Integrity
The practice of music, in my experience, has a curious effect on character. It may be that, being the most spiritual of all the arts, to be exposed to it is close to being exposed to Spirit itself; but I have often been struck to what extent many musicians, people who live day in and day out with the most noble and beautiful and enlivening and even just plain fun of all the arts, indeed of any way to make a living, turn out to be miserable, odious, selfish, and especially expert at all the sins that make for immediate and lasting unhappiness. Not all of them, mind: some are great and noble people. But of the worst people I have ever known, many have been musicians. It is as though contact with this greatest of art must either raise or depress a man, as though moderate decency became impossible. After all, the greatest of them all, Beethoven, was enormous both in his virtues and his vices.
But I would rather speak of heroes than of cads. So let us speak of three musicians I know who can all be said to be integrity incarnate, who proved it by by resisting the greatest evil of their time, and who nevertheless were as different - in anything except greatness - as three men could very well be.
Hans Knappertsbusch became a musician after the hard graft of a German degree in Philosophy in the pre-WWI period, but he never seems to have wanted to do anything except play music. He became a conductor, and, as young German conductors do, started his career in a series of small, provincial orchestras, till he achieved an excellent berth in Munich. And there he stayed, very happy with his post, with no ambition whatever to do better for himself, and immensely popular in the city, who knew very well how lucky they were in having him - until he was dismissed in 1938 for having made it clear, once too often, his utter contempt for the Nazi regime. He crossed the border to Austria and readily found work there - only to find the regime had followed him and annexed the country. None the less, and in spite of the fact that his anti-Nazism was no secret, he continued to find work throughout the war, and at the end he was not only still standing but with the added prestige of someone who had walked through the fire without being either stained or scorched. Being the easy-going sort he was, he took little advantage of this; but he was from then on and until his death a regular at West Berlin, Bayreuth and especially Vienna, where he recorded some of the most stunning performances ever of the classical German repertoire, especially Beethoven, Wagner and Bruckner.
Knappertsbusch's dominant characteristic is an exceptional beauty of sound, unmatched by any other conductor I know, and a pace that is rather slower than most, but never less than involving and exciting. I’ve been struck by how often one hears passages in his performances that sound like concerto passages, with some orchestral or other performing with the forwardness and intensity of a soloist; and I suspect that this is part of the secret of his immense and invulnerable popularity among fellow musicians. He got each man to perform at his best, to feel like a soloist; but, somehow, never at the expense of the whole. Hence that astounding beauty of sound that makes his Beethoven and his Bruckner so unlike anyone else's. In spite of what I said about his comfortable and laidback character, his results could be electric, astonishing. I have heard dozens of performances of the Master Singers Ouverture, and barely realized there was percussion in the score at all. Then I heard one of his, and the blows on the kettledrum made such an impression on me that I had to listen to the same performance a couple of times again to realize that the whole orchestra was sounding not only gorgeous but sustained, driven, without sloppiness or boredom - in a word: vital. And this was the work of a man at the end of his life:
Arturo Toscanini was as different from Knappertsbusch as two men could possibly be; and that does not refer only to the fact that one was German and the other Italian. In fact, Toscanini was a lot more like the popular Italian idea of a German - especially a Prussian sergeant-major - and Knappertsbusch like the German idea of an Italian, than either was like their own national stereotype. But those were not the only differences. Unlike Knappertsbusch's ordinary and unhurried career, Toscanini had barely any apprenticeship: volunteering to replace a sick conductor at the very start of what was intended as a career as an orchestral cellist, he made such an impression that he was immediately promoted to the position himself. Less than four years later, the Italian musical and state authorities showed what they thought of the young man by making him conduct at the funeral of Giuseppe Verdi, an event that had worldwide visibility. From then on, he never looked back; almost to the day of his death, for over half a century, he was the prince of conductors, famous across the world.
