The Letters of Arturo Toscanini :: Education by Design Store

Editorial Review
A major event in the literature of music—the first significant collection of the letters of Arturo Toscanini.

Toscanini (1867–1957) was one of the most celebrated and influential symphonic and operatic conductors in history. With his amazing ear and photographic memory, his sense of moral imperative and iron will, he raised the standards of orchestras and opera companies to previously undreamed-of heights. He conducted the world premieres of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and Puccini’s La bohème, The Girl of the Golden West, and Turandot. His sixty-eight-year conducting career began before Verdi had completed Otello and lasted into the era of televised concerts and stereophonic sound. He headed such ensembles as La Scala, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and the NBC Symphony Orchestra.

Yet he never wrote a memoir, or even essays for publication, or granted interviews. Now we are brought closer to him than we have ever been—in seven hundred letters, well over ninety percent of them previously unpublished in any language.

The letters are vivid and impassioned. They reveal a complicated man, often angry and unhappy, who was also capable of great generosity of spirit, self-irony, and humor. They show the depth of his musical knowledge and insight, and shed much light on the musical life of his time in Europe, in New York, and throughout the world. There is fascinating correspondence with his wife and children, and with colleagues and friends, and he writes, as well, about his affairs and erotic adventures. He expresses particular vehemence when talking about his active opposition to fascism and Nazism. Of Mussolini, for instance, he says: “Open all the prisons—you won’t find a delinquent or a criminal who is more of a delinquent, more of a criminal, than that ignoble animal!”

The Letters of Arturo Toscanini is a revelation of both the maestro and the man.

With 7 photographs.
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Customer Reviews

Entertaining and informative

2003-08-29
Sachs' editorial comments provide fascinating insights into the world of opera and Toscanini's role in it. Beyond the minutiae of the Maestro's life and passions, however, this book provides an intriguing perspective of world events during the first half of the 20th century.

Great Man -- Great Book

2003-03-13
This is an obsessively edited great book about, and by, an obsessively great man and great conductor. Of greatest interest to those also obsessed by Arturo Toscanini, but of great interest to anyone who wants to enter the mind of the greatest conductor of the 20th century. That's a lot of "greats", but they're well-deserved. Toscanini writes with passion, grace, lyricism, eroticism, and political insight. Mr. Sachs, the brilliant Toscanini biographer, has edited this book in a way that makes it an autobiography. Buy it!

Most readable and absorbing

2003-01-29
I loved this book. Toscanini's writing style is so direct and passionate. His love of music and his worship of its icons permeates the book and his ever-present desire to do them justice (even at the expense of dealing with musicians not meeting his exacting standards) make this a fun read. As a musician I can relate to the exhaustion of rehearsals and the exaltation he felt after a great concert and in the midst of musicians in which he had respect.
The hundreds of letters to his mistress are amazing, written in the most ardent and intimate manner. (One feels that one knows her, too, from osmosis). They are speckled also with his reflections on aging and their age disparity, of his concertizing, of his passionless marriage, of his disappointment/disgust with emerging regimes of his time. I found even the most mundane details of his everyday life are somehow also interesting.
The commentary from the author is nicely formatted so that it is easy to skip over details which have no familiarity to the lay reader.

Humanizing and scary

2002-06-11
What will floor a Toscanini fan here is the revelation that the old man's emotional life was much more intense than anybody realized. The majority of the book is taken up with love-letters to one woman, although this affair only went on for 10 years or less; the outpouring of adoration, obsession, and eventual anger is stunning. There are certain performances of his about which we've customarily said, hmm, this one is relatively expressive--it turns out Toscanini confesses to his true love that while he conducted Tchaikovsky's 6th tonight, he was thinking only of her, and wept at such-and-such a passage, and even kissed the locket with her picture during the performance...so much for "literal" music-making! Although some letters are not always interesting (in the sense that his culture was not all that broad--this is not a book from which you'll learn a lot about arts & letters, performance practice, or even about music in general), and some letters will definitely make some people squeamish, they present a quite different picture of the conductor as primarily passionate, rather than primarily angry. You come away from the book, as you do from his best performances, amazed at his honesty and phenomenal intensity.

Perhaps the hype was too great

2002-05-12
I was prepared for true revelations which didn't come through in the letters, found precious little I didn't already know.