Both in his Italian heritage and in the dynamism and style of his music-making, conductor Antonio Pappano is one of the few today who can truly be said to have inherited the mantle of Arturo Toscanini. In a year which marks both the 140th anniversary of Toscanini’s birth and 50 years since his death, Pappano explains how his great predecessor still inspires him…

Every Italian conductor – even one like myself, born in England and brought up in America – has the spectre of Arturo Toscanini looking over his shoulder. Fifty years after his death, his name alone conjures up the definition of conductorial authority and the legacy of Italian lyric theatre. This is undeniable. Toscanini’s temperament was so clearly Latin, so dramatic, yet he was preoccupied (maniacally so) with marrying his Mediterranean nature to a most scrupulous approach to musical execution, precision of a rare intensity. He rehearsed through repetition, virtually imprinting the music on his players – it was almost as if they were being carved into the shape he wanted. This precision was always allied to an immense sense of theatre, and of history. When you think that this man gave the first performances of Pagliacci, La bohème, Madama Butterfly, Fanciulla del West and Turandot it is truly awe-inspiring.

We know him mainly from recordings made for NBC in the terribly dry Studio 8H. What we hear is distilled conducting, no fat, absolutely lean – the effect is electrifying but there is not a lot of tonal allure. Though he had the fabulous NBC orchestra at his disposal, I believe his music-making was hampered by the acoustic: dry phrase-endings, over-driven tempi, lack of colour. His feverish, passionate approach to music needed a warmer environment. If you go back to the recordings he made with the Philadelphia Orchestra, or the New York Philharmonic, or the BBC Symphony, or at Salzburg with the Vienna Philharmonic, you hear a different conductor; colour, allure, breath.

To accentuate the many positive attributes, I  think his qualities of articulation, phrasing, style and energy, of structural clarity and balance, should appeal very much to a modern world. Toscanini put a microscope on each score he conducted. His fidelity to the score was famous. He had tremendous class, even in the way he dressed, tremendous taste. He came along at a time when orchestras had developed a lot of bad habits, the use of portamento had gone to an extreme and ‘tradition’ was a catch-all for sloppiness and cheap effects. He had an important role in simplifying things, in making conductors really look at what is written in the score, and encouraging them to become the most ardent disciples of the composer. It was religion for him. Toscanini redefines the notion of pulse. He gives it an incredible, life-enhancing energy: it’s so real, so wonderfully palpable in so much repertoire. His Brahms symphonies have such a structural sense of where they are, there is such a strong heartbeat. It’s the same with Beethoven, yet with a composer such as Debussy the concentration on the line and simplicity of texture is miraculous; if you listen to his Demoiselle élue the string-playing is refined beyond belief. I find it fascinating that he liked listening to the Busch Quartet rehearsing late Beethoven, and of course he played two movements of Op 135 with the orchestra. He was looking for that string quartet-like balance.

His sound is formed on quite a light and articulate bass; you hear more of the high end and thereby comes his trademark brilliance of sound. Furtwängler, by comparison, is the complete opposite. The sound is built up from the bass – you miss perhaps that clarity of sound that you get with Toscanini, but of course you gain other things. Toscanini doesn’t luxuriate, it’s not his way. 

His beat was very simple. You couldn’t say it was particularly subtle – he often looked like a bandmaster. That was because all the work was done in rehearsal, with the repetition, the moulding of the orchestra. He wouldn’t move on until the music had reached the desired groove, until it was fixed. His gaze was frightening, yet totally inspiring. A good bandmaster, I should point out, has something special. If you see one of those Italian bandmasters, they bring a sense of occasion, a panache, that’s not to be sneezed at. In Rossini or even in Verdi’s Falstaff, it is essential.

As for his tantrums, we all have our moments, whether it’s because of frustration with ourselves or the orchestra, but you couldn’t get away with the hurricane-like Toscanini explosions today and I don’t think they are necessary. As music director, both at Covent Garden and at the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome, I try to maintain a friendly but concentrated atmosphere. Besides which, this is a different era. In Toscanini’s day, the conductor could fire a player on the spot. Even so, Toscanini was beloved by his orchestras because they knew he was fighting for a result of the highest standard.