He earned it, and paid for it. In an age of authoritarian conductors, this passionate democrat, an enemy of tyrants and brutes everywhere, was the most famous and one of the worst-tempered of them all. The difference - and the reason why orchestrals put up with it, indeed why they often stuck with him for decades - was that it was never personal. He was short-sighted, and when he conducted he could only “see” the sound, never the player. If a player actually became personally offended, Toscanini would apologize. He drove himself as hard as anyone, and dreamed of dying in harness; and yet his dedication to excellence was so absolute that when a few critics started noticing slight problems with cohesion, he retired (at eighty-four). One thing his performances have in common with Knappertsbusch’s is that even their old mono recordings sound like hi-fi stereo: you can hear everything. And that is no chance, because he was always extremely careful about clarity and balance, both in the recording studio and to a live audience. One of his worst and most radical condemnations was: “They won’t be able to hear it that way!” But it is just as typical of the two men that, while Knappertsbusch took his beloved Munich orchestra as he found it and led it to greatness, Toscanini eventually was given his own orchestra - the legendary NBC Philharmonic - and even built up something like his own company of opera singers, people who performed almost only with him and who, except perhaps for Jan Pierce, never did as well with anyone else. He had to be in charge, absolutely, with a group committed to him.
Toscanini was one of those rare men whose very faults have something honourable and redeeming about them. He was, alas, a goat where women were concerned; but it was also known that a lady might turn him down if she wished, because he would be neither vindictive nor mean. He was capable of amazing generosity, and did not make a fuss about it. He was, in everything he did, a knightly figure; not just because of his high and innate sense of honour, but because he was naturally a fighter and never stepped back from battle.
In spite of his memorable performances of some of the greatest religious music, Toscanini came from old Garibaldian stock, passionately political, patriotic and progressive, and his religion is as doubtful as Verdi’s. Certainly he was no conservative. In 1919, he was the celebrity candidate in Mussolini’s first Fascist electoral list; like many contemporaries, he had hoped to find in his fellow Emilian the man to reconcile patriotism and social progress. He had simply not realized to what an extent Mussolini had abjured and reversed his pacifist pre-war socialism; and when he did, he broke with him radically and for ever. Eventually he suffered the indignity of a beating by Fascist thugs, and went into exile; a wrench he had been avoiding even as the situation grew more and more impossible, for he loved his country devotedly. From then on he used his reputation and his career as instruments to oppose Fascism, touring South America when the Fascist and Nazi governments were trying to reach there, consecrating the just-founded Palestine Philharmonic (now the Israel Philharmonic), a penniless collection of Jewish escapees, by guest-conducting, and noisily refusing to conduct anywhere a Fascist or Nazi were in charge. During the war, his work was frequently part of Allied war propaganda; and when he returned to Italy in 1946, to conduct in a still roofless and devastated La Scala, it was universally felt that this was the act of spiritual rebirth of a renewed, free Italy.
In his last years, Toscanini gave personal encouragement to the new generation of Italian musicians. In particular, he generously promoted two young conductor of great promise - proving that his ear for others’ talent was excellent. One of them, Guido Cantelli, tragically died in an air crash after making only a handful of performances hinting at immense potential; but the other, Carlo Maria Giulini, lived to be eighty-one and the greatest Italian conductor after Toscanini himself. And again, he was a wholly different kind of artist.
Unlike Toscanini, Giulini had a slow career, and again unlike the intensely local man from Parma, rooted in Verdi’s own country, he had a background that covered the whole of Italy - an incarnate Italian unity: born in Barletta to a father from Lombardy and a mother from Naples, then taken across the then border to Tyrol, only to discover in 1918 that Italy had followed them and that the German-speaking community where they lived was now under the Tricolore, he eventually wound up in Rome; but not before he had learned to speak Tyrolean dialect - and love German music. It was to become a professional musician that Giulini left the beautiful mountains of South Tyrol for the distant, unknown capital, to study and soon to join Italy’s main symphony orchestra, the Academy of St.Cecilia.
His slow progress up the ranks was interrupted by war just as he had taken the decisive step by winning a guest-conducting spot in his own orchestra: he was drafted, chucked into the army as a second lieutenant (by law, all college graduates were automatically made officers) and sent to the Hell of Croatia, one of the nastiest fronts, and one of those in which the Italians themselves were guilty of war crimes. It was in this unpromising stage that Giulini first showed, at the risk of life and limb, that mild but unbending character that led people to see him as a sort of saint. In two years in that bloody cauldron of partisans, ustashas and traitors on all sides, his pacifism and anti-fascism would not let him shoot a single bullet at a human target. In the same period he married the woman to whom - against most unlike Toscanini! - he would be faithful for 53 years.
