Music: Shove-Around

The announcement from NBC stated simply that “the return of Arturo Toscanini to the podium . . . has been postponed by the maestro.” A year ago he had slipped in his bathtub and hurt his knee; this season, said the announcement, there had been a recurrence of the ailment. Fritz Reiner would conduct the first three concerts, beginning this week, and Toscanini’s plans for the new season would be announced “at a later date.”

Last week the trade was rocking with a different story. What was really keeping 83-year-old Arturo Toscanini from the podium was not the ailing knee, blared Variety in Page One headlines, but a “shove-around.”

First the maestro had been moved out of NBC’s big, cerise plush Studio 8-H (now being converted into a TV theater) into Carnegie Hall. He had not objected too much: Carnegie is acoustically superior to Studio 8-H. But then NBC suggested a further move, to the unfamiliar Manhattan Center Studio. A final crowning blow to Toscanini, the story went, was the decision to shift his time to 10 o’clock (E.S.T.) Monday nights. When he learned that the NBC Symphony was to follow in an “evening of great music” such musically mongrelized but star-studded programs as the Telephone Hour, Toscanini, said Variety, “had all he could take.” Some members of his orchestra were convinced that the maestro would “decide to scram for keeps.” Since nobody thought that NBC would continue its orchestra without him, that might mean the end of the NBC Symphony too.

Toscanini’s troubles merely spotlighted a trend that has been in the making for a long time. Its budgets severely cramped by television’s voracious demands, big radio is giving serious music and musicians the brushoff.

NBC is still carrying its Sunday morning NBC String Quartet, but at an hour (8:30 a.m. E.S.T.) that in the great eastern listening area makes it entertainment for early Sunday risers only. The network is still airing rehearsals of the Boston Symphony, but this season dropped its Orchestras of the Nation series, which for five years has given U.S. music-lovers a listenin on the principal orchestras of the country.

So far this year, CBS has axed its CBS Symphony, its once-fine Invitation to Music and its summer symphony broadcasts from Manhattan’s Lewisohn Stadium. Listeners can still hear the New York Philharmonic-Symphony on Sunday—but only a tape recording of the preceding week’s program, broadcast at 1 p.m. E.S.T. instead of at the more profitable (to a sponsor) 3 p.m.

ABC, which dropped its broadcasts of the Boston Symphony two years ago, will still broadcast the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoons, but for the excellent reason that the Met has a sponsor (the Texas Co.). Overall, ABC has dropped some 13 hours a month of “live” classical music broadcasts since last year.

Network radio, with armies of pulse-takers to confirm its judgment, seems to be betting its future on the assumption that the U.S. prefers comics to classics.