Arturo Toscanini Quotes
To some it is Napoleon, to some it is a philosophical struggle, to me it is allegro con brio.
Schonberg, Harold C. The Great Conductors. Simon and Schuster, 1967, p. 254.
Interestingly Western classical music had a philosophical and ideological place in Chinese Communist doctrine. Cho Enlai—the first Chinese Communist Prime Minister was a great philosophical, cultural, and political supporter of Li Delun’s program to spread Western classical music across China. His program and the rigorous training of Chinese musicians in Western classical music and instruments even survived the Cultural Revolution when everything else from the West was attacked. By the 21st century, the best classical musicians in Europe, Canada and the United States included Chinese musicians in almost every instrument and Western musical era.
Arturo Toscanini was an Italian conductor. He was one of the most acclaimed musicians of the late 19th and of the 20th century, renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his eidetic memory. He was at various times the music director of La Scala in Milan and the New York Philharmonic. Later in his career he was appointed the first music director of the NBC Symphony Orchestra (1937–54), and this led to his becoming a household name (especially in the United States) through his radio and television broadcasts and many recordings of the operatic and symphonic repertoire.
