Getting back in peacetime

As early as March 1938 Toscanini proposed to Mase a 1939 BBC SO Beethoven/ Brahms cycle; perhaps more realistically, during his 1938 visit he intimated to Boult that he wished to set a seal on his London visits with a complete Beethoven cycle. Moreover he knew that in the BBC Chorus trained by Leslie Woodgate there was material fit for the ultimate test, the Missa Solemnis. As noted in the preceding chapter, at the Isolino on 30 July 1938 Mase was unsuccessful in gaining Toscanini's approval for HMV's concert recordings; but on the same day, in his capacity as Director of the London Music Festival, he did succeed in concluding an agreement with Toscanini for a seven-concert Beethoven cycle in 1939, at an increased fee of 500 guineas (£525, today about £26,000) per concert. As usual, he later forwarded it to the BBC for assignment and execution of its financial provisions.

A few days later the Mase holiday on the Isolino came to an end, but not before Carla donated one of her hats to their pet donkey Haiyu; as Georgina reported in her letter of thanks to Toscanini, this offering was no sooner presented than promptly eaten. In a further measure of the growing intimacy between the conductor and his English friends, Georgina did not hesitate to address Toscanini in remarkably familiar terms about their ‘wonderful’ holiday and how sad everyone would be without him: ‘but of course “everyone” doesn't love you quite so much as we do, so we are saddest’, their visit ‘a beauty beyond forgetting’.