A day to celebrate freedom

Arturo Toscanini was born on March 25, 1867, in Parma, Italy. Happy birthday Maestro! March 25 is also Independence Day and a national holiday in Greece commemorating the 1821 uprising against the occupying Turks that ended with the birth of an independent modern Greece in 1832. It is wonderfully appropriate that Toscanini's birthday and Greek Independence Day fall together as he was a conductor who hated compromise.

Sadly the Greek struggle for independence did not end in 1832, and in the twentieth-century it had to endure invasions by the fascist forces of Italy and Germany, the subsequent Civil War and a military junta. Here are the words of that great folk hero, activist and composer, Mikis Theodorakis, who fought on the side of right in all three conflicts.

So far death has only been defeated by art. All those who tried to reach immortality through violence, power or money have failed. There is no temporal dimension to immortality. Its distinguishing mark is one of quality, a strong sensation. Only art can convey the feeling of being immortal for three seconds.

My header image is the poster for Constantin Costa-Gravas' legendary 1969 film 'Z' which was a barely fictionalised account of the assassination in 1963 of the Greek socialist politician Gregoris Lambrakis. The film and its soundtrack by Theodorakis, became an international symbol of opposition to the Greek military junta, read more about it here. Although out of print copies of Theodorakis' important book Journals of Resistance can still be found. Read it together with Thomas Merton's Passion for Peace, then wonder where are the twenty-first century equivalents?

Now playing - Mikis Theodorakis' own recording of his Requiem (below), which is quite appropriate as March 25 is also the Feast of the Annunciation. My quote above is from the composer's notes for the CD release. More about Theodorakis' Requiem here.


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The conductor who hated compromise

"Futile to await your letter my decision is final. I have only one way of thinking and acting. I hate compromise. I walk and I shall always walk on the straight path that I have traced for myself in life. Cordial greetings." - Cable from Arturo Toscanini to Bruno Walter about Toscanini's refusal to conduct in Salzburg in 1938 because of the links between the German and Austrian Governments.

Photograph from Berlin 1932 is an interesting case study in compromise. Follow the links to find out how they stood the test. From left to right Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini, Erich Kleiber, Otto Klemperer and Wilhelm Furtwängler.
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Art born out of rebellion and dissatisfaction

Email received ~ 'Hi: I have a Xmas card from Toscanini to Ernst Krenek, sent Xmas 1946. I find this an odd connection & wonder if you know something I don't. Toscanini's handwriting is hard to read, but I am an autograph dealer & used to hard-to-write handwritings. It is in "broken" English however. The card also has a photo of Toscanini looking at a photo of Beethoven laid on. Underneath the photo there is a musical quotation from Beethoven's 9th Symphony with the words: "Seid umschlungen, Millionen! Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!" penned by Toscanini. There is also a note to Krenek from Toscanini thanking him for a wonderful gift & wishing him & Madame Krenek a happy New Year. So the plot thickens with the Beethoven association. Any ideas of how this connects?
Thanks,Joyce.'

Joyce, my solution is the following. Toscanini and Krenek were linked through the 1934 Salzburg declaration. In this, a young Viennese musician, Paul Csonka, started a movement which has some contemporary resonances ... "against conventional opera, conventionally produced and enslaved by the star system. Our hope was to introduce the arts of the theatre into opera from which they have been divorced, these many years, all over the world." Both Toscanini and Krenek signed the declaration, see the full story below reproduced from Time in November 1937.

The story of Paul Csonka is an extraordinary one, and deserves an article to itself. He was rumored to be the illegitimate son of Kaiser Franz Joseph, and fled from Austria after the Anschluss. He settled in Cuba, where he built the Opera Nacional de Havana and composed. After the 1958 revolution he left Cuba for Miami where he became creative director of Palm Beach Opera. Csonka also taught, and the young composers he worked with included Richard Danielpour. He once won $11,000 on a TV quiz show, his subject was opera. Paul Csonka died in 1995 in Palm Beach aged ninety.

