Volume 34, Number 6 · April 9, 1987
The Maestro on the Market
By Robert Craft
Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music
by Joseph Horowitz
Knopf, 492 pp., $30.00
Joseph Horowitz's new book ranges far beyond the limited expectations raised by its misleadingly specific title. Three decades after Toscanini's death not many music lovers can be seriously concerned with 'understanding' him. And if they were, in what sense—since neither he nor his music making is in any way enigmatic, and since this very absence of mystery constitutes part of Horowitz's criticism of him as an interpreter? The real subject of the book, we are told when well into it, 'is less Toscanini than the manner in which he was perceived, procured, appreciated, marketed.'
Review, 2771 words
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