A nineteen-year-old cellist seized the podium and never left it
In Rio de Janeiro in 1886, when a conductor quit hours before Aida and the crowd booed his replacement off the stage, Arturo Toscanini rose from the cello section, took the baton, and led the whole opera from memory. The nineteen-year-old left as a conductor. Intensity, perfectionism, and an almost photographic memory would make him a household name.
Arturo Toscanini was born in Parma on March 25, 1867, the son of a tailor. A scholarship took him to the Parma Conservatory as a cellist; the strict diet there was mostly fish, and for the rest of his life he refused seafood. Touring Brazil in 1886 with an Italian opera company, he was principal cellist when Leopoldo Miguez abandoned Aida in Rio. After Carlo Superti was shouted down, Toscanini walked to the podium and finished the night conducting by heart. He conducted eighteen operas that season, each a success, and a conducting career began at nineteen.
Back in Italy he premiered Alfredo Catalani's revised Edmea in Turin on November 4, 1886, and later played cello in the world premiere of Verdi's Otello at La Scala in 1887. Verdi, usually frustrated by conductors who ignored his markings, trusted Toscanini's ear—once agreeing that an allargando the young man suggested for the Te Deum had been left out only for fear of exaggeration. Toscanini led the premieres of Puccini's La bohème and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, gave his first symphonic concert in Turin in 1896, and by 1898 was principal conductor at La Scala, returning as music director from 1921 to 1929.
He ran the Metropolitan Opera from 1908 to 1915, led the New York Philharmonic from 1926 to 1936, and was the first non-German conductor at Bayreuth. Persuaded by David Sarnoff of RCA, he became the first music director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, opening with a Christmas Day broadcast in 1937 from Studio 8-H. Radio and television made his intensity famous across America. He died on January 16, 1957, still remembered for orchestral detail, eidetic memory, and a refusal to soften a score for convenience.
Source: Arturo Toscanini
