Toscanini in Britain.
Proksch, Bryan
Toscanini in Britain. By Christopher Dyment. Rochester, NY:
Boydell, 2012. [xxv, 372 p. ISBN: 978-1-84-383789-3. $50]
The first sentence of Harvey Sachs's foreword to this book
provides the departure point for Dyment's 372-page study of
Toscanini's connections with Great Britain: "A bunch of
concerts and a handful of recordings in the 1930s and two more concerts
in 1952: The End." Manifold biographies of the great conductor have
provided insights into his career as an opera conductor at La Scala and
his transformation into a renowned orchestral conductor in New York,
but, before the present book, Toscanini's trips to Britain had
fallen through the cracks as a footnote. Perhaps the country deserved
its footnote placement in a way Dyment does not really revise history
here so much as he fills in his inherited storyline in remarkable
detail--but, taken as a case study, this book provides its readers with
wonderful insights into Toscanini's mind, practice, and environs,
as well as his surprisingly reticent attitude towards recording and
broadcasting technologies. In sum, Dyment offers a full view, from the
British case-study perspective, of the extent to which he was likely the
most respected and "in demand" conductor history has seen and
will ever see.
That the various London orchestras of the day (at various times the
London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic, and the BBC
Orchestras) failed more often than they succeeded to lure Toscanini to
London does not intimidate the author. Instead, Dyment weaves two
disparate storylines together: one details the visits made to Britain
from the moment Toscanini arrived to the moment he left, and the other
details the intervening periods of time when a variety of figures
crisscrossed Europe trying to woo him into returning. His primary
engagements as a conductor in Britain occurred in the 1930s, beginning
with the 1930 New York Philharmonic visit to London at the end of its
European tour. He returned by himself as a guest conductor in 1935 after
much prodding, conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a series of
concerts that were very warmly received and profitable. Dyment
demonstrates Toscanini's esteem for the BBC Symphony and argues
that the quality of their playing was one of the major reasons the
maestro returned in three out of the four following years. War, the
maestro's busy advocacy of La Scala's postwar rebuilding, an
increasingly busy concertizing schedule, and the slowing of old age:
each factor hindered repeated efforts to bring him back in the 1940s and
1950s. A brief visit in 1952, his first since 1939, proved to be his
last.
The results of this study are a number of remarkable insights into
the complex figure that was Arturo Toscanini. His business-like approach
to contractual engagements comes across as antiquated. He refused to be
wooed via mail or telegram, but when chased down and confronted with
deferential face-to-face persuasion he hardly could say no. Perhaps the
most dramatic event of the book appears in a fully-transcribed primary
source: a memo by Raymond Mase on the lengths to which he went to
convince Toscanini to conduct at the 1937 London Music Festival. Mase
made his way onto the maestro's private island, bribed a
groundskeeper, stalked the conductor at his favorite restaurant, and
managed to get invited to a family dinner (feigning that he was merely
in town on other business). Only after becoming a virtual family friend
did Mase finally bring up a possible visit in passing!
Toscanini's surprising antipathy (perhaps anxiety is the
better word) towards recordings and piracy of his live broadcasts
becomes manifest from the beginning of the book as well. I say
surprising because he recorded so much music over his lifetime, yet
prior to the 1950s and especially during his London visits Toscanini
rejected and destroyed recording after recording and insisted on pushing
the limits of technology to make as natural a recording as possible.
When recording sessions went on too long, the music suffered or he would
simply end the session abruptly. In contrast to his later efforts with
the NBC Symphony, in the 1930s Toscanini purposely denied retransmission
permission of his concerts to avoid bootlegged recordings. The result is
that many of these concerts are now lost or recorded in such a poor
quality as to render them unlistenable. The author tracks possible
recordings exhaustively and provides insights into the maestro's
decision-making process.
Dyment's writing is detailed and documented in the extreme,
which lends a first-hand day-to-day impression to the history he
relates. Occasionally such detail makes it difficult to see the forest
for the trees, yet the sheer bulk of materials the author uncovered is
impressive in itself and should prove definitive in the long term.
Toscanini's materials at the New York Public Library, the HMV and
BBC documents housed in London, and a wide variety of other sources,
including personal recollections by the performers, all come together to
provide a complete picture from as many angles as possible. The
author's knowledge of British music critics is impressive: he reads
between the lines of each critic's writing style to discern what
each felt and, equally impressive, deduced what Toscanini's
interpretations sounded like in the all-too-frequent cases where
recordings have not survived. In the book's final chapter he
attempts to outline the evolution of the maestro's approaches to
conducting various works. Here he meets with some success, although
admittedly he treads a very fine line. His detailed analyses of the
recordings--both the good and the bad ones--tend to be too pinpoint in
their perspective for the average reader. On reading his thoughts on the
1930s recordings, one gets the impression that they are all flawed or
odd in some way, which is not really the case insofar as I, an
admittedly non-audiophile listener, could tell in casual listening.
Three appendices bring the book to a close. The first is a discography
of the recordings made in Britain, the second provides in detail the
programs as they were played regardless of recordings made, and the
final (somewhat of a non sequitur) relates details about
Toscanini's approach to conducting Brahms.
In conclusion, this book is an informative read on many accounts
and serves as a dense and definitive scholarly study. For the Toscanini
enthusiast it may prove too detailed to be of interest, but the academic
reader will find the book immensely useful and refreshingly free of the
"devoted fan" style of writing that so typically accompanies
most writing on the conductor. As someone who hovers between Toscanini
enthusiast and interested scholar, perhaps my highest praise for the
book was taken in the form of action: I purchased the 85-disc set of
Toscanini's recordings (including the London recordings) shortly
after finishing Dyment's book. I listened to them with new ears.
Bryan Proksch
Lamar University
Beaumont, Texas