When the catastrophe of September 8, 1943, struck Italy, Giulini was in Rome, and rather than follow his commander’s traitorous orders to fight on the Nazi side (just as, at the battle of Porta San Paolo, the last heroes were fighting and dying in the hopeless defense of a shattered country, a lost city, and a government that had left them in the lurch), Giulini and his young wife hid for nine months. The Nazi occupation of Rome only lasted only eight months (10 September 1943 - 6 June 1944), but it made up in horror what it lacked in time; slaughter, abduction, torture, and every foul act were daily occurrences. My father was a child of six at the time, and I know for a fact that he still has nightmares about the songs that German troops sang. Giulini spent nine months in a tunnel underneath a home owned by his wife's uncle, along with two friends and a Jewish family which was avoiding Nazi arrest and deportation. Posters around Rome with his face and name instructed that he be shot on sight.
His refusal to surrender paid off when Mark Clark’s Americans swept into Rome on June 6, to a yelling and weeping welcome of a population half-mad with joy and relief. Giulini turned out to be one of the few musicians in town whose hands were p not dirty with Fascist favour nor stained with German sympathies; he was forthwith promoted to permanent conductor of the Academy, and his stellar career began.
Giulini conducting Brahms' Fourth Symphony, the first piece he conducted when freed in 1944
One by one, he conducted every significant orchestra in Italy, keeping up a high standard of musicianship at a time when sloppy and slovenly attitudes were all too widespread, and cultivating the German repertoire while making himself familiar with the more local and traditional opera tradition. In 1950 he first conducted a Greek soprano then known mainly for dubious friendships during the war and for having later married a rich Milanese businessman, six years later he was to conduct Maria Callas in what may well have been the greatest opera performance of all time - La Traviata at La Scala, Milan, with Luchino Visconti producing, a staging so unforgettable that it made it almost impossible to stage that opera in Milan for the next fifty years, because, until everyone who remembered it had died, any other Violetta would be booed. Tragically, this utterly legendary performance was not recorded, although one hopes that tapes may still turn up somewhere in the cavernous archives of RAI.
(It is worth pointing out that Giulini, the greatest opera conductor in the world, associated with record-breaking triumphs in all the world’s greatest theatres, refused to conduct opera from 1968, rather than compromise his vision. That is a sufficient and dire comment on what producers have been doing to opera since the seventies.)
Giulini became a star without really trying, thanks mainly to the absolute belief of his colleagues and fellow-musicians, beginning with Toscanini and Victor de Sabata, who had recommended him for the chief post at La Scala. Even his occasional resignations on points of principle never stuck him with the reputation of a flouncing prima donna, such as many other musicians have attracted. To the contrary, and to a man, the orchestras and the artists he worked with felt the spell, growing from year to year, of an understatedly spiritual personality, not with his head in the clouds - a conductor cannot afford not to keep his feet firmly on the ground - but with an incredibly high and yet simple level of morality. As a musician he was neither adventurous nor narrow, working inside a broad but unchanging repertoire that went from the seventeen to the early nineteen hundreds and took in most of the popular works; in spite of his highly religious character, he did not particularly favour the sacred repertoire, although his recordings of sacred and religious works from Rossini’s Stabat Mater to Bruckner and Britten were uniformly memorable. He had the good fortune of spending his whole life with a woman who complemented him perfectly (all too much, according to a few impresarios and businesspeople; as one said, it was easy enough for Carlo to be a saint when Marcella spent her time being a she-devil on his behalf!) He died at 91, a ripe old age, like Toscanini and many other directors. (I have a suspicion that the physical exercise involved in standing for a few hours each day at the podium and waving your arms in various ways may be good for one’s health; you rarely see a fat conductor, either.)
