Well, we Italians do have this detestable way of being among the best at anything we take seriously

[fpb]

I am listening to a 1940s recording of Beethoven's Leonore Ouverture no.3 conducted by Arturo Toscanini with his legendary NBC Symphony Orchestra. I just cannot describe how wonderful it is. In spite of limited and ancient mono recording technology, every strand of the music comes across with cristal clarity, all orchestral colours blaze forth in their elemental greatness, and every sound and effect calculated to lead up to the next stage with the most impressive energy and passion. It is the kind of performance that makes the blood race in your veins, that brings you up from your chair to cheer and applaud, that really brings home that what you are hearing is something of unique, transcendent importance, glory, and beauty. If anyone wants to argue that there ever was a greater conductor than Toscanini, they will have trouble convincing me.

The Ouverture has just finished. I am going to listen to it again.

Comments

[avus.livejournal.com]

Ah, it must be such a burden being Italian. So hard to maintain humility. But then, of course, w/ those gifts, perhaps even that becomes easy.

And Toscanini is, indeed, exciting. Back in the 1960's, one of my roommates -- a trumpet player, and a fairly good one -- used Toscanini's Beethoven recordings to prop up his bed. I started, therefore, with some reserve. But I find them very exciting, so alive! And if there's anything that Beethoven should be, it's alive!

I also confess, however, to whore after false gods. My favorite interpretation tends to be one I don't know, and one that will show me something new in a piece, especially a well-known piece. Though it's fun to go back, sometimes, to the tried & true.

Your enjoyment of Toscanini is well-merited, well-written, playfully belligerent and, as always, a delight to read.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

In order to keep us humble, the gods send us politicians. It is hard to brag about one's country when the majority alliance is led by Berlusconi and Bossi, while the opposition is a crazy ragtag of egos and shattered clans half of which is composed from the most ignorant, prejudiced, dogmatic and arrogant kind of leftist known to man.

Toscanini, apart from being the interpretative giant he was, is a kind of national hero. He opposed Mussolini fearlessly and to his face, in spite of having been a candidate in Mussolini's first Fascist list in 1919 (when it seemed that the new party still had something to do with moderate Socialism). He had, in a different way from his successor Giulini, moral authority - a rockbound integrity and independence that, while it may not have made him a saint as Giulini was, made him a hero and a symbol. When he came back in 1946 after seventeen years in exile, it was like the life and spirit of the country were returned to her, like a signal that the twenty years of shame were not only over but had ceased to have hold over the Italian spirit.

(There is a sad difference in this between Italy and Germany. There, the return of a similarly national figure, the writer Thomas Mann, was by no means a success. This hero of German intellectual resistance and giant of German literature, who had felt able, during his exile, to say, ubi ego, ibi Germania, found the country so ill-disposed against him and exiles in general that he eventually settled in Switzerland.)

I do not say that Toscanini is beyond anyone else's level; rather, that his level is supreme, that it belongs to very few interpreters indeed. One musician who blew me away recently, and who, based on what I heard, I might place on the same level, is Glenn Gould. I just got hold of his performances of Liszt's transcriptions of Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth (the latter for two pianos), and they are amazing achievements. But one thing I will never forget as long as I live is the time when, at age sixteeen, just finding out about classical music, I first listened to Toscanini's legendary 1936 performance of Beethoven's Seventh with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Some critics insist that that is the greatest Beethoven symphonic performance on record; at any rate, I know that it blew me away like nothing, and I mean nothing, I had ever heard.

[avus.livejournal.com]

I've often wondered why God made politicians. Best reason I've heard. Mark Twain once commented that the US had no native criminal class except Congress. I'd always seen them more from a Job POV, not that I claim for myself or my country the nobility of Job.

The States very much benefited from the flight of WWII. Several of my musicology profs were German Jews. It's what, essentially, created the field in the US. And some of the composers -- Schoenberg comes to mind -- never went back. And of the Italians, of course Fermi, with his Jewish wife, never returned to Italy to live. And the Russian-French -- Stravinsky. Indeed, the brain drain of Europe placed the States, with their in-tact infrastructure, and their unimbeded economic might, into a place of intellectual dominance in many areas of science & scholarship that, at least in the 1970's, seemed unassailable. I suspect that has changed -- I'm rather far away from it now. And Yanks have always been horrible at languages, which has so limited them in the humanities.

Regarding Toscanini -- and Thomas Mann -- I find myself, as a Yank, wistful. I cannot imagine that a great artist would ever be a national hero in the States. We neglect our national soul -- we even deny it exists & should be nurtured. It's the same kind of sadness I have about classical music. I was born in 1950. While there are many classical works that have made it into standard repertoire that were composed in the decade before my birth, I don't know of a single work written in my lifetime, not one, that is regularly performed.

There is no period in great music that could ever say that. Yes, there are great performers, and great performances. And even more, there are great works of music recovered from earlier ages and given the performance & recording they merit.

But I feel that I have no contemporary musical home, only an old one well-renovated. And you know, that's not enough, it's really not enough.

But I travel off thread.

I shall keep my ears open for that Toscanini recording of the 7th.