When I was growing up I was aware of the name Toscanini, but it was through the opera recordings that I got to know him – Traviata, Bohème, Ballo, Falstaff, Otello – these last two, deeply important to me, were perhaps his greatest achievements on disc, complete in every way. When you hear him singing along with the tenor in the climax of the aria in Bohème it’s so moving, it’s as if he is stretching out for youth. In the rehearsal recordings for the operas you notice his tremendous feeling for the words. It isn’t only the orchestra but the total preparation: the singers are groomed to be absolutely specific in their expression, even more so than the orchestra. The nobility of sound and the humour he gets from Giuseppe Valdengo in Falstaff, the sense of ardour from Vinay in Otello, it’s amazing. He wants the same from the orchestra: the strings use a very quick vibrato that has an almost febrile quality.

As to how we conductors should view Toscanini today, I think that to be confronted with such directness is a challenge. We’re all looking to be different, searching for ways in which we can express our own personalities; but to be faced with a directness, a clarity of expression and delivery like Toscanini’s, is like a gauntlet thrown down to us.

His music-making is still relevant. If you have ideas, they have to be clear to your audience, you have to craft your ideas so that an audience can receive them. And how interesting to listen to those late recordings of his – as performances in general were getting slower, he was getting faster! The first thing that people mention about any Italian conductor is his lyrical quality, but there is far more to Toscanini. The way we perceive him has to do with propulsion, forward motion. Music that has very long paragraphs is performed in a way that always moves forward, the direction of the phrases is always fluid.

That sense of fluidity can be all the greater from a Latin temperament. The Italian language is phrased over the bar-lines, like Russian, always going forward. The German language has a point of arrival in a sentence that’s more vertical – there’s a greater feeling
 of the bar-line. It’s not necessarily a negative, and Furtwängler for one had a genius for not making you feel the bar-line; he doesn’t sound Teutonic. However, there is something about the German language and German music-making that makes you think of columns and solid architecture. I speak German so I’m aware of the timing of the language and how it’s going to affect the delivery of the music. But I am Italian: the challenge is to give warmth and generosity of sound and still keep this strong life-pulse. Toscanini has pointed the way for us.

Harvey Sachs on a ‘rich, complicated figure’:

‘They say I’ve always been the same. That’s the most foolish thing that’s ever been uttered about me. I’ve never been the same, not even from one day to the next. I’ve known it even if others haven’t.’

Thus the octogenarian Arturo Toscanini, circa 1950, described himself to a young colleague. The statement could serve as an appropriate introduction to a re-evaluation of Toscanini’s gigantic position in the history of musical performance. Today, after more than three decades of growth and development in the historic performance practice movement, one reads with wry amusement much of the negative criticism aimed at Toscanini by his detractors during the last years of his career and throughout the 1960s: tempi too fast and rigid, articulation too sharply honed, ‘streamlined’ performances. But to any musician or serious listener under the age of 45, Toscanini’s tempi – even those to be heard in the recordings made towards the end of his 68-year career, when he was in his mid-80s, and when on average (although by no means always) he tended to opt for tighter interpretations than he had earlier on – will seem logical and flexible without being self-indulgent; in a word: modern.

But that opening quotation is also a good starting point for taking a glance at Toscanini’s character. After all, whether or not you know (let alone like) his recordings, you must admit that he had a rather amazing life: born in the provincial town of Parma, Italy, when Rossini and Berlioz were still alive, when Verdi had just completed Don Carlos, when Wagner was working on Die Meistersinger and Brahms was working on his Deutsches Requiem, and when Elgar, Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Richard Strauss and Sibelius were between two and 10 years old, he lived to see all of these composers become ‘classics’ and to perform the music of some of them on television and record it on long-playing discs.

The public’s view of his character has changed – or ought to have changed – greatly in the half-century since his death, thanks largely to the first-person documents that have come to light since. Toscanini did not grant interviews or write for publication; ideas about him were culled largely from abundant but often conflicting second-hand reports. But now that a substantial selection of his letters has been published (I admit to personal interest: I edited them), it is possible to know a great deal about him that we did not know before. Toscanini’s father had been a soldier in Garibaldi’s irregular army in the struggle for Italian independence and reunification, and he instilled in his son radical anti-monarchic and anti-Church ideals to which the son remained faithful all his life – most notably in his well known, outspoken opposition to Mussolini and Hitler.

