The Toscanini Legacy

...During the 1970s, he resolutely fed New Yorkers a diet of Schoenberg and Webern, and they just as resolutely sat on their hands or stayed home...

...music within the classical Western tradition) must regard our present situation with feelings of concern, perplexity and, possibly, despair...

...Reputable commentators called him a "prophet and priest of art" who achieved " miracles of phrasing and tone...

...Otherwise, explanations of the public's coolness have to be concocted that hinge ultimately on some kind of conspiracy...

...So long as the hucksterism remains within the (admittedly elastic) bounds of truth and taste, it is hard to see why cultural figures should not advertise themselves much as professional athletes and movie stars do...

...Fulfilling a destiny he could neither foresee nor control," writes Horowitz, "Toscanini was made music's golden calf...

...indeed, the pages analyzing the Maestro's vaunted "objectivity" are, to my mind, the finest in the book...

...Thus, Deutsche Grammophon described Herbert von Karajan's fourth...

...His taste set the standard down to the present, directing concert-goers firmly toward the past: "Before Toscanini, no conductor of comparable prominence had so concentrated on what was already old and familiar...

...Rather than perform the Party anthem at La Scala, he publicly broke his baton and stormed of f. On another occasion, Fascist toughs in Bologna assaulted him because of his unconcealed opposition to Mussolini...

...In an era of thriving dictators, Toscanini, the son of aGaribaldi supporter, was a staunch and outspoken democrat...

...He displayed a different type of bravery after Italy went Fascist in the 1920s...

...Toscanini's redundant Beethoven and Weber, Dvorák and Elgar were as instantly and effortlessly preoccupying as a drawn six-shooter at the movies or a three-and-two count, bases loaded, at the ballpark...

...In music, the obvious choice for a symbol was the man most responsible for bringing the classics to them...

...During the early part of the century, the U.S...

...Another was a new craving for Culture on the part of the public that bespoke the insecure arriviste no less than the inquisitive innocent...

...Yet there is an assumption here that doesn't hold up— namely, that if audiences had been given the chance to hear modern (classical) music, they would have accepted and supported it...

...The ghost of Oswald Spengler beckons...

...Americans pursued refinement as never before, both for genuine and affected reasons...

...Works by Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner made up 40 per cent of his programs during his 11 Philharmonic seasons...

...The result is a volume whose title says it all, or at least more than a title usually does—Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (Knopf, 492 pp., $30.00...

...Horowitz' argument is intriguing and credible, though he overstates it when he says, with his nose somewhat higher in the air than it should be: "To many a lay listener, who turned the radio dial to the NBC Symphony via Your Hit Parade...

...Toscanini was one of the foremost conductors of his time, winning near-unanimous praise...

...It has been approximately 75 years since Schoenberg gave music its decisive push away from tonality...

...Not the music, but the performer and the performance were new...

...Conspiracy theories, though, are rarely correct and usually unhealthy, driving their proponents to ever more extreme pronouncements in the face of an obstinate reality...

...During World War I he gave concerts to Italian troops at the front, receiving a decoration for bravery under fire...

...It is the legacy of this extraordinarily influential figure that, says the author, accounts for classical music's current torpor...

...Born in 1948, he served as a New York Times music critic from 1976 to 1980, and for the last six years has been program director for New York's Kaufmann Concert Hall, winning an ASCAP Deems Taylor award in 1983 for his writing...

...Clearly, theToscanini phenomenon represented something larger than music...

...only 13 per cent were under 35...

...When Hitler came to power in Germany, Toscanini protested Jewish persecution and turned down an invitation to conduct at Bayreuth...

...Above all, they sought out personalities to revere who embodied creative genius...

...Joseph Horowitz has spent his entire career observing this dispiriting spectacle...

...He emerged, Horowitz notes, at a time when American audiences demanded a classical-music figurehead...

...Children consider Mozart and Beethoven boring, associating the great symphonic achievements with middle age and "elevator music...

...Yet ability alone cannot explain the cult that developed around him...

...After Toscanini, his example became the norm...

...In fact, I have practically stopped attending musical events at the Metropolitan Opera, Avery Fisher Hall, and the New York State Theater...

...Never has the orchestral, concert-going world seemed so removed from everyday American life...

...His iconoclasm has grown with time, and he is not afraid to express it...

...Phonograph companies, having already recorded every great work and warhorse several times, are trying any marketing device available to force a few more drops into an oversaturated sponge...

...Politics was a factor...

...Rather than by a democracy, high culture is propagated by a benign conservative dictatorship...

...Toscanini helped his reputation along by playing on the media, presenting a public image of himself as an affable, unpretentious self-made man...

...Classical albums as a portion of total record sales show a similar decline, shrinking from 25 per cent after World War II to 5 per cent today...

...Where others feared to tread, he rushed in—courageously, heroically...

...Lincoln Center and the mini-Lincoln Centers it has spawned across the country are at best museums engaged in preservation, at worst modern-day cathedrals where auditory ceremonies are ritualistically performed to little and long-forgotten purpose...

