Toscanini Doing Boito

 You'd see this and first you'd think it's AI. Somehow, this is not AI. Just the sound alone can tell you that... Toscanini barely did anything in Italy after World War II, but somehow he did both operas of Boito, or at least the vast majority of them.

Ironically, half of this music is by Toscanini himself, who basically wrote Act IV of Nerone from scratch after Boito died with it incomplete.

It is such a shame that Boito, fundamentally a literary man, didn't write more music. Unfortunately he was temperamentally unsuited to Italy in the generation of Puccini, and the world got only 1 3/4 of his more original conception of opera than Puccini's hit factory. Puccini is and/or can be great, don't get me wrong. I would not put him as a top 50 of all time, but at the same time, if you don't love Puccini, something is wrong with you. It's like Spielberg or Alexandre Dumas: even if we may be pushing it by calling it great art, you would have to be senseless to not warm to the greatness of that stuff.

But Boito, had he figured himself out, would have been a true successor to Wagner: as surely both he and Leoncavallo meant to be. It's not that they lacked the talent or the originality, but the sheer size of such enterprise makes it far more difficult to get things written. Boito finished Mephisto at 26, finished revising it at 33. By the time he finished revising the first three acts of Nerone, he was 73. How many operas might Verdi have polished off with those intervening 40 years? How many music dramas would Wagner have gotten through?

The problem, as always, is importantitis. Verdi just wanted to write opera, the music flowed, and the importance was ultimately tacked on by others. That wasn't enough for Boito: the paradox of 'unnatural' or 'sentimental' composers like Boito or Leoncavallo (or even Berlioz) is that they were literary men before they were musicians, and their imaginations only worked when they had a project in mind, and the projects were often daunting, even unrealizable. It depended on an imagination working that would not always cooperate in the manner that a natural composer like Verdi would never have trouble with. Wagner was the model for them, but Wagner was... well... he was a psychopath who subordinated whole countries to his will. You're never going to subordinate whole countries before you subordinate yourself, and Wagner became Wagner by exhibiting iron will in the pursuit of producing operas that were about iron will.

That is not Boito, and sadly, his greatest achievements will always be remembered as Otello and Falstaff: great as they are, he was capable of more. Much more. But he needed proper support. He needed patronage in a country where opera was extremely commercial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnuWBYE7MOY&fbclid=IwY2xjawUC0FBwZG9mBWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAHNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR5CExekXYaBwkZFZfp4qPUaSDk1yD0yNvnC9M2Fl_dCj0fGsFoXlJonRYzItw_aem_apgh-p7-cmI5fPuVtfgTrg