Homage to Two Glories of Italian Music: Arturo Toscanini and Magda Olivero

HOMAGE TO TWO GLORIES OF ITALIAN MUSIC: ARTURO TOSCANINI AND MAGDA OLIVERO Emilio Spedicato University of Bergamo December 2007 [email protected] Dedicated to: Giuseppe Valdengo, baritone chosen by Toscanini, who returned to the Maestro October 2007 This paper produced for the magazine Liberal, here given with marginal changes. My thanks to Countess Emanuela Castelbarco, granddaughter of Toscanini, for checking the part about her grandfather and for suggestions, and to Signora della Lirica, Magda Olivero Busch, for checking the part relevant to her. 1 RECALLING TOSCANINI, ITALIAN GLORY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY As I have previously stated in my article on Andrea Luchesi and Mozart (the new book by Taboga on Mozart death is due soon, containing material discovered in the last ten years) I am no musicologist, just a person interested in classical music and, in more recent years, in opera and folk music. I have had the chance of meeting personally great people in music, such as the pianist Badura-Skoda, and opera stars such as Taddei, Valdengo, Di Stefano (or should I say his wife Monika, since Pippo has not yet recovered from a violent attack by robbers in Kenya; they hit him on the head when he tried to protect the medal Toscanini had given him; though no more in a coma, he is still paralyzed), Bergonzi, Prandelli, Anita Cerquetti and especially Magda Olivero. A I have read numerous books about these figures, eight about Toscanini alone, and I was also able to communicate with Harvey Sachs, widely considered the main biographer of Toscanini, telling him why Toscanini broke with Alberto Erede and informing him that, contrary to what he stated in his book on Toscanini’s letters, there exists one letter by one of his lovers, Rosina Storchio. This letter is found in Storchio’s brief biography, available at Museo Storchio in Dello, near Brescia, the second largest museum in Italy on lyrics possessing the first collection of librettos in the world, but virtually unknown! Such new information has appeared in the book Toscanini, dolce tiranno by Renzo Allegri, possibly the best on the market, based upon the memorials that Toscanini’s daughters Wanda and Wally wrote and published several years ago in a magazine with a wide circulation. From now on I will refer to Toscanini just as T. 2 I have a kind of family connection with T. In our home he was appreciated more than any other Italian of the century, possibly because my grandfather had been the first foreign language interpreter in Milan at the beginning of 20th century (I heard he spoke 25 languages), and so he certainly must have met T at La Scala. And quite recently I heard from my aunt, over ninety years old, and from another relative almost as old, that Aureliano Pertile, the tenor preferred by T for his extraordinary expressivity, used to visit our home, playing the piano and singing. I suspect that some scores that survived the destruction of the family house by a British bomb (“Mi par d’ udire ancora.....” “ E lucevan le stell”e) belonged to Pertile. And I remember the sadness that overtook our family when,-- I was 12 years old at the time-- the news came by radio that T had passed away. Since I am not qualified to discuss the musical aspects of T work, which for some years has been subject to probably unjustified revision, I will only consider, (again by way of anecdotes) the principal aspects of his life. For a fuller presentation there are about a half dozen books on the market. I would also recommend a visit to the house where he was born in Parma and the conservatory there, which has a room dedicated to him. T was born on March 25th 1867 in Parma’s workers borough beyond the river; his father was anticlerical and a garibaldino, his mother a practicing catholic. Soon his musical qualities were discovered, such as being able to reproduce on the piano, on first hearing, melodies that he had not studied. He got a grant to the local conservatory, where there was strict discipline, little food, no heating, and compulsory mass attendance every morning, but where the teachers were very good. Once, due to some rule violation, he had to spend 24 hours in a small dark room, keeping only his cello. He was not allowed to 3 use the bathroom, hence he used the cello as a container. The following day the teacher asked: “What happened to your cello, it is sweating! ” Soon his schoolmates started calling him “ the genius”, having noted his extraordinary memory and his passion for learning every type of music and to play every instrument. A teacher asked why he was so called, and wanted to test him. First he asked him to play a score on first sight, then to replay it by memory; then he asked him to look at a score of Wagner and interpret it at the cello. Confronted with the amazing performance of T, he said: “It is true, T, you are a genius.” The extraordinary memory of T is a landmark record in human history. His memory was of the visual type: he could remember even dirty spots or abrasions in the page. He memorized about 1500 operas and symphonic works. Once an orchestra member asked him to be let out since a wire was broken in his instrument, so that a certain note could not be produced. T asked which note it was, then told him such a note did not appear in the part he had to play! Another time, when he was close to 90, pianist Delli Ponti, who used to visit him to play some baroque music (not much previously practiced by T), told him: “I will play an almost unknown piece of Frescobaldi....” Then T replied, remembering having seen that piece when he was a conservatory student: ”There are two versions in print, both with a mistake on the fourth beat.” We should recall that other people, such as De Sabata among musicians and Von Neumann among scientists, also had an enormous memory. We can recall as well the case, often quoted by Oliver Sacks, of a Russian who remembered everything in every day of his life... not to say of the Kirghizian bards, called Manaschi, who remember large part of the six million verses of their national epic, the Epic of Manas. At conservatory T specialized in the cello, but we know little of his quality as a performer. We know that in the following years he played the piano a great 4 deal, to accompany singers; in his last years he spent full days on the piano, playing full operas while singing them with a voice very expressive and completely in tune. (This can be heard in a famous recording of a Traviata rehearsal where Violetta was Licia Albanese, still alive in New York and close to one hundred, if not over according to the grandchild of Toscanini Emanuela Castelbarco ...). At 19, T embarked for a tour of South America as a cellist. Already he had memorized some twenty operas. During the voyage he took pleasure (in addition to seducing some of the female singers; in love he could not be resisted, and women, as his grandchild Emanuela Castelbarco told me, easily fell into his arms) in directing several operas, where his colleagues played and sang. In Brasil the very bad performance of the conductor got lot of boos in a concert at which the emperor was present. There was a real risk that the tour would end without the players and singers having the money to pay for a return ticket. Then a girl in the chorus, also from Parma, asked T in their dialect to act as conductor. After some hesitation T accepted, entering the scene without rehearsal and frac and directing, as he said later, as though in a trance and with shut eyes. It was a triumph: the audience went wild with clapping, and the emperor gave him a golden little box. The triumph continued in the following days of the tour, the newspapers enthusiastic and foretelling a great future. We should mention that after that first performance, T slept very deeply. On waking up he reviewed his conducting and realized that he had made two mistakes! The only one in his long years of conducting? Back to Italy T intended to continue his career as a cellist (for some years he also composed, but destroyed his compositions when he realized he could not create works better than Wagner’s). Meantime the fame of his success in 5 America had spread. So he was soon called to direct several orchestras, and in a few years he was already at La Scala. Here he was director and manager for many years, leading to such deep changes in the notion of opera and concert performance that the old ways completely disappeared worldwide. This is not the place, nor do I have the competence, to discuss the changes he made, fighting against the public, the orchestra and the singers, who had been accustomed, till his time, to modifying the composer’s notes according to their convenience. We will simply say that T had complete respect for the original text and composer’s will, and that he wanted the audience to pay real attention to the music (hence no more card playing or having food during the performance). He required from the orchestra a high quality performance in terms of tempi and expressivity. He became well known for his brusque reactions, sometimes almost violent, but only on work time; outside he was known for his generosity in helping orchestra members who were in financial need.

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