MUSIC / Chris Pasles : Author Seeks to Dethrone Toscanini as American ‘Culture God’

To most American music-lovers who grew up anytime from the late 1930s to the 1950s, Arturo Toscanini and great conducting were as inseparable as Rimsky and Korsakov.

Like many others, Joseph Horowitz, 44, revered The Maestro--the capital letters seem inevitable--even though he knew Toscanini’s work only through RCA Victor recordings.

“I did swallow the line that he was the greatest conductor of the age and (of) all time,” Horowitz said in a recent phone interview from New York. “Only later, when I heard other live records, did I put him into perspective.”

The result was his 1987 book, “Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music.”

A former free-lance music critic for the New York Times and author of a book on pianist Claudio Arrau, “Conversations with Arrau,” Horowitz will talk about Toscanini at 8 tonight at UC Irvine. He said his talk, which incorporates slides and musical examples, will be “more polemical than the book, more purposely provocative.”

“Toscanini was a culture god when we needed a validating symbol that we could wave at our cultural parents in Europe,” Horowitz said. “It was our cultural inferiority that fed the Toscanini cult.”

A number of factors, however--and not all of them musical--helped to feed the growing cult.

“Toscanini’s political credentials were impeccable,” Horowitz said. “He was an outspoken opponent of Mussolini and Hitler. He was a self-made man, which set him off from (Wilhelm) Furtwangler and Mahler, who were perceived as awkward, neurotic, cerebral. He seemed masculine, decisive and in addition was made to appear a regular guy. . . .

“He espoused textual fidelity, the notion that you didn’t have to be German to be a great Beethoven interpreter, which was a very popular idea in . . . the U.S.”

Radio and recordings also brought the work of the conductor to an ever-widening audience.

But was Toscanini as good as was claimed?

“No one could have been,” Horowitz said. “The claims are hyperbolic. To have called him the first musician of this time--and this in an era when Stravinsky was alive, when Schoenberg was alive, when Bartok and Hindemith were alive--that betrays a serious confusion about the relative importance of creative and re-creative musicians. . . .

“The second claim, that he was the greatest conductor of all time, was equally hyperbolic. Who is going to be able to compare him, for instance, with Wagner as a conductor?”

All this might be only of historical interest if the Toscanini cult had not produced a lasting legacy on the way music is heard and produced in this country, according to Horowitz.

“When I talk about long-term legacies of the cult, the main criteria are the fixation on celebrated performances, the identity of great music with over-familiar, canonized masterworks, which are always European and of the 18th and 19th centuries.”

In other words, no new music.

“No conductor prior to Toscanini was so divorced from contemporary music,” Horowitz said. “All the important conductors before him conducted new music as a matter of course. . . . Many were composers--Furtwangler, Mahler, Strauss are just some of the better-known cases. And, in the case of Mahler and Strauss, (they) were important composers.”

But Toscanini was the first important example of “a specialist interpreter.”

“I think it was certainly not an accident that this first specialist-interpreter--a specialist in performance--was a specialist in old music because a composer-conductor is very likely to take an interest in new music,” Horowitz said.

Horowitz believes that the Toscanini cult is ultimately responsible for the continuing marketing of superstar musical celebrities who avoid new music. And the result of that, he said, is “a malaise that afflicts our classical music culture.”

“It is a big problem,” he says. “I don’t have any easy solutions. But I would make the following points. The problem in one sense is that the audience is very old and not getting any younger. . . . It’s not being replenished . . . . At Lincoln Center, most of the people look like they are grandparents.”

So what can be done to lower the average age of the music-loving public?

“The wrong approach is to hire a consultant who does a breakdown of the audience, then concocts non-musical strategies to try to attract a new audience,” Horowitz said. “Then you do computerized mailings and radio-thons. You try to change the image of the orchestra so it seems it’s got more to do with yuppies and less to do with old people.

“Symptomatic of that, you find orchestras have larger marketing and promotional staffs than artistic staffs (not counting the musicians).

“This approach can be successful in the short run; even remarkably successful because this promotional apparatus is very sophisticated. But in the long run, it’s got to fail” because, he said, the standard repertory is failing to attract new audiences.

“It’s obvious that unless you change the product, all you’re doing is applying bandages. . . . You have to get beyond thinking of promotion strategy and acknowledge that something, some change, in the arts and repertory is called for.”

Toscanini, as Horowitz demonstrates so convincingly in his book, would not have agreed.

Joseph Horowitz will lecture on his book “Understanding Toscanini” tonight at 8 in the Science Lecture Hall on the UC Irvine campus , Campus Drive and Bridge Street. Tickets: $3-5. Information: (714) 856-5000.