Understanding Toscanini
Horowitz, Joseph
UNDERSTANDING TOSCANINI: HOW HE BECAME AN AMERICAN CULTURE-GOD AND HELPED CREATE A NEW AUDIENCE FOR OLD MUSIC Joseph Horowitz/Alfred A. Knopf/$30.00 R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. F or over one hundred...
...Finally, he seems to depreciate even the masters, and then only because in past decades middle-class audiences whooped it up for them...
...Any American of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s who pursued women with Toscanini's ardent inveteracy would have been incarcerated as a sex maniac...
...In America what past remains preservable goes back only a couple of centuries and has almost no bearing on the present...
...Horowitz cannot get over it...
...Adorno's last days...
...In Rome there live families that go back to the time of the Caesars and do little else...
...Horowitz insists that Toscanini, the son of a Parmesan tailor, educated and raised in Italy, is typically American...
...I wish he had...
...The mystery is why -Mr...
...jointed and cruelly repetitive...
...Hence, he explains art and life in America by resorting to such gloomy theoreticians as thelate Dwight Macdonald, a radical journalist, and the nonsensical German Marxist, T. W. Adorno, a New Left sage whose work I had thought was interred with his unhappy bones...
...In Understanding Toscanini he has gathered up fascinating pieces of information about the legendary conductor of the New York Philharmonic and the NBC symphony...
...Nonetheless, he offers us no reasons why Toscanini should have, and he is disappointingly coy about identifying the moderns...
...His problem is that he is a arty to that camorra of shanty intent tuals who believe that to be serious about art, or for that matter about life, one has to be painful on the subject...
...A man of Mr...
...It should have remained an essay...
...Horowitz, however, disapproves of lechery and so he chalks it up to Toscanini's being so very American...
...To blame the decline on an obviously successful conductor from the past rather than the conductors, composers, critics, and impresarios of the present is an intellectually slovenly exercise in advancing an unproved hypothesis...
...As a book it is incondite: dis42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987...
...Serious art has nothing like this kind of presence in middle-class America today...
...His book grows out of a Music Journal article written nine years ago to provoke Toscaninilovers...
...Think of Dr...
...Was this all that bad...
...Horowitz is a respected critic in the field I cannot stifle the suspicion that his impossible standards have something to do with the decline...
...When Toscanini was in his heyday Life magazine claimed that he was as famous as Joe DiMaggio...
...Adorno filled lecture halls with the intolerable nonsense that he wrote in his tracts, I cannot fault them for trying to give him a rise...
...I do not know what provoked these naughty frauleins, but if Dr...
...The morbidity that afflicts so many of today's shanty intelligentsia, destroying their relish for art and turning joie de vivre into endless sneers, can be traced to such lugubrious charlatans as Macdonald and Dr...
...Had Mr...
...In 1969 Der Spiegel caught a glimpse of the old boy at Frankfurt University during a demonstration of "planned tenderness" in which three revolutionary cuties from the "Basisgruppe Soziologie" circled the sixty-five-yearold Professor Adorno while he lectured, "at first waving their bouquets of flowers [!], then kissing him, exposing their breasts, and confronting him with erotic pantomime...
...In Paris there are still streets dating from the Middle Ages...
...Both of these charlatans were assiduous promoters of the idea that art must cause painful cerebrations after which the truly enlightened discover that everything, particularly in America, is a scam...
...In fact I wish he had rewritten that sentence...
...Thus the patient writes: "More than Europeans, Americans abhor elitism and apply democratic values with broad strokes...
...Horowitz cannot establish a connection between Toscanini's career and the decline of P serious music in America...
...He is angry at Toscanini for his superiority...
...He reproaches Toscanini for playing the masters rather than the moderns...
...Horowitz read these words and become a streaker I would understand...
...Tourists take pictures of them...
...Horowitz quotes Adorno as having written, "is not one which resolves objective contradictions in spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure...
...Horowitz grinds his ax...
...They may not be able to write a minuet that anyone would listen to tomorrow, but they are fluent in devising theories of aleatoric dissonance bound to take in a man like Mr...
...Horowitz does demonstrate is that media moguls, impresarios, and soap salesmen, along with Toscanini, made large amounts of money by coaxing ordinary Americans into orchestra halls...
...They have to have it all explained to them, and the more abstruse the theory the more convincing they assume it must be...
...Professor Adorno, who had called in the police last semester when 76 student radicals occupied his Institute for Social Research, tried to protect himself with his briefcase . . ." Soon thereafter Dr...
...Horowitz does not try to convince me...
...Modern art has fallen into the paws of theorists, who, like Adorno, are mostly frauds...
...But that does not stop the likes of Joseph Horowitz, a music critic, from being very cross about America's comparative callowness...
...But America is not Paris, and Mr...
...Of course Toscanini's passion for the fair sex was distinctly Mediterranean...
...Adorno departed for his Marxist happy hunting grounds...
...In the realm of music, the nineteenth-century rise of the public concert and commercialization of opera here proceeded without court or state subsidies—a circumstance R. Emmett Tjirrell, Jr...
...is editor-in-chief of The American Spectator...
...favoring both personal enterprise and marketplace exigencies...
...It contains solecisms such as "the hoi polloi," misinformation such as "Antonino Rocca, and other Italo-American fighters," and arguments that would not persuade a self-professed cat's-paw...
...He has also lugged in illuminating details about the growth of pioneering American orchestras, American audiences, and the amazing evolution of broadcasting, recording, music composition and criticism...
...At one point, to argue one or another variation of his thesis, which is the old canard about the corrupting process of the dollar, Mr...
...A successful [art]work," Mr...
...f course, serious music is indeed in sorrier condition today than it was in Toscanini's time, and bearing in mind that Mr...
...I am not sure that it has, and Mr...
...Horowitz obviously appreciates serious music and possesses an enormous amount of knowle e about it...
...Adorno...
...Reality cannot illuminate Mr...
...Nothing can be done about this lamentable defect...
...There are unhappy souls who are incapable of wonder...
...He is angry at the middle class for its mediocrity...
...Horowitz's presumed good taste would have rewritten it as surely as he would have paused to demonstrate the Europeans' superiority at promoting (I dare not say selling) serious music...
...All Mr...
...Alas, this was unfortunate, for the resulting "cult of personality, dragging high culture downward, has for over a century more dramatically articulated the musical scene here than abroad...
...Horowitz's gloomy anti-American thesis or restrain him from undercutting himself...
...That he read them and wrote a book based on the author's insights puts him beyond sympathy...
...The greenness of America is for many otherwise intelligent minds, both here and over there, a source of schizophrenia, which is a serious mental illness...
...and he goes on to scorn Toscanini's tireless skirt-chasing...
...For over 400 gruesome pages Mr...
...F or over one hundred years or so it has been this Republic's defect not to be 1500 years older, with ancient families of noble lineage, hoary and daunting traditions, and all the ruins seen in lands long inhabited by sophisticated cultures...
...Actually life is full of wonders...
...Horowitz needs theory, and why a man so concerned about being taken in by Toscanini's barkers would allow himself to be taken in by the New Left, nearly two decades after it blew up...
Vol. 20 • May 1987 • No. 5
