Arturo Toscanini - Television

Television

Arturo Toscanini was one of the first conductors to make extended appearances on live television. Between 1948 and 1952, he conducted ten concerts telecast on NBC, including a two-part concert performance of Verdi's complete opera Aida starring Herva Nelli and Richard Tucker, and the first complete telecast of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. All of these were simulcast on radio. These concerts were all shown only once during that four-year span, but they were preserved on kinescopes.

The telecasts began on March 20, 1948, with an all-Wagner program, including the Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin; the overture and bacchanale from Tannhäuser; "Forest Murmurs" from Siegfried; "Dawn and Siegfried's Rhine Journey" from Götterdämmerung; and "The Ride of the Valkyries" from Die Walküre. On the very same day that this concert was telecast live, conductor Eugene Ormandy also made his live television concert debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra. They performed Weber's overture to Der Freischutz and Rachmaninoff's Symphony no. 1, which had been recently rediscovered. The Ormandy concert was telecast by rival network CBS, but the schedules were arranged so that the two programs would not interfere with one another.

Less than a month after the first Toscanini televised concert, a performance by the conductor of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was telecast on April 3, 1948. On November 13, 1948, there was an all-Brahms program, including the Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra in A minor (Mischa Mischakoff, violin; Frank Miller, cello); Liebeslieder-Walzer, Op. 52 (with two pianists and a small chorus); and Hungarian Dance No. 1 in G minor. On December 3, 1948, Toscanini conducted Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor; Dvořák's Symphonic Variations; and Wagner's original overture to Tannhäuser.

There were two Toscanini telecasts in 1949, both devoted to the concert performance of Verdi's Aida from studio 8H. Acts I and II were telecast on March 26 and III and IV on April 2. Portions of the audio were rerecorded in June 1954 for the commercial release on LP records. As the video shows, the soloists were placed close to Toscanini, in front of the orchestra, while the robed members of the Robert Shaw Chorale were on risers behind the orchestra.

There were no Toscanini telecasts in 1950, but they resumed from Carnegie Hall on November 3, 1951, with Weber's overture to Euryanthe and Brahms' Symphony No. 1. On December 29, 1951, there was another all-Wagner program that included the two excerpts from Siegfried and Die Walküre featured on the March 1948 telecast, plus the Prelude to Act II of Lohengrin; the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde; and "Siegfried's Death and Funeral Music" from Götterdämmerung.

On March 15, 1952, Toscanini conducted the Symphonic Interlude from Franck's Rédemption; Sibelius's En Saga; Debussy's "Nuages" and "Fetes" from Nocturnes; and the overture of Rossini's William Tell. The final live Toscanini telecast, on March 22, 1952, included Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, and Respighi's The Pines of Rome.

The NBC cameras were often left on Toscanini for extended periods, documenting not only his baton techniques but his deep involvement in the music. At the end of a piece, Toscanini generally nodded rather than bowed and exited the stage quickly. Although NBC continued to broadcast the orchestra on radio until April 1954, telecasts were abandoned after March 1952.

As part of a restoration project initiated by the Toscanini family in the late 1980s, the kinescopes were fully restored and issued by RCA on VHS and laser disc beginning in 1989. The audio portion of the sound was taken, not from the noisy kinescopes, but from 33-1/3 rpm 16-inch transcription disc and high fidelity audio tape recordings made simultaneously by RCA technicians during the televised concerts. The hi-fi audio was synchronized with the kinescope video for the home video release. Original introductions by NBC's longtime announcer Ben Grauer were replaced with new commentary by Martin Bookspan. The entire group of Toscanini videos has since been reissued by Testament on DVD, with further improvements to the sound.