Toscanini: In His Own Words
Director: Larry Weinstein
Cast: Barry Jackson (Toscanini); Joseph Lang (Walter); Michael Brandon (Pelletier); Carolina Giammetta (Wally); Jennie Goossens (Anita); Valentina Chico (Iris Cantelli)
Studio: Medici Arts DVD 3077928 [www.medici.tv] [Distr. by Naxos]
Video: 16:9 Black & White and Color
Audio: PCM Stereo
Length: 70 minutes
Rating: ****
Director and writer Larry Weinstein, collaborating with the Toscanini family and fellow writer Harvey Sachs, has created a visual conversation-piece, interspersed with historical footage from the life and career of Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957). The dialogue finds its source in the 150 hours of recordings the Maestro’s son Walter made, unbeknownst to Toscanini, of home conversations on all sorts of musical, familial, and philosophical topics. In 2007, the family permitted the film’s creators to audition and utilize the conversations as they saw fit. Weinstein here dramatizes a typical gathering of the family around the patriarch, arguably the greatest orchestra conductor of the 20th Century.
It is the eve of the year 1955, and around Arturo Toscanini in his Riverdale, New York home are gathered children Walter Toscanini (1898-1971) and Wally Toscanini (1900-1991); conductor Wilfrid Pelletier (1896-1982); assistant Anita Columbo; and Iris Cantelli, wife of the talented Guido Cantelli, who died tragically young in an airplane crash in 1956. The film, in eight sections, explores their various inquiries and topics of conversation, freely shifting to visual, documentary B&W footage that illuminates the subject as hand. We open with the Chorus of Hebrew Slaves from Verdi’s Nabucco, and Verdi will dominate much discussion, especially his place alongside Wagner in Toscanini’s estimate, especially his approach of the Master when Toscanini was preparing the Four Sacred Pieces and took an accelerando in a passage not so marked. “I played it [on the piano] as I felt it,” offers Toscanini. Verdi congratulated him. “A real musician understands,” said Verdi, “that I cannot designate every note with a dynamic gesture.” Reminiscences of Puccini prove not so flattering: “The man never had an original idea in his head. Never a direct inspiration. Everything he borrowed from elsewhere.” Toscanini disparages Maria Callas, whom we glimpse in I Puritani: “I can’t understand a single word she sings. Every singer with a high note becomes a huge star. I recognize only those stars in heaven.”
More fondly, Toscanini speaks of composer Alfredo Catalani, whose La Wally also inspired the names of Toscanini’s second child. “He was a most simpatico spirit, and he had the most beautiful eyes, which women could not resist. I recall that Puccini became jealous towards Catalani, often wondering how a man could write so many beautiful melodies. I still play his lovely song ‘The Dream.’” On the subject of women, the aging maestro (played by Barry Jackson) concedes that “a woman’s love aims to divinity. I, on the other hand, was a good, honest but unfaithful husband..” Daughter Wally (Carolina Giametta) shrugs her disapproval, but Toscanini betrays no embarrassment: “Carla [nee de Martini], my wife, was a saint. But matrimonial life was not what I had imagined. As for the many. . .offers I had from women, I said No many times, but I was not made of stone. Verdi and Puccini loved women: do we blame them?
Certain dates loom as milestones in this docudrama: April 4, 1954: Toscanini’s previously infallible memory fails: “I felt like I was dreaming, in a fog.” He would never appear again before an orchestra. May 11, 1946: the re-opening of La Scala in Milan after WW II. We hear strains from Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. “I could not bear to walk the streets of Milan, to see the destruction. I kept my head down as I walked back to the hotel.” Toscanini’s resistance to Fascism opens several conversations and their concomitant images. We see the rise of Mussolini in 1919, when he was left-of-Socialist, and Toscanini considered running on the same political ticket! “As soon as he went to the Right, I abandoned the rascal. And Hitler, he ruined my tenure at Bayreuth – a temple, one of my joys. I led all major Wagner opera except Das Rheingold. Even when I went to Salzburg, he came and annexed Austria. Delinquents! People like Furtwaengler stayed and played for him and his gangsters. What a bad race we are. . .it’s even worse when our morals are tested. The spine curves when the soul has already curved.”
We see and hear Toscanini leading the opening figures from Lohengrin; we even see (and do not hear) a “silent” film of his leading The Ride of the Valkyries. “When I am working, I have no time to feel joy. I am like a woman, giving birth in pain and suffering. But Beethoven–to think he composed in deafness–his Ninth Symphony expresses the inexpressible. To have music descend from some realm ‘up there.’ There is no gravity; I am weightless. To really worship this music, his Missa Solemnis, I should conduct it on my knees.” For the darker thoughts from Toscanini, we have moments from the Brahms C Minor Symphony. Toscanini rails at his colleague Leopold Stokowski: “I suppose we have our gangsters in music just as we do in politics – those thugs Mussolini and Hitler. I heard Stokowski give a disgusting Franck Symphony in D Minor and wrote him a letter to the effect of his desecration of great music–but I did not mail it.”
The purely “historical” segments of the retrospective prove visually illuminating: family photos of Toscanini’s parents, especially his father; the 1886 embarkation from Genoa to Sao Paolo, Brazil, where Toscanini would debut as a conductor of Aida at age nineteen. “You play me my recordings of Aida, and all I can hear are the flaws.” The discussion gravitates to the formation of the NBC Symphony. “They promised me an orchestra to be made from members from all over the country, the first in precision, in ensemble. They did it! To rival Boston, Philadelphia, and a joy to work with. We hear and see La Forza del Destino Overture. “Music has always managed to pull me back up, to rejuvenate me. When Carla turned 70 she became too ill to accompany me on my tours. . .I needed her, not for the details but for the big questions of purpose. I am so shy, still, after so many years. And I need to be alone; me, who is never alone because of the work I do.” The last visual sequence juxtaposes Toscanini’s profile with the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan, and we realize that Toscanini’s entire being was a tragic love-affair with music, the marriage of the timely and the timeless.
–Gary Lemco
