THE LINE of intellectuals criticizing America's lack of artistic achievements, begining with Tocqueville, is long and distinguished. Social scientists and literary men and women have told us time and again that our practical-minded, egalitarian and materialistic majority cannot recognize high art, does not really want to do so, and inevitably dilutes great creative achievements for popular consumption.

Understanding Toscanini

By Joseph Horowitz

Knopf; 440 pp.; $30.00.

Joseph Horowitz, the author of Understanding Toscanini, now can claim a distinguished place on the long list.

His book is named after an Italian-born conductor, and it brings a staggering amount of research to bear on the career of Arturo Toscanini, the classical music cult figure who, after his adoption by America, became a symbol of the supposed parity between American and European culture.

But ultimately Horowitz, who wrote a critically-acclaimed book recording his conversations with Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau, focuses not so much on Toscanini as a man or musician as on the millions of Americans who canonized him, taking it as an article of faith that Toscanini was the "greatest conductor of all time."

Extrapolating into the 1980s his conclusions about the career of Toscanini, who died in 1957, Horowitz presents a searing and largely convincing critique of music and other performing arts in America.

This book is radical. It endorses a Marxist-based understanding of musical culture in America, vehemently denies that widely publicized high culture represents the best around, and not least, definitively debunks the myths that surrounded Toscanini.

Despite the book's faults--its over-ambitiousness, its sometimes befuddling organization, and an occasional lack of theoretical rigor that will displease the sociologically-minded--Understanding Toscanini will captivate classical music lovers as well as those who want to understand the state of the performing arts in America.

THE BOOK begins with an account not of Toscanini's youth, but of America's. As Horowitz tells it, Americans in the 19th century were at once proud of their liberation from the pretentiousness of the arts in Europe and deeply humbled by the achievements of the Europeans.

Late in the century the flood of European immigrants for the first time brought the standard orchestral and instrumental repertoire to American ears. When Austrian composer and conductor Gustav Mahler came to New York to head the Metropolitan Opera, he found a musical public "in contrast to 'our people' in Vienna...-- unsophisticated, hungry for novelty, and in the highest degree eager to learn."

Soon afterward, Toscanini settled in New York and robbed Mahler of his pre-eminence. More than that, Horowitz argues, Toscanini contributed to the historical circumstances that deprived America the chance of developing a vibrant, unfossilized musical culture.

After Toscanini had more than proved his genius as leader of the New York Philharmonic in the 1930s, NBC radio hired him, formed an orchestra for him, and launched a media blitz that celebrated the maestro as the foremost conductor of the European music.

Although an Italian, Toscanini was portrayed as embodying the panoply of virtues that Tocqueville, a century before, had labeled as particularly "American": pragmatism, efficiency, and belief in democracy. In addition, Horowitz writes--and this is a fascinating insight--Toscanini seemed to fulfil America's dream of denying the significance of the past, which seemed to dictate that American art would continue to lag behind Europe's.