Three men, each as different from the other two as it is possible to be, yet each visibly possessed, both in his artistry and in his private life, of the highest level of integrity. Indeed, in all three cases, their artistry would not have been possible without integrity. And it is not even the case that integrity is necessary to this particular field of endeavour: some famous directors - Leonard Bernstein and Karl Boehm, to mention a couple - did not, in my view, have a smidgen of it, at least in their private lives. But these three could almost have been chosen to show how many different forms integrity may have, and still be recognizable.,
But I would rather speak of heroes than of cads. So let us speak of three musicians I know who can all be said to be integrity incarnate, who proved it by by resisting the greatest evil of their time, and who nevertheless were as different - in anything except greatness - as three men could very well be.
Hans Knappertsbusch became a musician after the hard graft of a German degree in Philosophy in the pre-WWI period, but he never seems to have wanted to do anything except play music. He became a conductor, and, as young German conductors do, started his career in a series of small, provincial orchestras, till he achieved an excellent berth in Munich. And there he stayed, very happy with his post, with no ambition whatever to do better for himself, and immensely popular in the city, who knew very well how lucky they were in having him - until he was dismissed in 1938 for having made it clear, once too often, his utter contempt for the Nazi regime. He crossed the border to Austria and readily found work there - only to find the regime had followed him and annexed the country. None the less, and in spite of the fact that his anti-Nazism was no secret, he continued to find work throughout the war, and at the end he was not only still standing but with the added prestige of someone who had walked through the fire without being either stained or scorched. Being the easy-going sort he was, he took little advantage of this; but he was from then on and until his death a regular at West Berlin, Bayreuth and especially Vienna, where he recorded some of the most stunning performances ever of the classical German repertoire, especially Beethoven, Wagner and Bruckner.
Knappertsbusch's dominant characteristic is an exceptional beauty of sound, unmatched by any other conductor I know, and a pace that is rather slower than most, but never less than involving and exciting. I’ve been struck by how often one hears passages in his performances that sound like concerto passages, with some orchestral or other performing with the forwardness and intensity of a soloist; and I suspect that this is part of the secret of his immense and invulnerable popularity among fellow musicians. He got each man to perform at his best, to feel like a soloist; but, somehow, never at the expense of the whole. Hence that astounding beauty of sound that makes his Beethoven and his Bruckner so unlike anyone else's. In spite of what I said about his comfortable and laidback character, his results could be electric, astonishing. I have heard dozens of performances of the Master Singers Ouverture, and barely realized there was percussion in the score at all. Then I heard one of his, and the blows on the kettledrum made such an impression on me that I had to listen to the same performance a couple of times again to realize that the whole orchestra was sounding not only gorgeous but sustained, driven, without sloppiness or boredom - in a word: vital. And this was the work of a man at the end of his life:
Click to viewArturo Toscanini was as different from Knappertsbusch as two men could possibly be; and that does not refer only to the fact that one was German and the other Italian. In fact, Toscanini was a lot more like the popular Italian idea of a German - especially a Prussian sergeant-major - and Knappertsbusch like the German idea of an Italian, than either was like their own national stereotype. But those were not the only differences. Unlike Knappertsbusch's ordinary and unhurried career, Toscanini had barely any apprenticeship: volunteering to replace a sick conductor at the very start of what was intended as a career as an orchestral cellist, he made such an impression that he was immediately promoted to the position himself. Less than four years later, the Italian musical and state authorities showed what they thought of the young man by making him conduct at the funeral of Giuseppe Verdi, an event that had worldwide visibility. From then on, he never looked back; almost to the day of his death, for over half a century, he was the prince of conductors, famous across the world.
He earned it, and paid for it. In an age of authoritarian conductors, this passionate democrat, an enemy of tyrants and brutes everywhere, was the most famous and one of the worst-tempered of them all. The difference - and the reason why orchestrals put up with it, indeed why they often stuck with him for decades - was that it was never personal. He was short-sighted, and when he conducted he could only “see” the sound, never the player. If a player actually became personally offended, Toscanini would apologize. He drove himself as hard as anyone, and dreamed of dying in harness; and yet his dedication to excellence was so absolute that when a few critics started noticing slight problems with cohesion, he retired (at eighty-four). One thing his performances have in common with Knappertsbusch’s is that even their old mono recordings sound like hi-fi stereo: you can hear everything. And that is no chance, because he was always extremely careful about clarity and balance, both in the recording studio and to a live audience. One of his worst and most radical condemnations was: “They won’t be able to hear it that way!” But it is just as typical of the two men that, while Knappertsbusch took his beloved Munich orchestra as he found it and led it to greatness, Toscanini eventually was given his own orchestra - the legendary NBC Philharmonic - and even built up something like his own company of opera singers, people who performed almost only with him and who, except perhaps for Jan Pierce, never did as well with anyone else. He had to be in charge, absolutely, with a group committed to him.