The quotation on the Christmas card is from Schiller's Ode to Joy , and translates as 'Be embraced, you millions! This kiss for the whole world!'. It seems to reflect the sentiments of the 1934 Salzburg declaration, and would have been sent to Krenek when he was living in Cuba - he became a citizen in 1947. That's my take, other solutions to the link between Toscanini and Krenek are very welcome. Here is the 1937 Time story:

''Our company was born out of rebellion and dissatisfaction, in the summer of 1934. Our rebellion was against conventional opera, conventionally produced and enslaved by the star system. Our hope was to introduce the arts of the theatre into opera from which they have been divorced, these many years, all over the world. Toscanini, Klemperer, Stefan Zweig and Ernst Krenek listened to our declarations. A proclamation of artistic independence was drawn up and subscribed to by these men. They all signed it. and Toscanini remarked: 'Nothing is ever being done for the real opera—only words, never action. But perhaps,' he added with a smile, 'this will be the real thing.' "

Thus does a young Viennese named Paul Csonka (photo above), who assembled a troupe of young singers in 1934, explain what he set out to do. For six months in a quiet Tyrolese village his troupe rehearsed one opera, Mozart's Cosi fan tutte. After a season in Vienna, Csonka moved it to Salzburg, though it had no connection with the summer music festivals, and adopted the name, Salzburg Opera Guild. Last summer, rehearsing twelve hours a day in a rented castle at Mondsee near Salzburg, the Guild increased its repertory of operas. Last week, under the management of astute S. (for Sol) Hurok, the Guild made its Manhattan debut, first stop in a tour of 100 U. S. cities.

With Cosi fan tutte ("They all do it") as its opener, the Guild showed that, though it could not do much for the vocal side of opera, it could, theatrically, provide as agreeable a romp as anything that had been sung on a Manhattan stage in years. Viennese Theo Otto's frivolous set and gay 18th-Century costumes—worn by opera singers who for once looked perfectly at home in them—made a completely plausible background for Mozart's tale of deception which proves that all women are fickle.

The starless cast of the Salzburg Guild included: pretty Soprano Margarethe Menzel, 24, who once played the piano in a Viennese ladies' orchestra; pretty Contralto Hertha Glatz, 27, who has sung with the San Francisco Symphony; pretty Coloratura Soprano Marisa Merlo. so flip on the stage that audiences might not guess that she once nearly got herself to a nunnery; roly-poly Basso Alfred Hollander, once of the able German Theatre in Brunn, Czechoslovakia; Baritone Leo Weith, who sang the title role in the world premiere of Schwanda der Dudelsackpfeifer; Tenor Franco Perulli, onetime protege of Tenor Tito Schipa.

The Guild's repertory for its tour is balanced between the gay and the sombre: La Cambiale di Matrimonio ("The Matrimonial Market"), Rossini's first operatic work, an opera-buffa composed when he was 18; Angelique, music by contemporary Frenchman Jacques Ibert, the story of a shopkeeper's efforts to sell his shrewish wife; Le Pauvre Matelot, a "lament in one act," music by Darius Milhaud. libretto by Jean Cocteau, in which a woman kills a sailor, unaware that he is her husband who has returned after 15 years' absence. This week the Guild gives the first professional performance in the U. S. of L'Incoronazione di Poppea, an antique forerunner of modern opera, composed by Claudio Monteverdi and given its debut in Venice in 1642. The work has been reconstructed from its fragmentary original score by Ernst Krenek, best known in the U. S. for his jazz opera Jonny Spielt Anf, and as conductor of the Monteverdi work making his first visit to the U. S.

Now read the full story of Jonny Spielt Anf
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Happy Birthday Maestro Toscanini!

Arturo Toscanini was born on 25th March 1867 in Parma, Italy. My photograph shows him celebrating while on tour in the US in May, 1950. The photo was taken at Sun Valley, Idaho, where the maestro conducted an impromptu band of toy guitars, wash-tubs, and a clarinet for a refreshingly multi-cultural audience.

