Toscanini seemed to defy history because, in an age when a musician was still weaned largely on the works of countrymen, his repertoire included not only Italian music, but also German and French.
Toscanini's viscerally exciting performances, wrought with supreme tension and instrumental clarity, though sometimes sacrificing musical depth, also account for his popularity, according to Horowitz. Here Horowitz invokes the theories of Theodor Adorno, a Marxist of the Frankfurt school. Adorno, Horowitz writes, understood culture of the "bourgeois epoch"--"affirmative" and "official"--as neglecting the contradictions inherent in great art. Although proponents claimed classical would lead to universal enlightenment, "aspects of the concert hall experience were standardized, atomized, `fetishized,'" by alienated members of a "commodity society."
Thus the rise of cult performers, the cult of "right" concerts where one enjoys being present rather than listening to music, and the rise of cult symphonies, which listeners enjoy as isolated themes and moments rather than as artistic totalities.
TOSCANINI WAS an important part of the fetishization of music, Horowitz concludes, because his style, far from being suited to all types of music, cut all of it in the same, popularly appealing mold--that of the visceral music of Guiseppe Verdi, Toscanini's countryman, friend, and deepest musical love.
It was easy for a cult of Toscanini to grow not only because of his enigmatic, stirring personality, but also because everything he conducted was rhythmically, erotically gripping.
More importantly, according to Horowitz, Toscanini's repertoire was restricted, especially in his later years, to what we now know as standard repertoire.
If Toscanini had conducted more modern works, more American works, Horowitz suggests, then perhaps classical music would not be as ossified as it is today, with young performers playing the same, standard works dating from earlier centuries. Toscanini, for Horowitz, was more than just a product of his times. He was also a formative influence on the American musical scene of his time and ours.
HOROWITZ, AS can be seen, offers a panoramic view of American musical life and pulls no punches about his own beliefs (the New York Philharmonic, he says, plays with "less sustained intensity" than the New York Rangers).
One doesn't need to understand or believe in Hegelian epistemology to recognize the syndromes Understanding Toscanini analyzes. Many decades have passed since "classical" music, whatever that is, was a living, breathing art, unencumbered by its own prestige and the status-seeking of audiences.
Joseph Horowitz is to be congratulated, and more than that, thanked, for offering a critical, fascinating, and mournful account of why that is.