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 black 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.