Audiobook Portrays Music and Magic of a Maestro, As Told by a Musician and His Daughter

This Was Toscanini by Samuel Antek and Lucy Antek Johnson

Listen to an EXCERPT of This Was Toscanini

Half a century after his death, Arturo Toscanini is remembered as one of the greatest conductors of all time. His fame was global. He insisted his musician’s performances hew to a composer’s intentions instead of self-expression. In Italy, he conducted premieres of timeless operas, including Pagliacci, La Boheme, and Turandot. He stood up to Mussolini. His temper outbreaks were legendary. He was a classical rock star for the ages. 

In 1963, a musical memoir by first violinist Samuel Antek, This Was Toscanini, gave an intimate account of Toscanini’s genius, told from the orchestra side of the conductor’s podium.

Sixty years later, Lucy Antek Johnson expanded her father’s memoir into This Was Toscanini: The Maestro, My Father and Me (Brown Books Publishing Group) by adding introductory essays to introduce each of her father’s original chapters. 

Now there’s an audiobook version narrated by David Garrison and Lucy Antek Johnson. With 20 minutes of excerpts from Toscanini’s NBC Symphony performances, it’s a jewel box for lovers of classical music and its history. 

For Lovers of Classical Music History

Samuel Antek was 29 when he joined the NBC Symphony, which Toscanini led from its inception in 1937 until he retired in 1954 and the orchestra disbanded. A son of Ukrainian immigrants in Chicago, Antek was a child prodigy who was giving solo virtuoso violin concerts in his early 20s. While he played first violin with the NBC Symphony, he also was musical director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, guest conductor of many other orchestras, and became nationally acclaimed for his Young People’s Concerts.

“I grew up in a home filled with music,” writes Johnson. One of her favorite things was to listen to her father practice his violin. An autographed portrait of Toscanini graced the family’s grand piano. Along with millions of music lovers all over the world, she listened to the weekly radio concerts broadcast live from NBC’s Studio 8H at Rockefeller Plaza (Trivia buffs: the studio is now home to Saturday Night Live). She heard her father’s accounts of Toscanini’s exacting demands and grueling rehearsals. 

In 2017, the 150^th anniversary of Toscanini’s birth, Johnson was reading Toscanini: Musician of Conscience by Harvey Sachs, who quoted passages from her father’s memoir. Inspired to reread her father’s book, she realized it deserved a renewed life. She also wanted to bring her father’s career into the spotlight. (Sachs contributed the foreword to Johnson’s book.)

Sing! Sustain!

Samuel Antek’s memoir begins with a description of Toscanini’s first rehearsal of the NBC Symphony in the fall of 1937. It’s especially eye-opening to anyone considering a music career.

As he played Brahms’s First Symphony, Antek “sensed, more than I heard, with new disbelief, the new sounds around me. Was this the same music we had been practicing so assiduously for days?” As the music reached its first climax, Toscanini shouted “Cantare! Sostenere!”(Sing! Sustain!), words that were his battle cry, “and for seventeen years we lived by them,” wrote Antek. 

“Playing with Toscanini was a musical rebirth…Caught up in his force, your own indifference was washed away. You were not just a player, another musician, but an artist once more searcher for long-forgotten ideals and truths,” wrote Antek. 

In exacting detail, Antek describes Toscanini’s conducting style. The Maestro screamed and hurled curses. “Childish, petulant, unreasoning as it was, we somehow respected and admired his capacity to be so moved and aroused by his feeling for the work… [W]hen he conducted, we heard many things clearly for the first time.”

Antek also tells of touring with Toscanini and the symphony through the United States in 1950 as adoring crowds greeted the Maestro everywhere. He recounts the painful challenges of recording Toscanini’s symphony with the technology of the age. He met one-on-one with Toscanini to discuss Verdi’s Requiem, which Antek was to conduct with the New Jersey orchestra. 

Johnson’s essays include an account drawn from her mother’s notes of the NBC Symphony tour of South America in 1940, one year after the war broke out in Europe. The tour with fraught with fears of the United States’ expected involvement, and outbreaks from fascist supporters in the audiences. 

A Tribute to Musical Genius

Sadly, Antek didn’t live to see his memoir published. He died at age 49 in 1958, suffering a heart attack and falling to the sidewalk a few doors away from Carnegie Hall. Several years later, his widow edited the manuscript and selected many iconic photographs taken by Robert Hupka, an RCA recording engineer to illustrate it.

During her long career in the entertainment industry, Lucy Antek Johnson was a network executive for NBC and spent 14 years as senior vice president of daytime and children’s programs for CBS. But her first job was as a clerk-typist in NBC’s record library.  “Each morning when I passed through the revolving doors of the majestic RCA Building at ‘30 Rock’… I felt a sense of empowerment as I headed to the NBC elevators — the same elevators that Toscanini and my father had taken. Dad and I had come full circle.”