Now listen as the maestro conducts a real orchestra (after a brief Finnish introduction) in the complete Prelude to the third act of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg in November 1951. The orchestra is Toscanini's own NBC Symphony, and the recording was made in Carnegie Hall, where the orchestra and its conductor can be seen in my picture below -


Toscanini's Wagner may have been sublime, but his opposition to fascism was trenchant, read about it here. And for another Toscanini download take An Overgrown Path to Schoenberg on Toscanini Audio file credit YLE Radio 1, NBC Symphony from Wikipedia/NBC TV. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Schoenberg on Toscanini

"One of the biggest phenomena in my time was Toscanini. England, for one, certainly went crazy for him - so much so that he was an absolute pest as far as I was concerned. First and foremost, I did not like his conducting. I have to give him credit for the fact that he got an incredible clarity out of the orchestra. But it was absolutely without humanity, even rigid. If Toscanini had been in one hall and Beecham in another I would have gone to see Beecham any day. Toscanini seemed to have a power over people and could do no wrong. On one occasion he snatched the camera from a journalist, threw it to the ground, and stamped on it!

However it was more than ones' life was worth to criticize Toscanini or to say you didn't like him. You would have to defend yourself to a degree that I didn't feel like doing. One summer I was doing a summer school in Santa Barbara, California with Schoenberg. One day I gathered my courage and asked him, "Arnold, what do you think of Toscanini?" And he spat and said, "That bandmaster," with a great deal of derision in his voice. He went on to tell me that Toscanini had received all his musical training in military school, which explained everything."

Now listen to a 15 minute MP3 file of "that bandmaster" conducting Beethoven (after a brief Finnish introduction) "without humanity" and make up your own mind -

The quote above is taken from A Cellists Life by Griller Quartet cellist Colin Hampton. It is a fascinating read which roams across a wide range of composers. About Ernst Bloch he writes: "His string quartet No 1 is to me one of the great works in this world. It was a logical conclusion, as far as I am concerned, to the Beethoven quartets. I would put Bloch in front of Schubert and Brahms anytime."

Ernest Bloch is one of those unfortunate composers branded by a single work, in his case Schelomo (which I have to confess I wouldn't shed a tear if I didn't ever hear again). His string quartets, which inhabit a sound world somewhere between Shostakovich and Schoenberg, are very different, and something of a challenge, with the first lasting for almost an hour. But they are most certainly great works which reward exploration. And the recent re-issue of Colin Hampton and his colleagues in the Griller Quartet playing Bloch's four string quartets gives us a chance to explore and reappraise these neglected works.

The sound from these mono 1954 Decca studio recordings is staggeringly good. The producer is my old boss from my EMI days, Peter Andry, recorded when he was at Decca. I was talking to a violin playing friend about why early recordings such as this have such a good string tone. (The various Artur Grumiaux recordings on Philips are another outstanding example). His view was that it is not the recording technology that has gone backwards (although some would argue that is also the case), but rather that string playing technique has evolved to a leaner, more analytical sound. If that is so it is a shame, and may explain why so-called 'authentic instrument' recordings with their gutsy string tone are so popular (I was listening to the Salomon Quartet recordings of Mozart using original instrunents on Hyperion the other night, thinking what fantastic sound the players were producing) .

A book remains to be written about the Griller Quartet, who based on these recordings deserve their place up their with the Amadeus and Hollywood in the pantheon of all time great quartets (I must explore their Mozart and Haydn on Dutton). John Amis writes in his autobiographical 'Amiscellany': "Later the Grillers went to the States, their stay their ending in stark tragedy when an internal homosexual fracas ended in denunciation to the police and sudden death, at which point the always happily married Sidney Griller came back to England."

* A Cellist's Life by Colin Hampton is published by Back Stage Books, ISBN 1890490350
* MP3 file of Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony in the adagio molto e cantabile from Beethoven's 9th symphony from the superb Finnish national radio station YLE Radio 1, many more wonderful audio files there - do visit.

If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to Discovered - the online Arnold Schoenberg jukebox
Image credit: Schoenberg from Education musicale au collège Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Treasure trove of historic MP3 downloads

The Finnish national broadcaster YLE Radio 1 has the most extraordinary treasure trove of historic MP3 downloads on their website. I can't even list the riches available, but the artists include Dinu Lipatti, Pablo Casals, Alfred Cortot, Kirsten Flagstad , Yehudi Menuhin, Arturo Toscanini, and many, many more. There are lots of downloads for each artist, and the technical quality is very good. The whole site is in Finnish, but navigation is intuitive. Just select the artist from the left hand side list, then select the Real Audio or MP3 hyperlink under the composition. Each download has a spoken introduction of around 20 seconds in Finnish, but don't let that put you off.

