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ATRA-613: Toscanini Conducts Richard Strauss Favourites
MP3
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Emanuel Feuermann, cello
NBC Symphony Orchestra
Conducted by Arturo Toscanini
Rec. NBC Studio 8H, New York, 1st January 1938
Original CD transfer from acetate discs by Music and Arts, 1988
XR remastering by Andrew Rose, April 2007
Download ID: 295103
(Duration 62'46")
Don Quixote, Op.35
Death & Transfiguration (Tod und Verklärung), Op.24
...In his devotion to music Toscanini was
the slave of the composer; and in his acceptance
of his subservience lay the difference
between himself and his colleagues. Then one
heard, as nowadays one hears, conductors
ask, "Have you heard my Beethoven, my
Bach, my Brahms, my Haydn?" Toscanini
despised such presumptuous affiliation. And
to make sure that the music heard was not his,
Toscanini' s, Beethoven, Bach, etc, but their
music as they wrote it, Toscanini spent his
waking hours - and his waking hours almost
accounted for his entire days and nights since
he slept hardly at all - studying his scores and
trying to induce his orchestra to help him
recreate these scores.
And that, even for him,
was no easy thing. There were times when he
felt powerless. Then he would fulminate against
himself, and strike his clenched left hand against
his right arm and call himself "Imbecile!" and
shout in an agony of frustration "I cannot
make this stupid arm tell them [the men] what
I want." He had no mercy on himself, and
none on his players.
At the final bars of his
altogether wonderful performance of La
Boheme the brasses came in a fraction of a
second too soon. The error was so minor as to
be almost imaginary. Certainly only the players
and Toscanini could have been aware of
it. But the tiny mishap had the most devastating
effect on the maestro, who refused to
respond to the clamor of the enraptured
audience, shut himself up in his dressing
room and vented his distress and pain on the
furniture, and on his shirt and collar, which he
tore to bits. When he had spent his anger, he
summoned the unfortunate brass section to
his room and addressed them. "What happened
today," he said with deepest resignation, "may mean very little to you. For me life
is finished. I wish only to die."
And years
before, after his performance of an opera at
La Scala which hadn't gone to his satisfaction,
he prevented his wife and children from
entering the dining room for their usual delayed
meal. "Shame on you, shame," he
cried, "That you can wish to eat after such a
performance!" And both he and his family
went supperless to bed.
So he agonized over music, suffering
deeply himself and making others suffer, in
his zeal for perfection or some approximation
of perfection...
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