There can be little doubt that the ability to take a principled stand and remain true to it was also integral to Toscanini’s musical personality: he did not believe in traditional religion but his approach to music and art was religious in its intensity. He was a romantic idealist on questions of musical content and this led him to approach questions of musical interpretation with a classicist’s rigour. The statement may seem paradoxical, but it isn’t. The specious ‘objectivity’ versus ’subjectivity’ (or, in concrete terms, Toscanini versus Furtwängler) issue that seemed to be on so many critics’ minds 30 or 40 years ago has slid into, or at least in the direction of, oblivion, where it justly belongs. Nowhere, in decades spent scouring Toscanini-related documents and other archival material, have I come across any mention by him of ‘objectivity’ or of seeking merely to play the notes. What he did say was that he wished to ‘come as close as possible to expressing the composer’s thoughts’; indeed, he used the Italian word estrinsecare, which has no exact English equivalent and is more complex than esprimere (to express): it includes the concept of ‘bringing out’, of giving life to something that can’t come to life by itself. This was Toscanini’s eternal quest, whether he was dealing with the contemporary music of his day or with the classics.

He was not by nature an extrovert, although he could be highly sociable and was, by all accounts, warm-hearted and generous with family, friends and colleagues. But where music was concerned, he donned – from the very outset of his career – a suit of psychological armour, and wielded a sword that he had forged from an alloy of encyclopedic musical knowledge and grim determination to realise the best possible performance of every piece of music to which he turned his attention. There were no permanent orchestras in the Italian musical world of Toscanini’s youth, thus every rehearsal and performance was a struggle first to maintain and then to raise standards. This led to the development (intentional, in my opinion) of Toscanini’s terrifying temper – the only means at his disposal for achieving excellent performances in relatively short periods of time. Life was never easy for the singers or orchestra players who worked with him, much less for Toscanini himself, who came to expect highest-level technical excellence as a point of departure for achieving something much more important, something that we may call ‘expressive truth’. That truth shifted as his ideas about a specific work changed, sometimes radically over the years, but whatever his truth of the moment might have been, he used every means at his disposal to achieve it.

Few complained about his outbursts, because, as Bernard Shore, principal viola of the BBC Symphony Orchestra during the years (1935-39) when Toscanini frequently conducted it, put the matter: ‘Under Toscanini orchestral playing becomes a different art. He stimulates his men, refreshes their minds; and music that has become stale is revived in all its pristine beauty. Rehearsals are looked forward to. There is never a moment of dullness – everything is far too concentrated and vital – nor is there any vain repetition. [His concentration] enables him to live and think the music he is recreating so deeply and intensely that all who are working with him feel drawn to the composer’s very heart. It is a state of mind which blots out everything save the subject desired; he enters into another world, taking the orchestra with him.’

Toscanini was a great lover of painting (a collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century Italian works that belonged to him and/or are by artists with whom he was friendly is on display this winter at Avery Fisher Hall – headquarters of the New York Philharmonic, of which he was once music director), and he occasionally said that he didn’t know whether he loved music or painting better. As he was somewhat timid about speaking foreign languages (he read widely and deeply in English and French, and in German with the help of dictionaries, but spoke the first two incorrectly and the last hardly at all), many non-Italian-speaking people who had contact with Toscanini described him as taciturn or downright uncultivated. We now know that this was not only untrue, but also that he considered broad general culture essential to being a good performing musician. His letters are full of classical and modern literary references, from Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare to Byron, Carducci and Silone, and he devoured books on art, history and the social sciences. In discussing one conductor whose musicianship he respected, Toscanini wrote to a friend: ‘Apart from music, [he] is fearfully ignorant. Go to his house – you won’t find a book, an objet d’art. Apart from those few notes, he doesn’t know a thing – I don’t know anyone who can equal him for lack of cultivation.’

A rich and complicated figure was Arturo Toscanini, and let’s hope that the events connected to this anniversary year will stimulate young musicians and music lovers to become acquainted with his personality and his remarkable and forever valuable recorded legacy. 

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