Toscaninnies

Ten years ago, the musical world was already swooning in the aisles over the fire-and-ice perfection of Arturo Toscanini's interpretations. Since then the little white-haired Maestro has become the darling of millions who couldn't tell a fugue from a flugelhorn. Today, as chief of NBC's shiny new symphony, 72-year-old Arturo Toscanini is far & away the biggest lion in the U. S. musical zoo.

To his weekly broadcasts in Radio City's scientifically sound-deadened Studio 8-H pushes an audience of dowagers, politicians and musical who's who that tops the Metropolitan's opening nighters for mink and boiled shirts. Toscaniniacs come from far & wide. From Indianapolis Mr.

& Mrs. James W. Fesler, who could hear the weekly broadcast much better in their own front parlor (in the studio the music sounds almost as if it were being played under a blanket), make special weekly train trips to Manhattan to see the Maestro conduct in the fiery flesh. Two Buffalo newlyweds recently made Studio 8-H their Niagara Falls. One Texan chartered a plane to get there. Refugees from Central Europe spend their first two cents on U. S. soil to stamp a letter to NBC asking for passes. Bootleg passes retail at $25 a pair. Last week, when Toscanini took his NBC Symphony to Carnegie Hall to play Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, hundreds were turned away at a $25 top.

Sample Toscanini fan mail:

> From a lady in Hamilton, Ohio: ". . . this glittering coruscation of impalpable sound. ... I fled to my bed determined that I should never again be so vulnerable to such perfection. I didn't have the strength to dance, or laugh, or cry, or shout."

> From Astoria, L. I. : "The Trinity --God, Chotzinoff* and the NBC-- we thank for making these concerts a reality." Hardly less impressive than the Maestro's fan mail is the mental shag into which he has thrown Manhattan critics. Toscaniniac Marcia Davenport: "The sun shines on -- and so long as it does there is nothing on earth to be heard like the electrical clarity of the least voice in Toscanini 's orchestra, or the overwhelming majesty of its full song. How or why he obtains, in the pursuit of his ideal of perfection, the almost terrible beauty of tone that he draws from every single player is the ultimate mystery and miracle that nobody can solve and nobody can duplicate." Lawrence Oilman: "In later years what we know to be the truth about him will not be believed. It will survive as a legend and a myth, a fable scarcely conceivable as fact. ... He ceases to be merely the devoted literalist, and becomes the inexplicable lifegiver, the master of a secret vision and an incommunicable speech, known only to himself and to his peers."

When NBC officials threatened recently to deprive sardonic Composer Deems Taylor of his free tickets to the broadcast, on the ground that he "didn't like Toscanini anyway," he blasphemously cracked: "I admit Toscanini was at the Last Supper, but I insist that he did not sit at the head of the table."

*Samuel Chotzinoff, Manhattan music critic and Toscanini fan, who got the Maestro to accept the job of conducting NBC's broadcasts (TIME, Feb. 15, 1937).

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