Toscanini: The Maestro is a documentary produced and directed by Peter Rosen, about Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, who is considered by many to be the greatest maestro of the twentieth century.
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Toscanini: The Maestro is the last television program narrated by Alexander Scourby, is hosted by James Levine, and features interviews with former NBC Symphony Orchestra members, as well as reminiscences by opera stars Robert Merrill, Jarmila Novotná, Herva Nelli, Licia Albanese, as well as Bidu Sayão, all of whom worked with Toscanini, and rare color home-movies of the maestro with such musicians as Vladimir Horowitz and Andrés Segovia.
On January 17, 2008 the business was seized by the Massachusetts Department of Revenue because of failure to pay more than $167,000 in taxes dating back to 2000.
He was a frequent contributor to musical journals and debates and collaborated with Mascagni and Toscanini, who directed Lualdi’s composition Il diavolo nel campanile, based on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Devil in the Belfry."
In 1967, as RCA Victrola reissued numerous recordings of Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra, Seraphim reissued some of Toscanini's British recordings with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, made in London's Queen's Hall from 1937 to 1939.
A major coup was achieved when the industrious and ever-versatile Cameron Baird (the Chairman of the UB Music Department) received a recommendation from Arturo Toscanini of the NBC Symphony that its Associate Conductor, William Steinberg, would be perfect for the job.
More than 170 shows, a world preview and thirty national first performances, among which the performances of the musical Cats in the original edition by Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Italian debuts of Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Show, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony conducted by Lorin Maazel and co-produced by the Toscanini Symphonic Orchestra, and Peter Stein's interpretation of Faust.
Toscanini had refused to play "Giovinezza" in Milan in 1922 and later in Bayreuth, which earned him accolades from anti-fascists throughout Europe.
Filmed in Siena in 2002 (Arturo Toscanini Foundation), it was directed by Gianfranco Fozzi and produced by David Guido Pietroni and Maurizio De Santis.
Hymn of the Nations, originally titled Arturo Toscanini: Hymn of the Nations (1944), is a film directed by Alexander Hammid, which features the Inno delle nazioni, a patriotic work for tenor soloist, chorus, and orchestra, composed by Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi in the early-1860s.
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Toscanini added a bridge passage to include arrangements of The Star Spangled Banner for the United States and The Internationale for the Soviet Union and the Italian partisans.
In Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music, he treats the “Toscanini cult” of the mid-twentieth century as a metaphor for the decline of classical music in the United States, arguing that the conductor Arturo Toscanini became the first non-composer to be widely regarded the “world’s greatest musician,“ and that no prior conductor of comparable eminence and influence had been so divorced from the music of his own time.
There are a number of recordings of Reining: her Arabella (Salzburg, 1947, under Karl Böhm), Daphne (Vienna, 1944, Böhm), Ariadne (Vienna, 1944, Böhm), Eva in Die Meistersinger (Vienna, 1937, Toscanini), Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier (Salzburg, 1949, George Szell; Salzburg, 1953, Clemens Krauss; Vienna, 1954 (Studio), Erich Kleiber; Vienna, 1955, Knappertsbusch) are all on disc.
His last London appearance was on 15 June 1987, when he conducted Verdi's Requiem at the Festival Hall in the presence of Diana, Princess of Wales in commemoration of the 30th anniversary of Toscanini's death.
She was born in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California to actors George O'Brien and Marguerite Churchill, and began her studies with Milton Kestenbaum, former principal bass of the Pittsburgh Symphony under Fritz Reiner and member of the NBC Symphony under Arturo Toscanini, and with Herman Reinshagen, assistant-principal bass of the New York Philharmonic under Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The greatest of these were published in the book This Was Toscanini, (1963) accompanying an uncompleted essay by Samuel Antek, a violinist in the NBC Symphony.
The festival brings music back to a square frequented by Caruso, Chaliapin, Toscanini, the Gershwin brothers and other famous musicians.
His fame spread so far that Toscanini appealed to him to sing the leading role in Fromental Halévy's La Juive, but Rosenblatt replied that he would only use his vocal gift for the glory of God, in service to his religion.