Arturo Toscanini

Abstract

Thanks to the new media, i.e., record, radio and TV, Arturo Toscanini was the first conductor known by every kind of public in the world. The essay examines Toscanini’s art of conducting in five crucial issues. The foundation of a supranational repertoire of orchestral music enclosing ancient, modern and contemporaneous authors (from Corelli to Strawinsky). The reform of opera house and the paths of maestro in re-thinking the Italian opera after a deep study of Richard Wagner’s Musikdrama. The impressive use of memory in view of a close control of the orchestra (he conducted by heart over 600 scores). The personal, inelegant but effective gesture, by which Toscanini fascinated orchestras in Europe and the USA. The technique of the rehearsals and the reasons why he became a renowned conductor via his inflexibility with the tempo and his uncommon textual fidelity to the score, for which he was considered a living embodiment of the composers and named by some clever critics ‘the neoclassical maestro'. According to several interviews by witnesses, compared to the big amount of RCA records, we can affirm that young Toscanini conducting was “expansive”, vice versa in the last years of his career it became “simpler”.