Toscanini was one of those rare men whose very faults have something honourable and redeeming about them. He was, alas, a goat where women were concerned; but it was also known that a lady might turn him down if she wished, because he would be neither vindictive nor mean. He was capable of amazing generosity, and did not make a fuss about it. He was, in everything he did, a knightly figure; not just because of his high and innate sense of honour, but because he was naturally a fighter and never stepped back from battle.
In spite of his memorable performances of some of the greatest religious music, Toscanini came from old Garibaldian stock, passionately political, patriotic and progressive, and his religion is as doubtful as Verdi’s. Certainly he was no conservative. In 1919, he was the celebrity candidate in Mussolini’s first Fascist electoral list; like many contemporaries, he had hoped to find in his fellow Emilian the man to reconcile patriotism and social progress. He had simply not realized to what an extent Mussolini had abjured and reversed his pacifist pre-war socialism; and when he did, he broke with him radically and for ever. Eventually he suffered the indignity of a beating by Fascist thugs, and went into exile; a wrench he had been avoiding even as the situation grew more and more impossible, for he loved his country devotedly. From then on he used his reputation and his career as instruments to oppose Fascism, touring South America when the Fascist and Nazi governments were trying to reach there, consecrating the just-founded Palestine Philharmonic (now the Israel Philharmonic), a penniless collection of Jewish escapees, by guest-conducting, and noisily refusing to conduct anywhere a Fascist or Nazi were in charge. During the war, his work was frequently part of Allied war propaganda; and when he returned to Italy in 1946, to conduct in a still roofless and devastated La Scala, it was universally felt that this was the act of spiritual rebirth of a renewed, free Italy.
In his last years, Toscanini gave personal encouragement to the new generation of Italian musicians. In particular, he generously promoted two young conductor of great promise - proving that his ear for others’ talent was excellent. One of them, Guido Cantelli, tragically died in an air crash after making only a handful of performances hinting at immense potential; but the other, Carlo Maria Giulini, lived to be eighty-one and the greatest Italian conductor after Toscanini himself. And again, he was a wholly different kind of artist.
Unlike Toscanini, Giulini had a slow career, and again unlike the intensely local man from Parma, rooted in Verdi’s own country, he had a background that covered the whole of Italy - an incarnate Italian unity: born in Barletta to a father from Lombardy and a mother from Naples, then taken across the then border to Tyrol, only to discover in 1918 that Italy had followed them and that the German-speaking community where they lived was now under the Tricolore, he eventually wound up in Rome; but not before he had learned to speak Tyrolean dialect - and love German music. It was to become a professional musician that Giulini left the beautiful mountains of South Tyrol for the distant, unknown capital, to study and soon to join Italy’s main symphony orchestra, the Academy of St.Cecilia.
His slow progress up the ranks was interrupted by war just as he had taken the decisive step by winning a guest-conducting spot in his own orchestra: he was drafted, chucked into the army as a second lieutenant (by law, all college graduates were automatically made officers) and sent to the Hell of Croatia, one of the nastiest fronts, and one of those in which the Italians themselves were guilty of war crimes. It was in this unpromising stage that Giulini first showed, at the risk of life and limb, that mild but unbending character that led people to see him as a sort of saint. In two years in that bloody cauldron of partisans, ustashas and traitors on all sides, his pacifism and anti-fascism would not let him shoot a single bullet at a human target. In the same period he married the woman to whom - against most unlike Toscanini! - he would be faithful for 53 years.
