The New York Times Book Review - Robert Gottlieb
The trajectory of Toscanini's artistic path constitutes the main body of Sachs's biography, and he gives us an extremely thorough chronicle of his activities and achievements…Sachs's account of Toscanini's career is persuasive and compelling in the important ways. He also gives us the man, with all his contradictions.
Publishers Weekly
★ 01/23/2017
Sachs vibrantly and vividly narrates the sprawling tales of Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini’s passionate life, drawing on a treasure trove of newly available material: almost 1,500 letters, more than 100 tape recordings of Toscanini in conversation with his family and friends during the last years of his life, and archives of institutions with which Toscanini was deeply involved, such as La Scala and the Met. In exhaustive detail, Sachs begins with Toscanini’s birth in Parma in 1867 and energetically chronicles his student days; his marriage; his remaking of La Scala; his tenure at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera; his opposition to Mussolini; his years at the New York Philharmonic, Bayreuth, Paris, and Salzburg; and his death, just a few months before his 90th birthday. Toscanini emerges as a creative genius possessing an “extraordinary aural memory” that allowed him to recall pieces of music that he had heard but whose scores he had never seen. On tour with an opera company to São Paulo as assistant chorus master and principal cello when he was 19, Toscanini was thrust onto the conductor’s podium one evening when the crowd rejected the principal conductor; it was Toscanini’s remarkable debut. Sachs’s entertaining and definitive portrait of Toscanini reveals a passionate musician characterized by intense concentration, personal magnetism, generosity, and commitment to his country and his family. (June)
Francis Ford Coppola
"Considering the great impact Arturo Toscanini had on my family—and certainly my father, Carmine Coppola, his first chair flute during the ’40s—I would say that Toscanini’s powerful personality brought a unity to his conducting…He was the music he was conducting, the interpretive being…I am reminded of all of this in reading Harvey Sachs’s comprehensive new biography, which dramatically re-creates both the conductor’s musical genius and the politics of a distant age."
The New Yorker - Alex Ross
"[A] monumental new Toscanini biography. The most riveting pages are devoted to the nineteen-thirties and forties, when the conductor converted his favorite repertory—Beethoven, Verdi, and Wagner—into emblems of the fight against Fascism. I couldn’t help wondering: What would Toscanini have done if he had been confronted by geomusical snarl in Hamburg? He might have had something to say."
Christian Science Monitor - Jonathan Rosenberg
"Toscanini’s significance as a superb artist and a key figure in the international arena is brilliantly captured in Harvey Sachs’s absorbing biography Toscanini: Musician of Conscience. . . . [Sachs] paints a captivating portrait of the conductor, from his birth in Parma in 1867 to his final days in New York 89 years later. . . . [A] feast for those drawn to music, culture, and politics."
Gramophone - Rob Cowan
"Without doubt the most engaging, the best-written and certainly the most comprehensive Toscanini yet to be published."
Economist
"As a study of the life and times of one of the greatest conductors of all time, this book will not soon be bettered."
Plácido Domingo
"Arturo Toscanini was a gigantic figure in the history of musical performance…Harvey Sachs’ new biography is the most complete and involving story ever written about this amazing life."
Robert Gottlieb
"Sachs’s account is persuasive and compelling in the important ways. . . . . Today, Toscanini is receding from our consciousness, notwithstanding his many records. . . . Creative geniuses can survive for centuries, even millenniums; interpreters inevitably go over the cultural cliff. But that doesn’t detract from the crucial—the central—role Toscanini played in our musical culture for well over 60 years. Nor from the almost universal regard he was held in as a man."
James Levine
"No other musician had as great an impact as Arturo Toscanini on the performance of opera and symphonic music in the twentieth century. With tremendous passion and stubbornness—and thanks to his extraordinary talents—he reshaped our ideas about what a conductor’s goals should be and how to achieve them."
New York Review of Books - Tim Page
"Extraordinary . . . . Indeed, I cannot think of another biography of a classical musician to which it can be compared: in its breadth, scope, and encyclopedic command of factual detail it reminds me of nothing so much as Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker. . . . Never before has [this] history been told so well."
The New Yorker - David Denby
"A very engaging and at times gripping chronicle of music and society, all of it devoted to the unending drive and conscientiousness that made Toscanini’s performances so riveting—and, to some, so repellent. . . . What comes through in Sachs’s long chronicle is the extent of Toscanini’s role, witting and unwitting, in transforming the way that classical music was produced and consumed in the twentieth century."
Antonio Pappano
"An astonishing story of how Toscanini became a musical giant…The unbelievable detail in this book re-creates vividly the musical environment from the late 1800s onward."
