This Was Toscanini
The Maestro, My Father, and Me
LISTEN
to today's show
featuring Lucy Antek Johnson
to today's show
featuring Lucy Antek Johnson
Written by Samuel Antek & Lucy Antek Johnson
Narrated by Lucy Antek Johnson & David Garrison
Available for the First Time in Audiobook Format, Featuring Original NBC Symphony Excerpts!
“This Was Toscanini: The Maestro, My Father, and Me, which was produced at our own Verso Studios at the Westport Library … brings to life violinist Samuel Antek’s firsthand portrait of Maestro Arturo Tos canini and features his daughter’s recollections of a memorable time in classical music history. Added bonus! Excerpts from some original NBC Symphony performances are featured throughout. Take a listen!”
—Bill Hermer, Executive Director of Westport Library (CT)
“[Samuel Antek] wrote very beautiful about me. Very simpatico.”
—Maestro Arturo Toscanini
Live from New York, it’s Saturday night … 1937–1954! This riveting new audiobook about Arturo Toscanini, widely considered the greatest conductor of the modern age, features recordings from original NBC Symphony performances, broadcast from Studio 8H Radio City in Rockefeller Center as well as Carnegie Hall.
This Was Toscanini: The Maestro, My Father, and Me by Samuel Antek and Lucy Antek Johnson, with narration by Lucy Antek Johnson and David Garrison (Brown Books Publishing Group; Audiobook on sale June 4, 2024), is an intimate, firsthand portrait of Toscanini, one of the most influential conductors and musicians of the 20th century. Originally released as a special expanded hardcover edition in 2021, the book will now be followed by the release of its companion audiobook in June 2024 — timed perfectly for Father’s Day. This Was Toscanini is told from the perspective of Samuel Antek, the Maestro’s first violinist for all seventeen years of the NBC Symphony Orchestra’s existence — an orchestra specifically created for the purpose of being conducted under the legendary Maestro himself.
Antek’s timeless story of what it was to rehearse, record and go on tour both nationally and internationally with the famed Toscanini is brilliantly delivered by narrator Garrison. Newly added musical sequences bring listeners right into the seats of the orchestra players. Witnessing the crackling crescendos alongside the vehement strokes and slashes of Toscanini’s baton, it’ll feel as though attending the master class of an artistic genius.
About Toscani - from Encyclopedia.com
For more than half a century, Arturo Toscanini was one of the world’s most respected conductors, a musical powerhouse whose performances packed orchestra halls—and filled the radio waves—in every major city in the United States. Toscanini dominated the classical music world, leading the debut performances of numerous important operas and symphonies. In a time when the majority of Americans craved popular music and novel trends, Toscanini did more than any other artist to increase the audience for classical symphonies and operatic works. A New York Times reporter noted that the fiery conductor “represented absolute, uncompromising integrity. He strove earnestly to realize as exactly as possible the composer’s intentions as printed in the musical score. To achieve perfection he drove musicians relentlessly, himself hardest of all.”
Toscanini conducted entirely from memory. Nearsighted from childhood, he memorized hundreds of intricate operas, symphonies, and concertos and then—in performance and often in rehearsals as well—led without ever consulting the score. The temperamental former cellist kept a full schedule of touring, recording, and performing until well into his eighties, finally retiring just three years before his death. The New York Times praised Toscanini for his “judgment, experience, vast musical knowledge, uncompromising standards and the touch of incandescent brilliance he infused into every performance he conducted.”
Toscanini was born in 1867 and grew up in Parma, Italy. His father was a tailor, and as a youth Arturo, too, wanted to make clothes. His ambitions changed at the age of nine when he began cello lessons at the Parma Conservatory of Music. He was fascinated by the instrument and by classical music in general. Within two years he won a full scholarship to the conservatory, where he was known to sell his lunch in order to buy more sheet music.
After graduating from the conservatory in 1885, Toscanini immediately found work with travelling orchestras in Italy. In 1886 he joined a company that journeyed to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to stage some operas. On that particular trip the company conductor one day refused to lead a performance. The musicians persuaded Toscanini to step in as conductor—his penchant for memorizing whole scores had already marked him as extraordinary. Toscanini reluctantly accepted the assignment and, with no prior preparation, made his conducting debut on June 25, 1886. He was 19 at the time.
This Was Toscanini - The Maestro, My Father, and Me
“I don’t want to hear notes anymore, there shouldn’t be any more notes ... Abandon yourself to your heart!” —Maestro Arturo Toscanini
This Was Toscanini began as an essay by Samuel Antek called “Playing with Maestro,” which detailed what it was like to work with the world-famous Arturo Toscanini. The essay was so well received that Antek was approached for a book publishing contract, to which he responded, “I will describe what I have actually seen, felt and heard Toscanini say. What he asked of us, those of us who made music with him.” Samuel Antek had written all but the final chapter when he died suddenly at age 49. His book was published five years posthumously to many rave reviews, including praise from The New York Times. It had been out of print for several years before Lucy Antek Johnson decided to rerelease it.
