Chapter 25New York City, the 1950s
Toscanini was beginning to flag. His passion for music and the fiery talent that had made him a legend were still there, but the energy was not. With the NBC Symphony Orchestra things had changed as well. The orchestra had left its Studio 8H home at Rockefeller Plaza—some twenty years later the home of Saturday Night Live—for temporary digs at Manhattan Center before moving on to Carnegie Hall, where it made all of its recordings. No one was sad to leave 8H, least of all Toscanini, who had insisted on the move to Carnegie Hall. The 8H acoustics had always been “dry” without the “juice” the hall had to make the orchestra sing. Still, the move signaled to Toscanini an end that he feared was as much personal as it was professional.
He had been experiencing
