Conductors: Salute from the Ranks

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Croaking Along. In his drive to catch the distinctive line of each composition, Toscanini surged forward impatiently, pulling the orchestra along with his characteristic circular conducting motion. "You are too late," he cried. "I was a seven-month baby: I couldn't wait." His involvement in the music was so emotional that he shouted, wept and sang during performances. In his recording of La Boheme, he can actually be heard croaking along with Tenor Jan Peerce. Some listeners regard this as a flaw in the performance, but not Peerce. "Imagine," says Peerce, "hearing Toscanini and knowing this guy's blood is on that record, and some schmo says, That spoils it.' They don't know what inspires people."

The musicians also caught occasional glimpses of a less familiar side of Toscanini's nature, one which Conductor Robert Shaw calls "incredibly sweet and kind." On the NBC Orchestra's 1940 tour of South America, Toscanini relaxed with the players, took an interest in their poker games, even admitted that he was riot immune to the attractiveness of the orchestra's woman harpist. On the last day, one of the musicians was killed in a bus accident. Feeling responsible for the man's death because he had decided on the tour, Toscanini canceled an orchestra party and shut himself up in his room, grieving for days.

In his final season, three years before his death at 89 in 1957, Toscanini occasionally faltered; in his farewell performance he suffered an agonizing memory lapse during the Tannhauser Bacchanale, and his first cellist had to pick up the beat until he recovered. The music world assumed that such symptoms lay behind NBC's decision to discontinue the Toscanini concerts. But it is a measure of the loyalty and esteem his musicians had for him that in Haggin's book some of them suggest it was the other way around: Toscanini faltered only because he knew he would no longer be able to do what gave meaning to his life. As Violinist Felix Galimir puts it: "When you took away the baton, you took away the thing that kept him young."