This is an extraordinary discovery. I am listening to Toscanini conducting the adagio molto e cantabile from Beethoven's 9th as I write - beautiful. Here is the link, and many thanks to reader Walt Santner for the heads-up.

Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to Discovered - the online Arnold Schoenberg jukebox

'Glorious John' in New York

'Barbirolli's appointment was announced by the New York Philharmonic Society's directorial board on 7th April 1936. The musical world rubbed incredulous eyes. Barbirolli, said the announcement, was to open the forthcoming season, conducting twenty-six concerts out of a season's total of eighty-four. In much newspaper comment the following day surprise verged on perplexity. Nobody had heard of John Barbirolli. The official statement carried a hundred or two words of biographical matter which fed without satisfying. Not a line in the newspaper morgues. Not a word in the New York Times' elephantine index, a fact about which the New York Times did not omit to exclaim.

The New York Philharmonic was the greatest orchestra in the world. Every New Yorker knew that. There were people in Vienna, Berlin, London and Milan who knew it as well. What sense was there in giving the New York Philharmonic to a man who had never been on an American front page before or, so far as could be made out, on any front page of moment anywhere?' From John Barbirolli by Charles Read, published 1971

John Giovanni Batista Barbirolli was born in London in 1899 to a musical family. His father and grandfather were leading Italian violinists, and his mother was French. After studying at the Royal Academy of Music he started his career as a cellist with leading London orchestras, and was the soloist in an early performance of Elgar's Cello Concerto. He was also an acclaimed opera conductor who worked with the British National Opera and Covent Garden Companies. In 1933 he was appointed permanent conductor of the Scottish National Orchestra, and it was while holding this position that he received a cablegram from Arthur Judson, manager of the New York Philharmonic, inviting him to a ten week try out for the permanent conductor's position in succession to the legendary Toscanini.

Money was the main reason for Toscanini's departure from the Philharmonic, and his re-emergence in the same city with the reconstituted NBC Orchestra. The depression had hit America hard, and the New York Philharmonic had run up a quarter of a million dollar deficit in their 1935-36 season. They had been unable to reach an acceptable financial agreeement with Toscanini for 1936-37, so the search had started for an alternative. Stokowski was unwilling to make the time available, Fritz Busch had commitments in Denmark and London. Furtwängler was favoured, but made a politic withdrawal after his Nazi connections prompted major protests. Finding themselves between a rock and a hard place the board of the Philharmonic announced Barbirolli's probationary appointment in April 1936.

The programme for Barbirolli's first ever concert in New York on 5th November, 1936 was Berlioz, Bax (The Tale the Pines Knew - unknown in America), Mozart, and concluded with Brahms' Fourth Symphony. In his probationary season there were three works from American composers not previously performed by the Philharmonic, Charles Martin Loeffler's tonepoem Memories of my Childhood, a symphony by Anis Fuleihan, and Philip James' Bret Harte overture. He also performed Koussevitzky's Double Bass Concerto.

Barbirolli was an immediate success with both players and audience. Soon after an acclaimed Tchaikosky Fifth a deputation of players told the Philharmoic management that they would be happy for Barbirolli to be appointed to a permanent position. The outcome of this was an invitation to him to become Music Director and Permanent Conductor for three years starting with the 1937-38 season. In fact he spent a total of seven seasons in New York.

The early years were a honeymoon period. Barbirolli's main strength was in the romantic repertoire. In his first season he performed 183 works by seventy-five composers. Wagner was most frequent with sixty performances, Beethoven second with thirty-nine, followed by Brahms, Berlioz, Richard Strauss, Weber and Mendelssohn. This programming did not please all his New York audiences, where for instance was crowd pleaser Tchaikovsky? Thus at this early stage were the small seeds of discontent sowed that were ultimately to cause his departure. But overall the early seasons were a triumph. The 1937-38 season was one of the most successful in the Philharmonic's history. Average attendances reached almost two and a half thousand, and critic Olin Downes, of whom we shall hear more later, wrote "Nearly every performance of the evening, good or bad, was applauded with practically equal fervour and tumult".

