A Dictator amongst Dictators - The Rise of Arturo Toscanini Much has been written concerning Arturo Toscanini: renowned as the greatest conductor of his day, he took a stance against dictators whilst simultaneously reigning terror on those he worked with. MusicTeachers.co.uk investigates.

Ignoring the players, conductors are often perceived as the most musical aspect of any orchestral performance. Without their presence, the orchestra could never function as an integrated body and interpretation would be an almost impossible task, yet, ironically, the conductor is the only member of the band who fails to make a noise of any sort. Whilst rank and file players seem inconsequential and remain anonymous faces, conductors are often transported to superstardom. As supreme emissaries of music, their status makes them demigods, allowing them to revel in the attention and adulation of a listening public. Today, public attention remains pretty much the same, but mass media has also played a vital role in their public images: when Georg Solti appeared with the cuddly Dudley Moore in a 1990s prime-time television series to explain the ins and outs of orchestral music, he came across as the genial grandfather of music, the sort of person you would like as a next-door neighbour: charismatic, friendly, yet quintessentially authoritative. To musicians, and in private, however, his persona was markedly different. Known as the Screaming Skull, with bully-boy tactics that would have never had been tolerated in any other walk of society, he terrorised, belittled and abused more than a generation of orchestral players, browbeating and tormenting them into submission and supplication.

Yet it seems that Solti was only one of a long line of conductors who wielded such oppressive power on the podium, and the same epithet could be applied to any number who preceded him. Among them was Arturo Toscanini, who, even half a century after his death, remains one of the best-known conductors of the twentieth-century. The tapes of his tantrums confirm the aura of fear that he cast around his orchestras and casts - nothing and no one was safe from his anger: rehearsal pianos were kicked, music ripped up and musicians abused in a stream of foul invective that would, and did, make even the most icy-cool onlooker physically sick. In Turin, he snapped a violinist's bow, causing him a serious facial wound which had to be treated in hospital. The player sued him for damages… and lost: under Italian law, the conductor was deemed to have been 'prey to the tyranny of the tragic will'. But there was something calculating about Toscanini's demeanour; always considering the consequences, he would fall short of giving in to his rages entirely. In one famous incident, when rehearsing a Respighi work for a wartime performance, 'he picked up the score and was about to hurl it to the floor, but he stopped with it in mid-air, his hands uplifted. You could almost follow his thinking. "I dare not destroy it. It's the only score in America." He put it back on the stand with considerable care and then continued his tantrum.' (Harvey Sachs, Toscanini, Philadelphia, 1978, 139). Musicians, photographers and musical entrepreneurs suffered his abuses, yet against this terrifying backdrop is a story of heroic triumph over another form of tyranny that wielded power across Europe throughout the 1920s, 30s and 40s, the regimes of Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.