bed without supper that
night.

It stands to reason that a man of this type detests personal
publicity. The interviews he has granted in the fifty-six years of
his career--Mr. Toscanini, who is seventy-five, began conducting at
nineteen--can be counted on the fingers of one hand. He feels and has
often told friends that all he has to say he can say in musical terms;
that he gladly leaves to others what satisfaction they may derive from
publicly bandying words.

But his frequent brushes with news photographers don't come under this
head. The existence of numerous fine camera studies of the Maestro
proves that he doesn't dislike being photographed. Nor does he dislike
photographers. But he hates flashlights because they hurt his eyes.

This has bolstered the popular notion--based on the fact that he
conducts from memory--that his sight is so poor as to amount almost to
blindness.

Mr. Toscanini is neither blind nor half-blind. He does not use a
strong magnifying glass to study his scores, note by note. He is
near-sighted, but not more so than millions of others, and reads with
the aid of ordinary spectacles.

He has always conducted from memory because he believes that having
the score in his head gives a conductor greater freedom and authority
to impose his musical will upon his men. At rehearsals the score is
kept on a stand a few feet from the Maestro. From time to time he
consults it to verify a point at dispute. He has never been known to
be wrong.

His memory is, of course, phenomenal. Anything he has once seen,
read and particularly, heard, he not only remembers but is unable to
forget. The other day he and a friend were discussing the concerto
played by a certain pianist on his American debut in 1911. Mr.
Toscanini remembered it as Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto; the
friend maintained it was the Second.

The Maestro said: "I recall the concert very well. He was soloist with
the Philharmonic." And he reeled off all the other compositions on
that program of twenty-seven years ago.

To settle the argument the skeptical friend called the office of
the Philharmonic. Mr. Toscanini had been right about the Beethoven
Concerto and had correctly remembered the purely orchestral numbers as
well.

He is a profound student, not only of music but of all available
literature bearing upon it. A music critic who visited him in
Salzburg a few years ago, just before he was to conduct Wagner's "Die
Meistersinger," fo