Christmas Night, 1937

Oscar Thompson, writing in the New York Sun, was beside himself. “All of the Toscanini magic was in the three performances of the evening. The slakeless care, the amazing equipoise of parts, the inerrable tracing of the essential lifeline of each composition, without either sacrificing or overstressing subsidiary voices; the cumulative momentum by which the music runs its allotted course with a rhythmic surety that loses all semblance of arbitrary pace; the organic growth in the revelation of structure, as if the last measure were predestined with the first, and the ignescent inner light, whereby the instruments are given an individual glow rather than merging in a welter of sound, all these played their familiar part in performances as personal as they were universal in the power and persuasion of their appeal.”

Ignescent inner light, indeed.

Maybe Thompson’s paragraph — note, please, that it’s all of two sentences — slops over with gush, but if you couldn’t come over all sweetness and light about NBC’s 1937 Christmas night broadcast, then you were obviously the nastiest, Grinchiest Scrooge in town, a guy who snarled at kittens and stamped on bunnies. It was a kingly gift, begun six weeks earlier when Pierre Monteux, then Arthur Rodzinski, mounted the podium in RCA’s newly refitted Studio 8-H to conduct the newly formed NBC Symphony Orchestra on national radio. But that was just a warmup to the big event, which was Arturo Toscanini’s first broadcast with his orchestra, on December 25, 1937.

The thought of today’s networks doing anything remotely similar is laughable, albeit depressing. NBC had created the NBC Symphony Orchestra specifically for the septuagenerian Toscanini, who had recently stood down from the New York Philharmonic. His stature was unimpeachable, unassailable, Olympian. To secure him as the conductor of a radio orchestra took brazen chutzpah—an attribute that NBC czar David Sarnoff had in abundance. No expense was spared and no artistic corners were cut. The broadcasts were live concerts before a privileged and assiduously supervised audience, presented with minimal commercial interruptions. There was no pandering to unsophisticated listeners. The first program consisted of a Vivaldi concerto, the Mozart G Minor, and the Brahms First. One wonders if NBC considered tossing in a few Bing Crosby numbers just to goose the ratings. They probably knew that Toscanini would shoot them all, then himself, if they even whispered such a thing. As it turned out, there was no need: the December 25 broadcast drew in 20 million listeners—15.6 percent of the total US population. One wonders if even 1.56 percent of the 2012 population would bother with it. Probably not.

NBC’s royal gift went on for 17 years. The Depression was followed by a cataclysmic World War that tapered off into a wary standoff between the War’s two victors. By the time Toscanini led the orchestra for its last recording in June 1954 he was a TV veteran. The economically fragile America of his inaugural broadcast was now a global powerhouse, the richest nation in history, awash in cars and TVs and freeways and frozen foods and air conditioning and supermarkets and babies. (Including me; I was born just a few weeks after Toscanini’s final NBC studio session.) American orchestras had skyrocketed to international acclaim, and the 1950s recording orgy was on: Reiner in Chicago, Szell in Cleveland, Munch in Boston, Ormandy in Philadelphia, with Bernstein in New York just around the corner.

Toscanini raised the barre for orchestral playing, not only in the US, but everywhere. Perhaps NBC violinist Samuel Antek said it best:

“With each heart-pounding timpani stroke in the opening bars of the Brahms First Symphony his baton beat became more powerfully insistent, his shoulders more strained and hunched as though buffeting a giant wind. His outstretched left arm spasmodically flailed the air, the cupped fingers pleading like a beseeching beggar. His face reddened, his muscles tightened, eyes and eyebrows constantly moving. As we in the violin section tore with our bows against our strings, I felt I was being sucked into a roaring maelstrom of sound—every bit of strength and skill called upon and strained into being. Bits of breath, muscle, and blood, never before used, were being drained from me. Like ships torn from their mooring in a stormy ocean, we bobbed and tossed, responding to these earnest, importuning gestures. With what a fierce new joy we played!

Playing with Toscanini was a musical rebirth. The clarity, intensity, and honesty of his musical vision—his own torment—was like a cleansing baptismal pool. Caught up in his force, your own indifference was washed away. You were not just a player, another musician, but an artist once more searching for long forgotten ideals and truths. You were curiously alive, and there was a purpose and self- fulfillment in your work. It was not a job, it was a calling.”

All these years later, Toscanini’s first broadcast remains breathtaking. Those who accuse Toscanini of being a slash-and-burn literalist can’t have heard very much Toscanini; he was anything but. On that night he and his world-class players were giving their titanic all to the new venture. Everything about the performance is worth absorbing, including the pre-HIP Vivaldi concerto and its exemplary solo playing from concertmaster Mischa Mischakoff. The orchestra is magnificent, a modern-day “army of generals”—as Charles Burney famously described the Mannheim Court Orchestra. The Brahms First is unforgettable, richly luxuriant and passionate, its orchestral tone glowing despite the dual challenges presented by AM radio and Studio 8-H’s dry acoustic. At its conclusion the oh-so genteel audience goes collectively nuts, so much so that the announcer is obliged to shout into the microphone in order to make himself heard.

NBC’s glorious Christmas present has been handed down to posterity via 78 RPM transcription discs. I heartily recommend Andrew Rose’s fine remastering, which presents the broadcast in its entirety, including the announcements and commentary. It aims to bring out as much of that ignescent inner light as possible, and I think it succeeds admirably within the limits imposed by age and medium. But how could it fail? Playing like this has no boundaries of time or space.

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