music, he furnished proof of New World high cultural achievement . . ." The quality of his interpretations was almost irrelevant; in Horowitz's view, Toscanini and the great American cultural inferiority complex were made for each other.

To the contemporary listener, the mystique seems hard to fathom. The core of Toscanini's repertoire was small -- Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner made up 40% of his New York Philharmonic programs; Puccini and Verdi were favorites in the opera house -- and his interest in contemporary music, aside from fellow Italians like Respighi, was almost nil. The famous RCA recordings of the Beethoven symphonies now sound febrile and coarse. Even the conductor's notorious temper and torrents of epithets, which once seemed so romantically apposite -- no musician had really lived until Toscanini called him Porco! (pig) -- come off today as operatic posturing.

Yet almost from the moment he arrived at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1908, reports Horowitz, Toscanini was a celebrity. The story of his professional debut -- rising from the cello section to lead Verdi's Aida from memory in Rio de Janeiro at the age of 19 -- had preceded him, and the New York music critics provided a collective embrace. "As great and as welcome as anything that has come out of Italy since Verdi laid down his pen," proclaimed the New York Tribune in a typical response.

From then on, Toscanini's every move was diligently chronicled. When he . resigned from the Met in 1915, his departure was accompanied by a chorus of speculative articles. His return to an American post with the New York Philharmonic in 1926 was frantically cheered. A decade later he was granted the most flattering gift of all: an orchestra created specially for him. As director of the NBC Symphony, he reached a national radio and television audience and became a visitor to millions of homes that had never heard classical music in such abundance. He was no longer merely a conductor; he had become an icon.

The book, however, is only incidentally biographical. In digesting countless reviews, Horowitz has provided a valuable look at the state of American music criticism during the first half of the century. And in a separate chapter, he also provides a musical assessment by examining Toscanini's recordings in formidable detail. But the author's most important contribution is his analysis of Toscanini's pervasive influence on what music was programmed and the way it was performed: the conductor's determination to play certified great works defined, and confined, the repertoire for the next generation of musicians. Igor Stravinsky, whose music Toscanini largely ignored, lamented, "What a pity it is that his inexhaustible energy and his marvellous talents should almost always be wasted on such eternally repeated works."

Today those words still apply to too many conductors and their orchestras. Beethoven symphonies are wolfed down like bran flakes, high in moral fiber and good for the soul; meanwhile, less celebrated works are regarded as the aural version of empty calories. Here, apparently, is the enduring Toscanini legacy, and, according to Horowitz's plausible indictment, one that shows few signs of fading away.