An interpretative traversal: its character and origins

Toscanini's extensive legacy of recordings remains, including those made in London during the years 1935–39. The latter have their distinctive qualities, as this chapter attempts to demonstrate. But as Toscanini's era recedes in time, as living witness vanishes and as judgement relies (sometimes with malice aforethought) upon selective recordings made in his final years, the perception of Toscanini's special attributes has over succeeding generations undergone a change, and not for the better. Retrospectively some commentators have transmuted the conductor into the very figure Newman and Constant Lambert always, and rightly, insisted he was not – the apostle of ‘objectivism’ and ‘literalism’, forever pitted against, as some current proponents would again have it, the intuitive thrust of his polar opposite, Wilhelm Furtwängler. Toscanini would not have recognised himself in such straitjacketed, simplistic terms; his constant concern was to approach as near as possible to the composer's creative process as revealed in every particle of the score. The correct appreciation of the notes, and everything entailed by that in terms of tempo and phrasing, was but the end of the beginning, the springboard for realising with all the passion at his command the composer's intentions in sound – as he himself put it, ‘my ideal dream … is, to come as close as possible to expressing the author's thoughts’.