Toscanini Bio?

[bvy]

I'm interested in reading more about the great maestro, but most of the books I'm stumbling over are either a.) old, or b.) special topics (NBC years, letters of, etc.). Any recommendations for something written fairly recently that provides a good overview of his life and work?

[(poco) Sforzando]

I'm interested in reading more about the great maestro, but most of the books I'm stumbling over are either a.) old, or b.) special topics (NBC years, letters of, etc.). Any recommendations for something written fairly recently that provides a good overview of his life and work?

Joseph Horowitz's "Understanding Toscanini" is quite controversial, with some thinking it's an anti-Toscanini tract (it isn't, IMO) and others thinking it says a lot of interesting things about how music has been packaged and marketed in this country. But it's not your usual coffee-table picture book showing the Maestro in various poses of rage, bliss, etc.

[Szykneij]

I didn't post in the "Collecting books about music" thread, but the truth is that I pick up a lot of books that look intriguing even though I know I won't have the opportunity to read them anytime soon. When my favorite used book store was going out of business, I bought most of the remaining music inventory which included "Toscanini -- An Intimate Portrait" by Samuel Chotzinoff. Published in 1956, it doesn't meet your criteria of new, but it does look like an enjoyable and quick read. I'll try to get to it this weekend and let you know what I think. 

[bvy]

I didn't post in the "Collecting books about music" thread, but the truth is that I pick up a lot of books that look intriguing even though I know I won't have the opportunity to read them anytime soon. When my favorite used book store was going out of business, I bought most of the remaining music inventory which included "Toscanini -- An Intimate Portrait" by Samuel Chotzinoff. Published in 1956, it doesn't meet your criteria of new, but it does look like an enjoyable and quick read. I'll try to get to it this weekend and let you know what I think. 

That would be great. There's also one called "The Magic Baton of..." or some such, written about the same time. I only said "new" because I wanted something that could examine his life and legacy with the benefit of hindsight and the most recent research (for instance, I read that several of his letters were discovered within the past several years).

[Szykneij]

I didn't post in the "Collecting books about music" thread, but the truth is that I pick up a lot of books that look intriguing even though I know I won't have the opportunity to read them anytime soon. When my favorite used book store was going out of business, I bought most of the remaining music inventory which included "Toscanini -- An Intimate Portrait" by Samuel Chotzinoff. Published in 1956, it doesn't meet your criteria of new, but it does look like an enjoyable and quick read. I'll try to get to it this weekend and let you know what I think. 

I finally got a chance to get some reading done and finished this book last night. It deals mainly with the time period Chotzinoff, as a music critic, first met Toscanini in 1926 until the final days of the Maestro's career (the book was published in 1956 and Toscanini died the following year.)

Chotzinoff became a close friend of Toscanini and was an unapologetic admirer of the man. In fact, based on some of the anecdotes related in the book, Chotzinoff seemed almost sycophantic in his efforts to appease and curry favor from the conductor. Despite being written from this point of view, Toscanini comes off as a childish, brash, selfish, and volatile individual, attributes Chotzinoff has no trouble overlooking as a trade-off to Toscanini's genius.

The greatest value in this book, as I see it, is that the title of "Intimate Portrait" is especially apt. The author had an access to Toscanini and his private life that no one else could achieve. It was Chotzinoff who, as an employee of NBC, was charged with creating the NBC Symphony Orchestra and convincing Toscanini to conduct it. When Chotzinoff called back to New York from Milan to say the deal was accepted, all of the details mysteriously appeared in the morning Italian newspapers. Mussolini, the object of Toscanini's extreme hatred, had the Maestro's phone tapped.

This book doesn't meet your request as a good overview, bvy, especially since the conductor's actual work is a minor element of the writing. It is enjoyable reading, though, and would make a nice supplement to the biography you're looking for. As a matter of fact, if you do locate one, let me know because my appetite has become whetted to find out more about the man.

[Cato]

A review in the Wall Street Journal of a new biography of Toscanini:

See:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lesson-of-the-maestro-1503091854

An excerpt:

   I've just been listening to Arturo Toscanini conducting Verdi's "Un Ballo in Maschera" ("A Masked Ball"), the conductor's last complete opera performance, recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1954. Harvey Sachs, in his comprehensive new biography, "Toscanini: Musician of Conscience," describes in detail the process of rehearsal, live performance and post-concert "patching sessions" to correct minor slips in the recordings. The nearly 87-year-old conductor was not in prime health, and there were signs that his phenomenal photographic memory was beginning to fail him...

...listening to it, especially after reading Mr. Sachs's compelling chronicle, I'm once again swept away by Toscanini's forward momentum, in which incisive, brilliant attack and a flowing, singing line are, for a change, complementary and not contradictory. It's that singing line that Toscanini's detractors usually neglect to mention. In a remarkable recording made during a 1946 orchestra rehearsal for Verdi's "La Traviata," the conductor croaks all the vocal parts. It's heartbreaking how much he wants to sing. If he had a beautiful voice, maybe he would have become a singer. But how wonderfully, from the very beginning of his astonishing career, he made the orchestra sing....

...Toscanini's later detractors, especially the German philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno, attacked him for ignoring avant-garde contemporary music, especially the 12-tone compositions of the second Viennese school ( Schoenberg, Berg, Webern). But as Mr. Sachs notes, when Toscanini started out, much of the music he conducted was by composers still living or only recently deceased. He gave the first Italian performances of such daring works as Debussy's "Pelléas et Mélisande" and Strauss's "Salomé." From early on, he was devoted to the music of that German firebrand Richard Wagner, whose music, both operatic and symphonic, became a cornerstone of Toscanini's repertoire. Only a dozen years after Wagner's death, he led the first Italian performance of "Götterdämmerung" and, in 1930, became the first non-German-school conductor to be invited to perform at the Bayreuth Festival, the sanctum sanctorum of Wagnerian opera. By the end of his life, he had conducted a repertoire of more than 600 works....   

[lisa needs braces]

I liked the author of that new Toscanini bio's previous book -- The Ninth: Beethoven and the world in 1824. 

I added his new book to my Amazon wishlist.

[Todd]

Toscanini

Not a full bio, but a nice article from a 1938 issue of The Atlantic.  It covers some stories from different stages of the conductor's career and makes for a fun read.  And just how many cultural articles covering classical music are out there with references to Sherman's army?  One fun quote:

Will Toscanini's genius be recalled as easily as Caruso's?

Hmm.

[Mookalafalas]

A review in the Wall Street Journal of a new biography of Toscanini:

See:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lesson-of-the-maestro-1503091854

An excerpt:

Harvey Sachs wrote a bio of Toscanini in 1978. I read it, and it was a solid, factual, well researched history. He later came into a treasure trove of new data (letters, mostly), and rewrote the whole thing, hence the new bio mentioned above by cato, published in 2017, I think.  I haven't read the new one, and probably won't, but I'd imagine it is as detailed a one as we will ever see (if that is what you are looking for).

[j winter]

I have the newer Harvey Sachs bio, I haven't really dived into it yet but plan to soon.  Based on appearances and a few reviews it seems like it will be quite extensive, probably more detail than I need strictly speaking, but hopefully will be an entertaining read...