The real Toscanini, musicians reveal the maestro is an apt title, because it's the
account of those who were day in and day out in the workshop with Toscanini.
Now what should I tell you?
Should I say that there are no other conductors?
Of course not.
But they didn't have this electricity.
They didn't have this natural outburst of music.
These musicians who explain in musical terms what Toscanini did and why he did it,
and how he achieved his incredibly high standards.
You never played under Toscanini. You played with him.
You were his equal, and he made you feel that.
Well, Maestro, he always wanted things a certain way.
If he didn't get it, he was not very happy.
One day, early on when I just started, I'm sitting in the orchestra.
We're all sitting there waiting for him to come out to rehearsal.
I said, what happened? We're on and on and on. Finally, on the P.A. system,
David Sarser came to Maestro's dressing room.
I said, what did I do?
So I get up, put my fiddle out, and I go up to the podium and there's Jimmy Gollum.
He says, don't worry. Maestro has a problem. He's got a little portable radio that he uses all the time in the garden
to listen to Bruno Walter, and it won't play.
So he didn't want to start the rehearsal.
So they called me in, and I looked at it, and it was a motor roller,
and the cover was on a hinge.
The cover was the antenna, and the hinge had a piece of copper
holding, attaching the antenna to the radio, and it was cracked.
There was no antenna.
So I said, can you get me a soldering iron?
I said, of course. When they came up upstairs, they brought down a soldering iron, and I touched it a little and it played.
From then on, we were friends for life.
The music came first. People didn't matter. Tuscany didn't matter.
And I always refer to the one famous incident when we were doing the slow movement of the erog.
We finished it, and he stopped for a minute. He says, gentlemen,
I've been conducting this music for 50 years.
I do it mala. I do it badly. He says, please, may we do it once again, not for you, but for me.
Well, that's a big man.