New music was a central feature of Barbirolli's New York programmes. During his first season he read through more than fifty new scores from American resident composer's. Subsequently he programmed works from Daniel Gregory Mason, Joseph Deems Taylor (excerpts from his comic opera Peter Ibbetson), Abram Chasins, Samuel Barber, Ernst Toch, Arkady Dubensky, Charles Wakefield Cadman, Quinto Maganini, Gardner Read, Charles Griffes and Quincy Porter. Among the works from American based composers that he premiered were Lucien Cailliet's fantasia and fugue on O Susanna, and Paul Creston's Threnody.

Barbirollis exploration of new music ranged wider than North America. His programmes also included Ibert's Chamber Concertino, Eugene Goosen's Concertina for double string orchestra, Bliss' Double Piano Concerto, and two important works from Britten, the Violin Concerto and Sinfonia da Requiem. But his championing of contemporary music again brought him into conflict with the all important subscribers. He was told by an associate manager of the orchestra that when first performances were announced many subscribers asked to swap their tickets for other concerts which did not feature contemporary works. The evangelical Barbirolli was shocked by this, and concluded that the subscribers were ... "prepared to damn a new work before hearing it... If a person hears such a work and doesn't like it he is entitled to his opinion. But just to stay away when one is programmed certainly does not help the Society or the conductor in their efforts to give new music a proper chance." But the approbium of subscribers was not reserved exclusively for contemporary works. An inspired performance by Sergei Rachmaninov, no less, as soloist in Beethoven's First Piano Concerto was followed by an audience walk-out after the first movement of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony.

Ultimately it was the combination of New York critics and audiences that were Barbirolli's undoing. By the 1939-40 season Arthur Judson was becoming concerned about subscription sales. The critics started to turn, and the glowing reviews from his early years with the orchestra turned into what contemporary writer David Ewen called 'a rain of critical denunciation'. This was led by Olin Downes writing for the New York Times and Virgil Thomson in the Herald Tribune. The quality and insight of this 'criticism' can be guaged by quoting a contemporary review by Virgil Thomson, not of a Barbirolli performance, but of the work being performed...."Elgar's Enigma Variations are an academic effort not at all lacking in musical charm. I call them academic because the composer's interet in the musical devices he was employing was greater than his effort towards a direct and forceful expression of anything in particular......Mr. Elgar's variations are mostly a pretext for orchestration, a pretty pretext and a graceful one, not without charm and a modicum of sincerity but a pretext for fancy work all the same, for that massively frivolous patchwork in pastel shades of which one sees such quantities in any intellectual British suburban dwelling".

John Barbirolli's last concert as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic was on 7th March 1943. In April he sailed for a war torn Britain via Lisbon, and the position of permanent conductor of the Hallé Orchestra where he excelled. New York's loss was Manchester's gain, and Barbirolli was to continue his association with the Hallé until his death in 1970 (when he had the last laugh on Virgil Thomson by instructing that Nimrod from the Enigma Variations should be played at his funeral). From 1960-67 he was conductor-in-chief at the Houston Symphony. It is appropriate that when he first returned to guest conduct the New York Philharmonic in 1959 his opening concert included Vaughan Williams' Eighth Symphony which he had premiered in Manchester just three years earlier. This symphony is dedicated by the composer 'For glorious John, with love and admiration from Ralph'.

The New York critics played a major part in Glorious John's premature departure from the city. So it is fitting to give the last words to Harold C. Schonberg: - 'Barbirolli . . illuminated for us, incandescently the meaning of the notes that great men put on paper'.

If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to Furtwangler and the forgotten new music
Picture credits: Barbirolli header - Barbirolli Society, Statue of Liberty - South Georgia College, Barbirolli conducting - Bach Cantatas, Barbirolli sketch - Princeton images , Barbirolli footer - Manchester City Council .Please report any broken links, missing images, or other errors to overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk