He went again the next year to London, but the state of his health prevented his going anywhere else.  For a malady, which finally proved fatal, seemed to attack the composer when in his prime, and eventually put an end to his work.  We cannot guess what other art works he might have created.  But there must be some that have not yet seen the light.  It is known that he was wont to keep a composition for some time in his desk, correcting and letting it ripen, until he felt it was ready to be brought out.

One of his cherished dreams had been to compose a “Tristan.”

The characters of Tristan and Iseult are primarily taken from a French legend.  Debussy felt the story was a French heritage and should be restored to its original atmosphere and idea.  This it was his ardent desire to accomplish.

Debussy passed away March 26, 1918.

Since his desire to create a Tristan has been made impossible, let us cherish the rich heritage of piano, song and orchestral works, which this original French artist and thinker has left behind, to benefit art and his fellow man.

XXIII

ARTURO TOSCANINI

The sharp rap of Arturo Toscanini’s baton that cuts the ear like a whiplash brought the rehearsal of the NBC Symphony Orchestra to a sudden, shocking stop.  Overtones from chords of Wagner’s “Faust Overture,” killed in mid-career, vibrated through the throat-gripping silence.

The men stared at their music, bowed their heads a little in anticipation of the storm.  “Play that again,” the Maestro commanded William Bell, the bass tuba player, who had just finished a solo.  On Mr. Bell’s face there was an expression of mixed worry and wonderment.  Mr. Toscanini noticed the troubled anxious look.

“No, no, no,” he said, with that childlike smile of his that suffuses his whole face with an irresistible light.  “There is nothing wrong.  Play it again; please, play it again, just for me.  It is so beautiful.  I have never heard these solo passages 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.”