Toscanini: Musician of Conscience By Harvey Sachs
Biographies of dead performing musicians, even more than biographies of dead actors, often end with an implied question mark. What can they tell us, beyond a few amusing or salacious anecdotes, a handful of review quotations (sycophantic or malicious), a discography, and interviews with widows, ex-wives, friends and maybe the odd enemy? ‘Many of today’s young musicians,’ Harvey Sachs suggests near the end of this second and hugely longer of his two Toscanini biographies, ‘barely know the names of the conductors, instrumentalists and singers who dominated the field only one or two generations ago.’ Well, a lot of my music students at Cardiff University couldn’t have told you much about Wagner or Debussy, never mind Toscanini. But at least Sachs proves, in these marvellously researched and continuously fascinating 900 pages, that Toscanini, unlike most performers, is worth studying for reasons that go beyond his brilliance as a conductor – which...
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