Calling this reworking “a memoir wrapped in a memoir,” Antek Johnson expands the spotlight on Arturo Toscanini to include her virtuosic father, relaying a story about two musicians whose paths fortuitously crossed when the historic NBC Symphony Orchestra was formed. Providing her own audio narration in the prelude, coda and introductions to each chapter, she vividly regales us with memories of her father’s rise from first violinist for NBC Symphony Orchestra to simultaneously conducting the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and Philadelphia Young People’s Orchestra, while becoming musical director of several major American orchestras under the influence of Toscanini. With moving reflections on her father’s career and what it was like to grow up in an era of musical performance celebrity, Antek Johnson shares a remarkable contemporary look into the glamourous “heyday” of classical music history.
“Toscanini often said, ‘Any asino can conduct — but to make music... eh? Is difficile?’ 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 purpose and self-fulfillment in your work. It was not a job; it was a calling.”
—Samuel Antek
“First published in 1963, my father’s book remains the most comprehensive personal narrative about working with the Maestro. It is a story about the passion and dedication it takes to make great music and about Toscanini’s singular and often volatile approach to music making. It is also a story about the formation of a new orchestra under the baton of a musical genius who not only was a force throughout his twentieth-century career but who possessed an artistry and style that resonate even now, more than sixty-five years after his last concert.”
About the Authors
Samuel Antek began his violin studies in Chicago and was then invited to New York to become a pupil and protégé of the famous teacher Leopold Auer. In 1937, Mr. Antek was selected to become a first violinist for the NBC Symphony, specially created by RCA for the legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini. He was a member of the orchestra for all of its 17 years.
While continuing to play first violin for NBC, he was appointed musical director and conductor of the New Jersey Symphony in 1947; was named the associate conductor of the Chicago Symphony under Fritz Reiner; and, after inaugurating his distinctive Young People’s Concerts series in New Jersey, was soon named the director of all Young People’s Concerts of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He was invited to guest conduct many of the nation’s major orchestras.
Samuel Antek died suddenly at age 49 in January 1958. This Was Toscanini, his unique evaluation of the Maestro, was published posthumously.
Lucy Antek Johnson, Samuel Antek’s daughter, was born and raised in New York City. After studying music, fine art and ballet, she was drawn to the world of television production and spent her entire career in the entertainment industry, producing movies for television before joining the ranks of NBC as a network executive. She soon worked her way up to senior vice president of daytime and children’s programs for CBS. Lucy and her husband, Bill Klein, live in Connecticut.
Praise for This Was Toscanini
“Toscanini was not only a genius as a conductor but also a revolutionary of musical interpretation. In fact, he placed the performer totally at the service of the composer, in sacred respect for and fidelity to the written text.” —Maestro Riccardo Muti
“When This Was Toscanini was first published in 1963, Samuel Antek’s classic account of playing in Toscanini’s orchestra brought the Maestro back to life. In this new edition, Lucy Antek Johnson revivifies not only her father’s text and its subject — along with many of Robert Hupka’s original photos — but also her father’s own remarkable story. This book will fascinate everyone interested not only in Toscanini but in symphonic music and music making in general.”
—Harvey Sachs, Author and Music Historian
“Few authors can have the combination of gifts and experience, of love and intellect, which Samuel Antek brought to the writing of this posthumous memoir. ... We can almost hear the hoarse Toscanini voice in his fierce admonitions to the players, his wildly picturesque mixture of Italian and English in an idiom all his
own. After the recordings, this book will probably remain the most enduring and endearing monument to the art of Arturo Toscanini.”
—The New York Times (1963)
“For decades, This Was Toscanini has been my favorite book about the conductor. ... Antek’s book … is not only one of the most valuable writings on Toscanini but is one of the most insightful documents by any musician, analyzing how one painstakingly creates the aural picture of a piece of music. Lucy Antek Johnson expands our knowledge of her father and reveals the musician and human being behind the words.” —Bob Kosovsky, Librarian, Music & Recorded Sound Division,
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
“My admiration and interest in the recordings and career of Arturo Toscanini were piqued by the original publication of this book in 1963 ... I pored over and over it ... as well as the excellent photographs of the maestro ‘in action’ at his rehearsals taken candidly by the late Robert Hupka, whom I met and befriended
several years later. It was because of this book that I pursued my ultimate career in audio engineering. Now that this important book is being reissued ... a new generation of music lovers, musicologists and musicians can get acquainted with one of the greatest conductors of the past.”
—Seth B. Winner, Original Sound Preservation Engineer, ret., The Toscanini Legacy, Performing Arts Research Center, New York Public Library
“As the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra nears its centennial in 2022, the lasting legacy of Samuel Antek, its fourth music director, can be found in his conviction in sharing the glories of orchestral music with New Jersey’s youngest citizens.”
—Gabriel van Aalst, President and CEO, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra
“Already considered one of the most insightful books on the career of the conductor Arturo Toscanini, Johnson expands upon her father’s memoir with her own recollections and reflections.” —Ryan Patrick Irvin, Artistic Producer, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
“[Samuel Antek] was as gifted as an observer, a portraitist and a prose writer as he was a musician. The vigor of his sensory images makes its own literary music. This unique, doubly moving memoir unites an outstanding musician with his invaluable impressions of the world-famous maestro, and it also animates him as a man of his time — a loving husband and an adoring father to the daughter who writes insightfully and lovingly about the career in which [Samuel Antek] was poised to achieve even greater heights.” —Sybil Steinberg, Contributing Editor and Former Book Review Editor for Publishers Weekly
“One shares the experience of being under Toscanini’s baton ...
it is as though one were in the maestro’s living presence.”
—Kirkus Reviews (1963)
