The Stick Up Artist

 “It is the duty of everyone to fight and help in this sort of cause according to one’s means.”

Conductor Arturo Toscanini had strong opinions. For example, he hated fish. He had no beef against fish minding their own business swimming in the ocean, but he loathed fish on the dinner table.

At the age of nine he won admission to a local music conservatory where he lived for the eight years. It often served fish to its students, and often the fish was rank, thus leaving him with a lifelong loathing of finny foods.

His years at the conservatory were a blessing for his financially struggling parents. (His elementary school teacher had marveled at young Arturo’s ability to memorize poems and his singing voice, telling his father, “Have this boy study, because he has a great capacity for music!”)

The school was not luxurious. Students lived a “regular and monotonous life” of lessons, lessons, and more lessons. The boys slept on bedbug infested straw-filled cots and shared one toilet. They were served wine, but it was such dreck, Arturo sold his allotment to other students so he could buy sheet music.

“Fire to his baton”

Personal privations aside, he loved life there and thrived on his diet of musical studies. Given no choice what instrument to play, he was assigned the cello. He mastered it so well that when he was 14 he played in the local opera company’s orchestra. Other students crowned him with the nickname Geni (“Genius”).

After graduation, he joined a traveling opera company and memorized the score of Aida. When the conductor suddenly quit, others asked Toscanini to fill in. He wowed the audience. He was only 19. “The beardless maestro is a prodigy who communicated the sacred artistic fire to his baton,” read a review the next day.

Thus began an international career as a conductor which culminated in his serving as musical director of the NBC Symphony for 17 years.

As befits the stereotype of orchestra conductors, Toscanini had fits on the podium. In rehearsal, if he thought a musician was inattentive or lazy, he might snap his baton, shout at him, or even fling his baton at the transgressor.

            Toscanini saved his strongest opinions for politics. He was well known for his long-standing hatred of Italian and Germany fascism. In the 1930s, Mussolini ordered musical groups to open each performance with a rendition of his Fascist Party’s anthem. Toscanini refused. The result? In 1931, goons beat him outside of Bologna’s opera house.

In the early 1930s, he was a fixture at the annual Wagner Festival in Beyreuth, Germany, but in 1933, the year the Nazis took power, he announced he would not return. He then led orchestras in the mid-1930s at Austria’s annual Salzburg Festival, but with Nazi invasion looming, he announced in 1938 he would not go back.

“To breathe freedom”

As a result, Mussolini seized his passport. After an international outcry, il Duce returned it. That same day Toscanini and his family fled Italy for America. “To flee in order to breathe freedom—life!” he wrote.

When invited in 1936 to conduct the first ever performances of the Palestine Orchestra, Toscanini immediately accepted. Its founder asked him what his fee would be. Toscanini dismissed that notion out of hand and said he would travel to Palestine at his own expense.

(From 1920 to 1948, the British government administered the land that is present-day Israel. The League of Nations created this territory, which was known as British Palestine, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The goal was to give Arabs who lived there and Jewish natives and immigrants support “until such time as they are able to stand alone.”)

His involvement with what is today the Israeli Philharmonic meant a great deal to the fledging ensemble, most of whose members were Jewish musicians who had fled Nazi Germany and Eastern European nations where they were oppressed.

“I never before saw a country as small as this where there was so much culture as among the Jewish labor and farmer classes,” wrote Toscanini.

            No less a luminary than Albert Einstein wrote Toscanini to congratulate him, saying: “Honored Master! I feel the need to tell you for once how much I admire and honor you. You are not only the unmatchable interpreter of the world’s musical literature, whose forms deserve the highest admiration. In the fight against the Fascist criminals, too, you have shown yourself to be a man of the greatest dignity.”

            The symphony’s inaugural concert featured works by Rossini, Brahms, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Weber. Many in attendance were so overcome with the grandeur of the event that they wept.

             Said Toscanini: “It is the duty of everyone to fight and help in this sort of cause according to one’s means.”

MORAL: ‘Stick’ up for what you believe in.

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