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Updated: May 4, 2025
Toscanini entered, the proprietor dashed forward, bowed almost to the ground and said: "Maestro, I am greatly honored ... I'll never forget this hour ..." Then he led the party to the most conspicuous spot in the room. Mr. Toscanini wanted a nip of brandy, but the innkeeper insisted that he try some very special wine of the house's own making.
Four days after, not far from this same spot, General Capello, the Commander of the Italian Second Army, decorated with the Silver Medal for Valour some of the heroes of the great victory. Among these was a civilian, a man over military age. It was Toscanini, Italy's most famous musical conductor.
The existence of numerous fine camera studies of the Maestro proves that he doesn't dislike being photographed. Nor does he dislike photographers. But he hates flashlights because they hurt his eyes. This has bolstered the popular notion based on the fact that he conducts from memory that his sight is so poor as to amount almost to blindness. Mr. Toscanini is neither blind nor half-blind.
Toscanini that the boys have forgotten to tell you about. From these stories there emerged a demoniacal little man with the tantrums of a dozen prima donnas, a temperamental tyrant who, at the dropping of a stitch in the orchestral knitting, tore his hair, screamed at the top of his inexhaustible Latin lungs, doused his trembling players with streams of blistering invective.
That same humility, that same incurable bewilderment at public acclaim must have been apparent to all who ever attended a Toscanini concert, saw him at the close of a superb interpretation bowing as one of the group of players and making deprecating gestures that seemed to say: "What you have heard was a great score brought to life by these excellent musicians why applaud me?"
That's how you learned that, to the king of conductors, a musician playing an acid note is a "shoemaker," a "swine," an "assassin" or even something completely unprintable. So far as they went the stories were true. Mr. Toscanini, as all the world knows by now, is the world's No. 1 musical purist. Nothing but perfection satisfies him.
Then Toscanini took command of what surely was one of the strangest concerts in the world, played in the moonlight, in an hour of glory, on a mountain top, which to the Italians had become an almost legendary name, to an audience of two contending Armies, amid the rattle of machine guns, the rumble of cannon, and the crashes of exploding shells.
Toscanini have occupied an apartment in the Astor the same suite of four smallish rooms. The place is furnished by the hotel, but the Maestro always brings his beloved knickknacks his miniature of Beethoven, his Wagner and Verdi manuscripts, his family photographs. He has no valet and dislikes being pawed by barbers. He shaves himself, and Mrs. Toscanini or one of the daughters cuts his hair.
Toscanini noticed the troubled anxious look. "No, no, no," he said, with that childlike smile of his that suffuses his whole face with an irresistible light. "There is nothing wrong. Play it again; please, play it again, just for me. It is so beautiful. I have never heard these solo passages played with such a lovely tone." There you have a side of Mr.
His wing-spread, so to speak, is much larger than that of either Mr. Stokowski or Mr. Toscanini, and he has a greater repertoire of unpredictable motions than both of them put together. Time cannot wither, nor custom stale, the infinite variety of his shadow boxing. Those who knew his history look upon Mr. Koussevitzky's joyous, unrestrained gymnastics with tolerant eyes.
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