Word: maestro
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...more entitled to make these artistic gestures than Arturo Toscanini. The most famous of all living Italians except Mussolini and the most famous living embodiment of the art of music, the little, white-haired 76-year-old maestro had for years been using the lever of his prestige to pry at the roots of Fascism. To most Italians, who rate music as important as food and wine and a good deal more important than politics, that lever was a powerful one. To music-loving Germans (who gave him a smashing reception as conductor of the Bayreuth Wagner Festival...
...when he first defied a request to play Giovinezza at Milan's La Scala Opera House. When the Fascists started to agitate for control of La Scala's policies in 1929, Toscanini resigned as director. Two years later, at a concert in Bologna, the peppery little maestro again refused to conduct Giovinezza, saying publicly that, in his opinion, it was not music at all. After the concert a Fascist mob beat him up, Fascist authorities temporarily confiscated his passport, and the Fascist Party surrounded his Milan home with carabinieri. He was under incessant attack in the Fascist press...
...good deal of imagination on the part of the audience for fall enjoyment it makes up for this evident weakness by fine Technicolor and of course by the presence of Harry James. The James band is not hidden away in the near distant scenery and plays nine songs. Maestro Harry cracks a few jokes and pushes his trumpet around the dance floor several times...
When the music-loving Milanese got the news of Mussolini's downfall, they promptly demonstrated before La Scala Opera House, loudly cried "Toscanini must open the new opera season" (TIME, Aug. 9). For twelve years Maestro Toscanini, most famous of all Italian antiFascists, had refused to conduct in Italy. Under his leadership (off & on from 1898 to 1925), La Scala had become a sort of Vatican of Italian opera, had never sounded the same since he left. Last week history put a period to Milanese hopes: the Italian Government reported that La Scala Opera House had been destroyed...
While U.S.-born and U.S.-trained musicians have been rated high as violinists, cellists, pianists and opera singers, no U.S. maestro has so far reached international fame as a symphony conductor."This scarcity of important U.S. maestros has long kept U.S. critics and concertgoers guessing. Commonest rationalizations : 1) Americans lack the dictatorial temperament characteristic of men like Toscanini, Stokowski, Koussevitzky ; 2) the U.S. lacks bush-league opera houses and symphony orchestras such as provide European maestros with experience...