Some of the letters are also entertaining, for instance one written to Ada on October 12th, 1938, in which he tells the story of his turbulent train trip to Le Havre to board a passenger liner bound for New York. At Domodossola, on the Italian-Swiss border, customs police checked Maestro Toscanini "in great detail". The searching included "the little secret suitcase" containing three packets of Ada's love-letters, which he had transferred from the purifying pages of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis to his pack Marco Sonzogni reviews The Letters of Arturo Toscanini, compiled and translated by Harvey Sachs.
'The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don't want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but which you do not want to be destroyed, but perhaps hope may be preserved for complete strangers to read, is ineradicable. We want to confess ourselves in writing to a few friends, and we do not always want to feel that no one but those friends will ever read what we have written."
Recorded from an unpreserved 1933 T.S. Eliot lecture - 'English Poets as Letter Writers' - those two sentences encapsulate the conflicts surrounding not just the publication of letters, but also their very writing. They provide too a particularly fitting frame to the recent publication of the correspondence of Arturo Toscanini, one of the greatest conductors in history.
Toscanini was born in Parma, Italy, in 1867 and died in New York in 1957. He studied at the conservatories of Parma and Milan, graduating as a cellist with maximum grades. In 1887, he was second in the cello section for the première of Verdi's Otello at La Scala. However, as various musicologists have written, a "prodigious musical memory and ear" combined with "insatiable curiosity" and "great powers of concentration" had already channelled his talents toward conducting.
His début is legendary. At the age of 19, on tour in Brazil with an Italian troupe, a sequence of accidents resulted in his promotion from the cello section to the podium for the June 30th, 1886 performance of Aïda in Rio de Janeiro. He conducted "in masterly fashion" without the score. There was to be no turning back, and his reputation as "a powerful and exacting" conductor, "the enemy of mediocrity and routine", grew stronger performance after performance.
Musicologists have also observed that Toscanini's insistence on the primacy and purity of the musical text - which enabled him to achieve "clarity, precision and glowing intensity" - marked "a highpoint in the development of the conductor's art".
His conducting career, termed by many "Toscanini's regime", ended on April 4th, 1954, after 68 years of relentless conducting. Thankfully for posterity, half of those years (1920-1954) were dedicated to recording, and the retired maestro continued the meticulous editing of his recordings right up to his death, shortly before his ninetieth birthday.
Toscanini interpreted composers as various as Bach, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Cherubini, Weber, Rossini, Schubert, Donizetti, Berlioz, Schumann, Franck, Bruckner, Brahms, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Elgar, Leoncavallo, Puccini, Debussy, Strauss, Sibelius, Mendelssohn, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Shostakovich, but was at his greatest in the music of his favourites: Beethoven, Verdi and Wagner. He considered Wagner "the greatest composer of the century" and championed him even when he was still relatively unknown in Italy.
He conducted in the most prestigious venues in the world - Bayreuth (he was the first non-German to do so), Berlin, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Jerusalem, London, Milan, New York (the epicentre of his activities in his last 25 years), Salzburg, Paris and Vienna - and performed with the most accomplished orchestras and soloists. As artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera, he ruled over one of the most "dazzling constellations" of singers in the history of opera: Caruso, Farrar, Destinn, Martinelli and Scotti to mention but a few.
His uncompromising and dictatorial character, however, strained all his relationships, which often ended on a sour note, especially those with politicians and administrators.
All of this, and much more, is documented in The Letters of Toscanini, a volume containing all the missives written by Toscanini which have gradually appeared in the last 20 years. The letters, dating from January 12th, 1885 to November 17th, 1956, have been impeccably compiled, translated, introduced and annotated by Harvey Sachs, the established musicologist and author of two major works on the conductor: Toscanini (1978), the standard biography, and Reflections on Toscanini (1992).
Written in Italian, French and English, they were sent to fellow musicians, administrators, politicians (among them, the "Teutonic Criminal", Hitler, the "great Delinquent", Mussolini, and the "dear Mr. President", Roosevelt), family members and friends. But nearly half of the collated correspondence was addressed to the Italian pianist Ada Colleoni Mainardi, with whom Toscanini had a lasting affair.
Many of these letters contain passionate passages which are periodically pornographic and reminiscent of Britain's eavesdropped Prince Charles. To dwell on them - as, unfortunately, several reviewers in the US and in Britain have done - is to miss the wood for the trees. And the wood in question is the unique, perhaps incomprehensible drive that made Toscanini a genius and one of the most influential music makers of the 20th century.
In addition, there are many letters - including some of those written to Ada - that bear witness to memorable moments in the life and work of Toscanini. These will hold readers' attention more firmly than those detailing his bizarre sexual fantasies.
This reviewer's favourite letters document Toscanini's spiteful trickery of Strauss on the occasion of the Italian première of Salome; his admiration for the French libretto of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, the only opera he ever performed in the original language; his literary readings (Dante, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Keats, D'Annunzio); his caustic criticism of fellow conductors and his outspoken and uncompromising anti-fascism. Ada, too, was among the recipients of his indignation, which culminated with the tragicomic confiscation of his passport.
Perfection in art and perfection in life, we know, rarely go hand in hand. However, the intersection of private and public, personal and professional - whether enlightening or embarrassing - is unfailingly engaging here. When it is properly documented and evaluated, as in Sachs's edition of Toscanini's letters, private information can provide an understanding of a public persona more effectively than reams of literature.
If some letters in this fascinating volume take Toscanini down from the pedestal many may have put him on, others will unquestionably throw new light on, as Theodor Adorno put it, "the master's mastery" on the podium.
Marco Sonzogni teaches Italian at University College Dublin. He is a critic and literary translator, and the editor of Translation Ireland
Marco Sonzogni
The Letters of Arturo Toscanini. Compiled, edited and translated by Harvey Sachs. Faber & Faber, 433 pp, €30