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Some famous conductors have added the B of Barnum to the three immortal B's of music Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. Those wielders of the stick are great showmen as well as great musicians. Not so Mr. Toscanini. In his platform manner there is nothing calculated for theatrical effect. He doesn't care in the least what he looks like "from out front."
To provide for both was the violin which in his hands played itself. For years it sufficed. Then, with extreme good sense, he fought with the Union, fought with Toscanini, disassociated himself from both. Now, latterly, with his arm in a sling, the wolf was not merely at the door, it was in the living-room of this Harlem flat which Cassy had just entered. It was then that he repeated it.
Toscanini does not eat before a performance, and his family wait with the evening meal until he joins them. As he stepped into the hall he saw his wife and daughters walking into the dining room. "Where are you going?" he asks them. "In to supper, of course," one of them told him. The Maestro exploded: "What? After THAT performance? Oh, no, you're not.
The other day he and a friend were discussing the concerto played by a certain pianist on his American debut in 1911. Mr. Toscanini remembered it as Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto; the friend maintained it was the Second. The Maestro said: "I recall the concert very well. He was soloist with the Philharmonic."
"It was a great ordeal for a young singer, almost a beginner, to start at our greatest Opera House! It meant unremitting labor for me. I worked very hard, but I am not afraid of work. Toscanini held sway when I began, and he was a marvelous musician and conductor. Such exactness, such perfection of detail; he required perfection of every one.
And he reeled off all the other compositions on that program of twenty-seven years ago. To settle the argument the skeptical friend called the office of the Philharmonic. Mr. Toscanini had been right about the Beethoven Concerto and had correctly remembered the purely orchestral numbers as well. He is a profound student, not only of music but of all available literature bearing upon it.
The tragedy of that seemed to overwhelm him. "I wish I were dead." Cassy laughed. "Now it's the cheese. On Saturday it was the violin. Well, you got it back. What will you say if I find some Camembert? Do stop meowing. Any one might think you didn't have me." At her young laughter, he groaned. "Formerly if I let a day go without practising, I noticed it. If I let two days go, Toscanini noticed it.
Melba, says that one day the singer, Joachim, and a party of friends stopped at a peasant's cottage near Bergamo, where they were regaled with such delicious macaroni that Melba persuaded her friends to return another day and wait while the peasant taught her the exact method of preparing the dish. In at least one New York restaurant oeuf Toscanini is to be found on the bill.
Toscanini was so amused that he forgot to get angry with Mr. Royal for breaking the grimly enforced rule barring all but orchestra members from rehearsals. The sympathetic program director also had the shattered platinum watch put together by what must have been a Toscanini among watchmakers.
Toscanini, who is seventy-five, began conducting at nineteen can be counted on the fingers of one hand. He feels and has often told friends that all he has to say he can say in musical terms; that he gladly leaves to others what satisfaction they may derive from publicly bandying words. But his frequent brushes with news photographers don't come under this head.
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