When the catastrophe of September 8, 1943, struck Italy, Giulini was in Rome, and rather than follow his commander’s traitorous orders to fight on the Nazi side (just as, at the battle of Porta San Paolo, the last heroes were fighting and dying in the hopeless defense of a shattered country, a lost city, and a government that had left them in the lurch), Giulini and his young wife hid for nine months. The Nazi occupation of Rome only lasted only eight months (10 September 1943 - 6 June 1944), but it made up in horror what it lacked in time; slaughter, abduction, torture, and every foul act were daily occurrences. My father was a child of six at the time, and I know for a fact that he still has nightmares about the songs that German troops sang. Giulini spent nine months in a tunnel underneath a home owned by his wife's uncle, along with two friends and a Jewish family which was avoiding Nazi arrest and deportation. Posters around Rome with his face and name instructed that he be shot on sight.
His refusal to surrender paid off when Mark Clark’s Americans swept into Rome on June 6, to a yelling and weeping welcome of a population half-mad with joy and relief. Giulini turned out to be one of the few musicians in town whose hands were p not dirty with Fascist favour nor stained with German sympathies; he was forthwith promoted to permanent conductor of the Academy, and his stellar career began.
Giulini conducting Brahms' Fourth Symphony, the first piece he conducted when freed in 1944
One by one, he conducted every significant orchestra in Italy, keeping up a high standard of musicianship at a time when sloppy and slovenly attitudes were all too widespread, and cultivating the German repertoire while making himself familiar with the more local and traditional opera tradition. In 1950 he first conducted a Greek soprano then known mainly for dubious friendships during the war and for having later married a rich Milanese businessman, six years later he was to conduct Maria Callas in what may well have been the greatest opera performance of all time - La Traviata at La Scala, Milan, with Luchino Visconti producing, a staging so unforgettable that it made it almost impossible to stage that opera in Milan for the next fifty years, because, until everyone who remembered it had died, any other Violetta would be booed. Tragically, this utterly legendary performance was not recorded, although one hopes that tapes may still turn up somewhere in the cavernous archives of RAI.
(It is worth pointing out that Giulini, the greatest opera conductor in the world, associated with record-breaking triumphs in all the world’s greatest theatres, refused to conduct opera from 1968, rather than compromise his vision. That is a sufficient and dire comment on what producers have been doing to opera since the seventies.)
Giulini became a star without really trying, thanks mainly to the absolute belief of his colleagues and fellow-musicians, beginning with Toscanini and Victor de Sabata, who had recommended him for the chief post at La Scala. Even his occasional resignations on points of principle never stuck him with the reputation of a flouncing prima donna, such as many other musicians have attracted. To the contrary, and to a man, the orchestras and the artists he worked with felt the spell, growing from year to year, of an understatedly spiritual personality, not with his head in the clouds - a conductor cannot afford not to keep his feet firmly on the ground - but with an incredibly high and yet simple level of morality. As a musician he was neither adventurous nor narrow, working inside a broad but unchanging repertoire that went from the seventeen to the early nineteen hundreds and took in most of the popular works; in spite of his highly religious character, he did not particularly favour the sacred repertoire, although his recordings of sacred and religious works from Rossini’s Stabat Mater to Bruckner and Britten were uniformly memorable. He had the good fortune of spending his whole life with a woman who complemented him perfectly (all too much, according to a few impresarios and businesspeople; as one said, it was easy enough for Carlo to be a saint when Marcella spent her time being a she-devil on his behalf!) He died at 91, a ripe old age, like Toscanini and many other directors. (I have a suspicion that the physical exercise involved in standing for a few hours each day at the podium and waving your arms in various ways may be good for one’s health; you rarely see a fat conductor, either.)
Three men, each as different from the other two as it is possible to be, yet each visibly possessed, both in his artistry and in his private life, of the highest level of integrity. Indeed, in all three cases, their artistry would not have been possible without integrity. And it is not even the case that integrity is necessary to this particular field of endeavour: some famous directors - Leonard Bernstein and Karl Boehm, to mention a couple - did not, in my view, have a smidgen of it, at least in their private lives. But these three could almost have been chosen to show how many different forms integrity may have, and still be recognizable.,