Changes and exchanges

Soon after Mase contracted Toscanini for the 1938 Festival, he decided that his various interests, including the personal connection forged with the conductor, would justify his pursuing a career as concert promoter and administrator outside the BBC structure. After leaving the corporation late in 1937 he began a prolonged process of co-opting a committee which would plan and direct the following year's London Music Festival; once in place, the committee duly appointed him Director of the Festival. According to Sir Henry Wood's memoirs, Mase's ‘release’ from the corporation had ‘the full blessing of the BBC’; but while relations between them necessarily remained close, the BBC cannot have been entirely happy for their erstwhile employee to assume a position as the (in substance) self-styled Director of the Festival, an event featuring their own orchestra and starring the most eminent of all conductors who was until then contracted (through Mase) with the corporation.

Tensions soon grew, stemming from Toscanini's complaint in February 1938 to NBC, quickly relayed to the BBC, that he had not received promised copies of the as yet unissued Tragic Overture recorded three months before. In fact Mase had arranged for copies to be sent by the quickest means possible from HMV to RCA in New York but RCA had failed to deliver them to Toscanini's home.