“On the night of June 30, 1886, Arturo Toscanini—recently turned 19—arrived, barely on time, at the imperial opera house in Rio de Janeiro, where the touring company for which he was the principal cellist was about to perform ‘Aida.’ Pandemonium,” writes Robert Gottlieb in Tuesday’s (6/27) New York Times, reviewing Harvey Sach’s new Toscanini: Man of Conscience. “The unpopular lead conductor had resigned in a huff. … Toscanini, who was also assistant choral master, was thrust forward by his colleagues. … He was handed a baton and just started to conduct. A triumph! … For the remaining six weeks of the tour, Harvey Sachs tells us in his biography Toscanini: Musician of Conscience, the maestro led the orchestra in 26 performances of 12 operas, all from memory. … One of the things that led Sachs to write a second biography of Toscanini, more than twice as long as his first (published in 1978), was the new availability of huge archives of documents and letters … The letters cover an immense range of musical, political and personal matters… The trajectory of Toscanini’s artistic path constitutes the main body of Sachs’s biography, and he gives us an extremely thorough chronicle of his activities and achievements. … Sachs’s account of Toscanini’s career is persuasive and compelling in the important ways.”
Posted June 28, 2017