...These commendations are examples not of meaningful criticism but of criticism run off the rails, a kind of esthetic delirium...

...Horowitz doesn't like the musical Establishment, or the hype surrounding superstars like Itzhak Perlman and Luciano Pavarotti, or the repetitive blandness of the standard repertoire...

...The definitive experiment in trying to win an audience for modern music may have occurred under one of Toscanini's successors at the Philharmonic, Pierre Boulez...

...In the end, however, the Toscanini cult cannot be explained strictly on the basis of the conductor himself...

...Taking a cue from a concept of Dwight Macdonald, he identifies Lincoln Center as a temple of midcult, diluting and prepackaging serious work to make it accessible to the unserious masses...

...They joined the Book-of-the-Month Club...

...A1982 survey revealed a majority of the New York Philharmonic's audience to be 55 years old or more...

...At the height of his fame, from the 1930s to his death in 1957, he was said to be as well-known as Joe DiMaggio, "an object of unmitigated veneration" in Horowitz' words, far outdistancing rivals like Serge Koussevitzky and Leopold Stokowski...

...Eliot to Alfred Stieglitz...

...rendition of the Beethoven symphonies, which it began releasing in 1985, asa "milestone in recording history," and urged purchasers to "study in depth" the "nuances of expression between one version and another...

...in Van Wyck Brooks' phrase, it was "coming of age...

...In such empty connoisseurship resides the desperation of decadence...

...During the War, as Americans were dying in the struggle against Fascism, the sight of him on the podium leading Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the "Victory Symphony, Act I," inspired nothing less than adoration among his audiences...

...Horowitz explains that "my topic is less Toscanini than the manner in which he was perceived, procured, appreciated, marketed and used...

...Horowitz' version begins with Toscanini and is perpetuated by the musical Establishment: "Rather than being democratically selected, great music is preselected for the demos...

...Unlike German conductors such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, who came out of a Romantic tradition stressing harmonic structure and inwardness, Toscanini emphasized precision, propulsion and linearity, precisely the qualities to appeal to a public whose musical background consisted of popular songs...

...Five years ago, Horowitz undertook to examine classical music's problems by focusing on the most influential serious musician of the century, the former conductor of the New York Philharmonic and NBC Symphony, Arturo Toscanini...

...Viewers of the Public Broadcasting System's Great Performances series are even older...

...Even today, Toscanini's actions command admiration...

...There is something here for almost everyone and toward the end, when Horowitz discusses the Toscanini legacy, drawing (unhappy) conclusions, important and provocative questions are raised with the speed of a TV game show...

...This is not quite true, since a considerable number of pages are devoted to tracing the conductor's life, particularly his years in the United States...

...Horowitz doesn't care for this marketing of a musical personality, any more than he approves of Pavarotti doing American Express ads, but in a post-Warholian age there is a certain old-maidish primness to his objections...

...The fact is that in the three decades since Toscanini's death, the public has had countless opportunities, and those atonal wheezes and squeaks have almost always sent it fleeing from the halls...

...Horowitz is on more solid ground explaining how Toscanini's style of conducting contributed to building his audience...

...In creating his "new audience for old music," Toscanini offered a severely restricted canon of masterpieces, rooted in 19th-century Germany...

...modern music, including compositions by Americans, was neglected to the point ofdismissal...

...But Horowitz does lead his readers on brisk, informed tours of, among other subjects, post-World War II orchestras and performers, changes in styles of conducting in this century, the policies of record companies, and the influence of the media on American listening habits...

...The major problem with Understanding Toscanini is that it opens the door to misunderstanding modern music—and much else besides...

...Much of the story is told through lengthy quotations from contemporary critics and other sources, giving the book a frequently plodding and clunky quality...

...critic of the 1920s and '30s who is cited approvingly by Horowitz for his minority views on Toscanini, having grown dyspeptic at the state of American music, concluded: "Our whole contemporary esthetic attitude toward instrumental music, especially in New York, is dominated by Jewish tastes and standards, with their Oriental extravagance, their sensuous brilliancy and intellectual facility and superficiality, their general tendency to exaggeration and disproportion...

...His enthusiasts lapped it up...

...The number of music teachers in the New York City public schools has dropped from 2,200 to 793 since 1974, and the home piano is on the way to becoming an endangered species, falling from 365,000 in 1909 to 151,000 in 1985, despite a larger population...

...One side of this growing cosmopolitanism was an increasing sophistication among the country's artists, from T.S...

...One leading U.S...

...Ossification, meanwhile, threatens purveyors of the art...

...was shedding its cultural parochialism...

...The refusal made the front page of the New York Times...

...Hewas"amanof really transcendental genius," "the greatest musical interpreter who ever lived," "a law unto himself...

...They enrolled in art-appreciation courses...

...How long will it be before Horowitz and others like him are ready to concede it was a push in the wrong direction...