Riccardo Muti
"Sachs examines not only the artistic aspects but also the political, social, and private aspects of the man whom many consider the greatest conductor of his time. A reading of this biography helps us to understand this inflexible man, this musician who was so severe, also with himself, this conductor who represents a legend of the musical world, past and present. "
David I. Kertzer
"Arturo Toscanini was not only one of the twentieth century’s towering figures of classical music and opera, but an inspirational figure as the world-renowned Italian artist who stood up to fascism. In this monumental biography, Sachs artfully weaves together both of these stories, offering rich insight into music and politics across an extraordinary life."
Classics Today - David Hurwitz
"What cannot be denied is the fact that this new biography constitutes a tremendous achievement for which both fans of the conductor and music lovers in general will be eternally grateful. . . Sach’s new biography looks to be the most authoritative work on Toscanini that we are likely to see."
Classical Music - Philip Borg-Wheeler
"'Sachs’ own dedication to this force of nature has been fulfilled in a book which ranks among the best of 2017."
Economist
"As a study of the life and times of one of the greatest conductors of all time, this book will not soon be bettered."
Library Journal
★ 02/01/2017
The name Toscanini once struck fear in the hearts of musicians and awe in the hearts of his audiences. During his turbulent lifetime Arturo Toscanini (1867–1957) knew many famous composers, including Giuseppi Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, and Richard Strauss, and was influential in the interpretation of their works. His photographic memory enabled him to conduct without a score, and his exacting standards influenced reforms in the opera house and concert hall. Sachs, who is on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music, wrote an earlier biography of his subject, but this completely new edition draws on the archives of such venerable institutions as Milan's La Scala, New York's Metropolitan Opera, and the New York Philharmonic, as well as the Toscanini family's archive and the 1,500 letters that the author edited, translated, and annotated and published in 2002, as The Letters of Arturo Toscanini. Sachs blends his tale of the maestro's career with copious details of his private life, including Toscanini's affairs and his courageous stand against Fascism and Nazism. VERDICT There is a wealth of information here for musicologists. Sachs's engaging account should also attract general readers interested in the subject. Highly recommended.—Edward B. Cone, New York
SEPTEMBER 2017 - AudioFile
This exhaustive biography of world-renowned musician and composer Arturo Toscanini is a significant undertaking for both narrator and listener. Happily, Paul Boehmer has the skill to deliver this lengthy history with the clarity and fluency the excellent writing deserves while maintaining a comfortable pace that advances the text briskly without rushing through the fascinating details. Boehmer also provides great color and authenticity as he slips easily from English to Toscanini's native Italian and the French, German, and Russian of the maestro's favorite composers. Although mainly a treat for music and opera buffs, the audiobook contains sufficient details of Toscanini's spicy and turbulent personal life for broader audience appeal. Virtuoso performances by both Sachs and Boehmer result in a successful audiobook experience. M.O.B. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2017-04-16
The epic life and art of the famed Italian conductor.In his lifetime, Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) was considered the greatest conductor of all, and music historian Sachs (Curtis Institute of Music; The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824, 2010, etc.) makes a strong case for that assessment with judicious quotations from contemporary sources. They reveal an exacting taskmaster, feared for his brutal criticisms of singers and orchestra members, who could also be a gentle instructor and a steadfast support—if he felt they were working hard enough. He drove no one harder than himself: a musical prodigy from a family in straitened circumstances, Toscanini won admittance to Parma's prestigious Royal School of Music when he was 9 and conducted his first orchestra at 19. He gained early success in opera, serving as chief conductor of La Scala in Milan and then New York's Metropolitan Opera, but he achieved his broadest popular reach leading the NBC Symphony Orchestra's weekly radio broadcasts beginning in 1937. He awed performers and audiences by conducting without a score and was revered for his attention to detail and fidelity to the composer's intentions. Sachs creates a well-rounded portrait of this admirable artist and not entirely admirable man, noting that Toscanini proclaimed devotion to his wife while philandering well into his 70s. The biographer has nothing but admiration, however, for Toscanini's principled anti-fascism, which led him to leave La Scala and to refuse to continue at Bayreuth, where he was the first non-German conductor. The author also praises Toscanini in his prime as an advocate for new music and living composers; if the conductor's tastes grew more conservative over time, Sachs reminds us that this was part of a broader trend, as classical music and opera receded from the mainstream to rely on an established, mostly 19th-century canon. This minutely detailed chronicle of Toscanini's jam-packed life offers more than casual readers will want to know, but music lovers will savor every evocative word. Sweeping yet meticulous, appreciative without eschewing critical judgments—like Toscanini himself.
