A bunch of concerts and a handful of recordings in the 1930s and two more concerts in 1952: The End.

Some of us who know a thing or two about Arturo Toscanini have tended until now to think of his relationship with Great Britain in these overly drastic terms. It is true that the 1930s – when Toscanini was in his sixties and early seventies – probably constituted his peak decade as a symphonic conductor, and that the 1952 concerts gave London a chance to hear the eighty-five-year-old Maestro in a moment of musical grace, a year and a half before he brought his long career to an end. Still, there is no comparison, in either temporal or numerical terms, between Toscanini's British career and his careers in his native Italy (1886–1952, with a fifteen-year interruption for political reasons in the 1930s and '40s) and the United States (1908–15, 1920–21, 1926–54). Nor did Toscanini, renowned mainly as an opera conductor during the first half of his professional life (in South America and Paris, as well as Italy and the United States), ever conduct an opera in Britain.