125 Moments: 111 Arturo Toscanini

Arturo Toscanini made his only appearance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on April 24, 1941, at Orchestra Hall. For the occasion, the 74-year-old conductor was invited to lead a special concert to conclude the 50th season and to benefit the musicians’ pension fund. Toscanini conducted Gluck’s Overture to Iphigénie en Aulide, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Respighi’s Fountains of Rome, Berlioz’s orchestration of Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, and Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll and Overture to Tannhäuser.

“Toscanini [is] the most celebrated musician of our day,” reported Edward Barry in the Chicago Tribune. “It was as if a big exclamation point had been put at the end of a season which had already had more than its share of pleasurable astonishment. For the great conductor called on every resource of his imagination to make the music vivid and meaningful. And the Orchestra leaped to the execution of his ideas with a passion and a sureness that transcended technical considerations entirely and succeeded in laying the music itself before us in all its purity and beauty.”

“But in many ways Respighi’s Fountains of Rome was the high point of the concert,” wrote Claudia Cassidy in the Journal of Commerce. “He has for it the full sensitivity, the quality of creative imagery, the almost clairvoyant tenderness that make it deeply communicative. The performance took on a murmurous magic possible only when conductor and orchestra have established full understanding.”

Chicago Symphony Orchestra: 125 Moments was created to celebrate the ensemble's 125th season in 2015-16 and gathered significant events, illustrated with imagery and artifacts from the collections of the Rosenthal Archives.

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