It all began in Rio
On the night of June 30, 1886, Arturo Toscanini — recently turned 19 — arrived, barely on time, at the imperial opera house in Rio de Janeiro, was to perform “Aida.” Pandemonium. The unpopular lead conductor had resigned in a huff; the audience shouted his unpopular replacement off the podium. Toscanini, the principal cellist & assistant choral master, was thrust forward by his colleagues.
“Everyone knew about my memory,” he would recall, “because the singers had all had lessons with me, and I had played the piano without ever looking at the music.” For the remaining six weeks of the tour, Harvey Sachs tells us in his biography “Toscanini: Musician of Conscience,” the maestro led the orchestra in 26 performances of 12 operas, all from memory. No one offered him a raise, and it didn’t occur to him to ask for one.
Almost 68 years later, in April 1954, that he conducted his final concert, an all-Wagner program, at Carnegie Hall. He had established himself as the world’s most famous conductor — the world’s most famous musician; a “genius,” in fact, his name is alongside such names as Einstein, Picasso and, with a backward glance, Thomas Alva Edison. Back in the conservatory in Parma, his hometown, “Arturo’s fellow students teased him by calling him Gèni, the dialect word for ‘genius; ’” they were prescient.
Many Charts
Astrotheme says the time is 1 am, 21 Sagittarius, a “barn dance.” It has a stellium in the 3rd house that suggests the Maestro obsessed about what others thought. We do not recommend this one.
In the Jones 1000 name listing, Toscanini has 2 am as his birth time on March 25, 1867 in Parma, giving a Capricorn 04 Ascendant, “a party entering a large canoe”. In the chart section this becomes 2:08 for 06 Capricorn., a dark archway and ten logs at the bottom. Of the three, we think the 06 Capricorn chart is better but still not convincing.
We decided on 29 Capricorn with the keyword :Signature: a symbol of a woman reading tea leaves, representing Toscanini’s persistent desire to establish relationships with all of reality by bringing his particular genius to his music and the larger issues of life.
He has a preponderance of square aspects in his chart and is the example given in Essentials of Astrology by Marc Jones where he states that the “operatic and symphonic conductor Toscanini is uncompromising in his artistry and tendency to drive himself and musicians towards perfection” Jones says this s an “act-of-self” weighing his chart towards his dynamic individuality despite critics complaints and showing his “particular mark” of genius.
For Toscanini, that genius is the Mercury conjunct musical Neptune (both in the second of native gifts) square Uranus in the 5th
Musical training in Parma
Music happened to him by accident. His good-natured if rather feckless father, Claudio — whose heart lay in campaigning with Garibaldi’s army of the Risorgimento, and made a somewhat precarious living through tailoring — and his cold and distant mother, Paola, were “musical,” but nothing exceptional. It was an elementary-school teacher who spotted little Arturo’s strong response to music and advised his parents to send him to Parma’s music conservatory, where he could be a live-in student with all his expenses taken care of; they agreed if for nothing it was one less mouth to feed.
In Milan he had worked with — and disciplined — the young Enrico Caruso and Russian opera singer Feodor Chaliapin Toscanini forced audiences to accept darkened auditoriums, & instituted a bitterly opposed policy of no encores, and had the orchestra play in a pit rather than at stage level as he felt it obscured the opera.
Marriage to Carlotta
Arturo met Carlotta De Martini in 1895: he was 28 and she was 18, a pretty, vivacious girl whom he pursued with all his intensity and tenacity. They married in 1897, and he enjoyed telling people that their son Walter was born exactly nine months after the wedding: “in tempo, like a good conductor.”
Two girls and another boy would follow. it was a successful marriage but not a happy one. Arturo and Carla would stay together until her death in 1951, both of them loyal to family but increasingly distanced from each other emotionally primarily because of incessant paramours.
Her disorderly household and general messiness maddened him ( “For 41 years I’ve suffered from this disorder of hers!!!”), and his serial philandering wounded her and probably caused her to put up barricades (NN in Scorpio in the 7th house).
Plaudits
To Isaiah Berlin, he was “the most morally dignified and inspiring hero of our time.” His son Walter, who for many years took care of his father is quoted in the book by Sachthat although he knew his father’s personal failings intimately, the “human side” of his character was even “greater than his musicianship.”
Enrico Caruso anticipated them all when in 1909 he said, “Experience has taught me that I don’t know if I know a role until I sing it with the Grande Omino [great little man]!”
Footnotes:
- Asteroid Fantasia is named for the 1940 musical animation Fantasia and conducted by Leopold Stokowski, who had a rivalrous relationship with Toscanini.
- Mr Stokowski’s second wife was the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, mother of Anderson Cooper.
the Many Charts of Toscanini follow
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