Arturo Toscanini

Arturo Toscanini was an Italian conductor who, after the age of sixty, lived and worked in the United States. He was born in Parma and studied at the Royal Music School in Parma, where he entered at the age of nine. Trained in cello, piano, and composition, he won a scholarship at eleven and by thirteen had begun performing as a professional cellist. He graduated with distinction from the Parma Conservatory in 1885 in the cello class of L. Carini, and while still a student he organized and led a small orchestra of fellow pupils.

After finishing the conservatory, Toscanini joined a traveling Italian opera company as principal cellist, assistant chorus master, and répétiteur. In 1886, during a tour in Rio de Janeiro, disputes involving the company’s regular conductor, management, and audience forced him to take the podium for a performance of Verdi’s Aida on 25 June 1886. He conducted the opera from memory, and this marked the beginning of a conducting career that lasted about seventy years. As a cellist, he also took part in the world premiere of Verdi’s Otello in 1887.

Toscanini received his first Italian conducting engagement in Turin. Over the next twelve years he conducted in twenty Italian cities and towns, gradually establishing a reputation as the leading conductor of his time. He led the world premiere of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci in Milan in 1892 and was invited to conduct the first performance of Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème in Turin in 1896. From 1896 he also appeared in symphonic concerts, and in 1898 he gave the first Italian performance of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony.

For fifteen years Toscanini was the leading conductor of La Scala in Milan. From 1898 to 1903 he divided his time between the winter season at La Scala and the winter season in the theaters of Buenos Aires. Disagreements over the artistic policy of La Scala led him to leave the theater in 1904; he returned in 1906 for another two years, but a further conflict in 1908 again drove him from Milan. From 1908 to 1915 he served as a conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where in his first year he conducted the world premiere of Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West. His arrival helped bring opera in the United States to a world level.

After returning to Italy in 1915, he again became principal conductor of La Scala following the end of the First World War, and the years 1921 to 1929 became a period of brilliant flourishing for the theater. Although he had once agreed to support Gabriele d’Annunzio’s adventure in Fiume and even to accept the post of minister of culture in its proclaimed republic, he left Italy for a long period in 1929 because he did not wish to cooperate with the fascist regime.

From 1927 Toscanini was also active in the United States as principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and after its merger with the New York Symphony Orchestra in 1928 he led the combined New York Philharmonic until 1936. In 1930 he took the orchestra on its first European tour. In Europe he conducted twice at the Wagner festivals in 1930 and 1931, appeared at the Salzburg Festival from 1934 to 1937, founded his own festival in London from 1935 to 1939, and also conducted at the Lucerne Festival in 1938 and 1939. In 1936 he helped organize the Palestine Orchestra, now the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

The final and most public stage of his life, preserved in numerous recordings, began in 1937, when he gave the first of seventeen seasons of radio concerts with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. With this orchestra he toured South America in 1940, and in 1950 he traveled across the United States with an ensemble of orchestral musicians. The vigorous promotion of RCA, which broadcast the orchestra’s performances on radio, quickly made Toscanini the most famous conductor in America. During the Second World War he conducted works by composers from the Soviet state allied with the United States, including Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 in a radio broadcast on 19 July 1942 and Tikhon Khrennikov’s Symphony No. 1 in October 1942.

Toscanini conducted the world premieres of such operas as Pagliacci, La Bohème, and Turandot. He was called the most famous conductor of the century and possibly the most famous conductor in history. In December 1949 the Italian president Luigi Einaudi approved Toscanini and the mathematician Castelnuovo as the first life senators in the country’s history without political qualification, though Toscanini refused the honor two days later. Although the “cult of Toscanini” was criticized in the last quarter of the twentieth century and somewhat faded, in a 2010 survey by BBC Music Magazine he ranked eighth among the twenty greatest conductors of all time. He is also included in the Gramophone Hall of Fame.

He died in his sleep at his home in Riverdale, New York, on 16 January 1957 and was buried in the family vault at the Monumental Cemetery in Milan. At his funeral, the gathered crowd sang the famous chorus “Va', pensiero” from Verdi’s Nabucco.

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