es played with such a lovely
tone."

There you have a side of Mr. Toscanini that the boys have forgotten to
tell you about. For years newspaper and magazine writers (in the last
couple of seasons the Maestro has even "made" the Broadway columns!)
have doled out anecdotes concerning his terrible temper.

From these stories there emerged a demoniacal little man with the
tantrums of a dozen prima donnas, a temperamental tyrant who, at
the dropping of a stitch in the orchestral knitting, tore his hair,
screamed at the top of his inexhaustible Latin lungs, doused his
trembling players with streams of blistering invective.

That's how you learned that, to the king of conductors, a musician
playing an acid note is a "shoemaker," a "swine," an "assassin" or
even something completely unprintable.

So far as they went the stories were true. Mr. Toscanini, as all the
world knows by now, is the world's No. 1 musical purist. Nothing but
perfection satisfies him. He hates compromise, loathes the half-baked
and mediocre, refuses to put up with "something almost as good."

As Stefan Zweig puts it: "In vain will you remind him that the
perfect, the absolute, are rarely attainable in this world; that,
even to the sublimest will, no more is possible than an approach to
perfection.... His glorious unwisdom makes it impossible to recognize
this wise dispensation."

His rages, then, are the spasms of pain of a perfectionist wounded
by imperfection. It was his glorious unwisdom that caused him, at a
rehearsal not long ago, to fling a platinum watch to the floor, where,
of course, it was smashed into fragments.

In the shadows of the studio that afternoon lurked John F. Royal,
program director of NBC. Next day he presented the Maestro with two $1
watches, both inscribed, "For Rehearsals Only." Mr. Toscanini was so
amused that he forgot to get angry with Mr. Royal for breaking
the grimly enforced rule barring all but orchestra members from
rehearsals.

The sympathetic program director also had the shattered platinum watch
put together by what must have been a Toscanini among watchmakers. By
that time the incident had become such a joke that the orchestra
men dared to give the Maestro a chain, of material and construction
guaranteed to be unbreakable, to attach the brace of Ingersolls to the
dark, roomy jacket which for years he has worn at rehearsals.

Less than a week later that same choleric director, with the burning
deep-set bla