Music: Back from Italy

Arturo Toscanini was back in the U.S. last week after five months in Italy, steaming to get back to his NBC Symphony podium. To his extreme annoyance, he came down with a touch of flu, and his doctor told him he would have to postpone his opening concert this week. At 86, the Maestro still hates to miss a curtain.*

Flu or no flu. he is the same passionate, reflective, tempery, sweetly mannered man as ever. And he is fresh from a busy and sociable vacation.

Buttons & Bows. Toscanini has a special fondness for his old house in Milan, and spent the early part of his summer there. He had it decorated to his taste around 1908, a Victorian era hodgepodge of heavy furniture and silk brocade walls and draperies, has refused to have it redecorated since. The only change he permits is the rehanging of his numerous paintings, and he insists on directing this himself, scrambling up stepladders with hammer and hooks in hand to fix the settings, while servants hold the heavy frames and family members hold their breaths, worrying about a fall.

Through the summer, the old man usually kept to his bedroom until noon, lounging in his pajamas studying scores, playing symphonies from memory on the piano, or listening with insatiable curiosity to his radio. When he made his lunchtime appearances, he was always immaculately dressed, including starched collar and cuffs. Often the happy recipient of emphatic neckties, he once startled his guests by turning up in a bow tie that lit up with small electric bulbs when the Maestro pressed a button in his pants pocket. Night after night Toscanini received processions of old friends for talk and drinks, often until 1a.m.

Tears & Growls. In early August, Toscanini moved with his son and daughter-in-law, the Walter Toscaninis. and his 24-year-old grandson, Walfredo, to his rented villa on the island of San Giovanni in Lake Maggiore. There, social life was quieter, although natives and sightseers on passing launches soon found that the great conductor was there. If they saw him on the lawns, they sent shouts of “Bravo, Toscanini!” and “Bravo, Arturo!” rolling across the water. The Maestro, snorting with offended modesty, would turn his back and disappear.

His son Walter had rigged up a hi-fi record player, and Toscanini used it to study his old recordings, listening for flaws.* Walter always tried to be around to help : the old man, never an able hand with mechanical gadgets, is likely to jiggle the tone arm and scratch the records. Evenings on the island, the’re would be recorded concerts in his bedroom of music that Toscanini had either recorded or broadcast. He would sit on his bed as the music played, eyes blazing as if he were on the podium, conducting energetically and singing the music to himself. When he came to a particularly affecting passage in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or his Missa Solemnis, Toscanini sometimes wept openly. Tears rolling down his cheeks, he would sit back and murmur to himself. “I cannot believe it. I cannot imagine such a man [as Beethoven].”

At summer’s end, stories blossomed that the present season might be Toscanini’s last in the U.S., that afterward he might be ready to “stay put” in Italy. No such talk came from Toscanini in New York last week. He was busy studying scores (especially Verdi’s opera, Un Ballo in Maschera, which he will broadcast in January), and growling at his flu.

*NBC hastily called on a relative youngster, 78-year-old Pierre Monteux, to lead the first concert.

*Friends have never known Toscanini to be satisfied with a performance, and he often postpones listening to a recording tape for the first time, pleading, “No, no, I am afraid to listen.” When his ear catches a flaw, his first impulse is to throw the tape away. In a test-recording of a Beethoven symphony, the Maestro thought a trumpet note too light. So the trumpeter was hauled to a studio to play and replay the note, while sound engineers painstakingly erased his old note and inserted the new. It took three days’ work to satisfy Toscanini.