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The Letters of Arturo Toscanini. (Book Reviews: Diverse Topics).(Book Review)-

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The Letters of Arturo Toscanini. Compiled, edited, and translated by Harvey Sachs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. [xxiii, 468 p. ISBN 0-375-40405-8. $35.] Illustrations, index.

Harvey Sachs's collection of letters provides an ideal way to become acquainted with Arturo Toscanini. Of course, Toscanini still lives in the memories of the elderly and, more broadly, his many recordings speak for him as a performing musician. Already a mythic figure during his lifetime, his reputation continues to be buoyed up by hundreds of gossipy anecdotes and eyewitness accounts. Contemporaneous reports of this sort have made their proper contribution to biographies such as Sachs's own Toscanini (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1978) and Denis Matthews's Arturo Toscanini (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1982). More recently, Joseph Horowitz has investigated the socioeconomic and cultural meanings of the conductor's American reception in particular (Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987]).

With the Letters we come to a book written largely...

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