Toscanini: Berceuse
Adam Nielsen
The name of Arturo Toscanini - the legendary music director of La Scala, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and the NBC Symphony - may come as a surprise in our list of composers. Composition played such a minor role in the Maestro’s life that it disappears by page 49 of Harvey Sachs’s 912-page biography. But in historical context the surprise is in reverse: Toscanini, born in 1867, became the first non-composing superstar of the podium.
Before, the two professions were inextricable. Toscanini’s great Italian predecessors - Martucci, Mancinelli, Faccio, Arditi - may be remembered by few today, but all had operas staged in major houses. The conducting celebrities on the international scene in his youth included Mahler and Strauss. Young Arturo seems to have assumed he was setting out on the same path, but at just twenty-one - after being overwhelmed by his first exposure to Tristan und Isolde, he told friends in later years - he called a halt.
With those same friends, he is supposed to have used the Berceuse heard here as his proof that he was ungifted for composition. Humble brag? It is a charming piece, harmonically quirky, melodically appealing in the traditional Italian way, sure-handed in its pianistic textures.
Toscanini may have felt no call to continue composing, but he felt enough to write - and to perform and/or publish - more than two dozen pieces before giving up. Maybe it was “in the air” - around the same time, Arthur Nikisch and Hans Richter let their compositional activities dwindle as well. Perhaps some instinct told him that the time was coming in which a virtuoso conductor would attain more influence, celebrity, and earning power than any mere author. He was the first to do that, but far from the last. What kind of composer might he have become if he had developed his imagination? It’s fair to say he was off to a more than decent start.
Toscanini around 1890, unknown photographer
Title page of the original edition