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In Memory of Guido Cantelli
- Abstract
When Guido Cantelli was killed in an airplane crash on November 24, 1956, the loss was what it would have been if Arturo Toscanini had been killed in a train wreck in 1903. This is not just my belief: in the talks about Toscanini that I had with NBC Symphony musicians for the book The Toscanini Musicians Knew, a musician would be describing something remarkable about Toscanini, and would remember that it had been true also of Cantelli. For example, Toscanini was a conductor who didn’t have to say what he wanted the orchestra to do: he showed it with the movements of his stick, which the players watched and understood and obeyed; and Cantelli also was such a conductor. Toscanini got the players to do what he wanted because he had the personality and magnetism that compelled their attention: they had to look at him, and when they looked and saw what he wanted, they had to do it; and this was true also of Cantelli. The conductors who instead talked—which the players hated—did so because they didn’t have Toscanini’s rehearsal technique, his knowledge of how to get and keep an orchestra’s attention and communicate to it what was in his mind; and so a rehearsal with Ansermet, who was a fine musician but talked too much, was something the players dreaded, whereas a rehearsal with Toscanini—or with Cantelli—was something they looked forward to. The recollection of how Toscanini had heard, in a huge orchestral climax, the B-natural a contrabassoonist was playing from his part instead of the B-flat Toscanini remembered in the score, led one player to observe that Toscanini’s was one of the three great ears he had encountered—the others having been Monteux’s and Cantelli’s. This player recalled Cantelli’s performing Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta with the feeling for balance and clarity of detail that Toscanini had with Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Debussy, and said: “That was why Maestro sat in the hall during Cantelli’s rehearsals beaming like a proud father: if he had had a son who was musically endowed, this was what he would have wanted him to be.”
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