As he stepped into the hall he saw his wife and daughters walking into the dining room.  “Where are you going?” he asks them.  “In to supper, of course,” one of them told him.  The Maestro exploded:  “What?  After THAT performance?  Oh, no, you’re not.  It shall never be said of my family that they could eat after such a horrible show!” All of them, including the great man himself, went to 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,” found him in a room littered with books on the opera, books on Wagner, volumes of the composer’s correspondence.