ck eyes, the finely chiseled features and the halo of
silver hair surrounding a bald spot that turns purple in his passions,
walked into a room where a girl of this reporter's acquaintance stood
beside a canary cage, making a rather successful attempt at whistling,
in time and tune with the bird.

For a moment the man who can make music like no one else on earth
listened to the girl and her pet. Then he sighed and said:

"Oh, if I could only whistle!"

Those who know Mr. Toscanini intimately find in those six simple words
the key to his character. He is, they say, the most modest man who
ever lived, a man sincerely at a loss to understand the endless fuss
that is made about him.

Time and again he has told his friends that he has no fonder desire
than to be able to walk about undisturbed, to saunter along the
avenue, look into shop-windows, do the thousand-and-one common little
things that are permitted other human beings.

That same humility, that same incurable bewilderment at public acclaim
must have been apparent to all who ever attended a Toscanini concert,
saw him at the close of a superb interpretation bowing as one of the
group of players and making deprecating gestures that seemed to
say: "What you have heard was a great score brought to life by these
excellent musicians--why applaud me?"

At rehearsals he is the strictest of disciplinarians but not a prima
donna conductor. He demands the utmost attention and concentration
from his men, brooks no disturbance or interruption. On the other
hand, he is punctual to a fault, arrives fifteen minutes ahead of
time, never asks for special privileges of any kind.

He has been described as the world's most patient and impatient
orchestral director. In rehearsal he will take the men through a
passage, a mere phrase, innumerable times to achieve a certain tonal
or dynamic effect. But he explodes when he feels that he is faced with
stupidity or stubbornness.

Some famous conductors have added the B of Barnum to the three
immortal B's of music--Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. Those wielders of
the stick are great showmen as well as great musicians.

Not so Mr. Toscanini. In his platform manner there is nothing
calculated for theatrical effect. He doesn't care in the least what he
looks like "from out front." His gestures are designed not to impress,
enrapture or englamour the musical groundlings, but to convey his
sharply defined wishes to his men and transmit to them