Toscanini at his best

 So I'm gonna slam Toscanini hard but then I'm going to effusively praise him. If you think you'll take offense, read at your peril...

For those of us who generally dislike Toscanini, the reason is deceptively simple. It's not just that it's all so rigid and drilled, it's that in all that discipline, you can hear the maestro's rage and the orchestra's terror. Toscanini hews closer to the score than 90% of conductors generally do, but he does not follow the score closely enough to justify the grating, hectoring, ugly unpleasantness of so many performances.

But that said, Toscanini has many moments when his better angels overcome him, moreso than other podium tyrants, and clearly had some measure of humanity underneath the baton-breaking arrogance; and his greatness never moreso apparent than in the place for which he was best known and for which we have relatively little record of what he did: the opera pit.

Even Toscanini's live opera recordings were mostly done as concert broadcasts, and that's why the documents of what he did in mid-30s Salzburg are so valuable. Opera conducting is a completely different animal from even concert opera. So many thousands of variables happen at every moment of an opera that no conductor can possibly control their vast majority. In the concert hall, he imposes a vision from which not a single musician may diverge, and that's not a demonstration of his vision, that's a demonstration of his ego. But in the opera pit, you can never do that, you simply have to get on with the business of making the show go on. You make adjustments to singers capabilities in the moment, and everything moves forward before a conductor can put his controlling hands on every variable.

For me, this is why so many of the sargeant-maestri were so much more convincing when we hear them live in the opera house: Toscanini, Szell, Solti, Leinsdorf... In the chaos of live opera recordings, strict order like theirs is always helpful, but in the concert hall, so great is a conductor's control that they can repress the ability of their musicians to take any joy in their performance.

As well as I'm sure Toscanini knew his orchestral repertoire, he had far more and deeper experience in the opera house. Concert hall dates were an occasional thing he did, but he didn't have a permanent concert hall position until his sixties. Opera was simply the lifeblood of his career, and he knew every corner of the basic operatic repertoire in his bones. It's great that we have so much of his Verdi, whether concert or opera form, but we can only wish we had so much more of his repertoire from this conductor who conducted Italian premieres of everything from Wagner's complete Ring (I think...), to Onegin and Boris, to the world premieres of Pagliacci, Fanciulla del West, and Turandot.

Wagner particularly is the corner of the repertoire we need more of - the Met Tristan that supposedly exceeded even Mahler's, the Bayreuth Parsifal whose slowness exceeded Knappertsbusch's, the Lohengrin whose Act I prelude made a larger impression on him than nearly any music on earth.

Short of the 1949 Jochum/Hotter Meistersinger, I wonder if there's ever been a better Meistersinger than this on record. Obviously the sound is bad, but the feeling of this event comes through - a Meistersinger means something: a last stand in Austria for German culture as something for everyone and not just for Nuremberg rallies. So many cultural luminaries were in the audience from Stefan Zweig to Isaiah Berlin. It means as much as the pre-Anschluss Walter Mahler 9.

Isaiah Berlin would write about going to Salzburg in the 30s, and how at the time, everyone worshipped Toscanini as the world's greatest cultural hero - a liberal who stood up to tyranny and used his immense privilege to speak up for the underdog. Sadly like many liberals, he was not always inclined to practice what he preached, but he nevertheless has to be celebrated for what he was: perhaps the greatest opera conductor there has ever been, a champion of underdogs and a once progressive promoter of new music (at least circa 1900).

The Toscanini of the 30s is a different conductor than the Toscanini of the 40s and 50s. American mass media had yet to truly exploit his mythos, and he was still regularly conducting the opera repertoire he most had in his bones. This is the Toscanini I try to remember, and for me, the Salzburg operas are perhaps the finest document we have of what his art was like at his obviously titanic best.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPWBA73DoOY