The Letters of Arturo Toscanini
“This is a major contribution to our understanding of Toscanini and of several entire eras of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century musical life, especially the almost improvisatory looseness of opera in Italy, the glamour of European festivals, and the concert life of the United States. It’s also a wonderful, sometimes downright salacious read.”—New York Times
“Toscanini’s large, cranky humanity comes alive throughout his letters, as it does in his best recordings.”—New York Review of Books
“Edited with scrupulous care and wide-ranging erudition.”—Wall Street Journal
“Sachs has served the conductor well . . . by editing this generously annotated and unprecedentedly revealing collection of letters that were written, usually in haste and often in fury, over the course of seventy years.”—Washington Post
“A major contribution to our understanding of Toscanini and of several eras of late 19th- and 20th-century musical life. . . . It's also a wonderful, sometimes downright salacious read.”—New York Times
“The letters . . . are immensely enjoyable to read and an exceptional record of a man and an era. . . . In his correspondence he was passionate, sometimes comically juvenile, often seething with rage, misanthropic, not intellectually sophisticated but widely curious, heroically prncipled about certain big issues, and wholly unprincipled when it came to issues like marital fidelity. . . . Toscanini’s large, cranky humanity comes alive throughout his letters, as it does in his best recordings.”—New York Review of Books
“Helps fill out a picture of this formidable personality in his very own words. That is particularly valuable as Toscanini left no memoir, shunned interviews and was notoriously private for so public a figure. . . . The impression that emerges above all from these pages is one of enormous vitality.”—Publishers Weekly
“There is hardly a love letter that does not sparkle with insights into music or politics. There is hardly a letter about music or politics that does not provide insight into [Toscanini’s] life. . . . Sachs’s editing is as meticulous as his biography and other writings about Toscanini have been. His notes after every letter provide the details we need to understand the context of the letter. With the notes, the book is almost an autobiography.”—Globe and Mail
“Sachs has served the conductor well . . . by editing this generously annotated and unprecedentedly revealing collection of letters that were written, usually in haste and often in fury, over the course of seventy years.”—Washington Post
Preface
Acknowledgments
Explanations and Abbreviations
Introduction
The Letters
Part One: January 1885– September 1897
Part Two: July 1898–May 1933
Part Three: June 1933–May 1936
Part Four: July 1936– September 1937
Part Five: September 1937– September 1939
Part Six: October 1939–March 1946
Part Seven: July 1946–November 1956
Index
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