The ground was freezing cold and fog was in the air when a brand new Douglas DC-6B took off from Orly Airport near Paris early November 24, 1956. The plane was en route to Shannon, Ireland and then to New York.
It wouldn’t come to either of them.
About 15 seconds after it left the ground, the plane sank slightly below its path, clipped an unlit house and crashed into the village of Paray-Vieille-Poste. Authorities never found the cause of the crash; all but one of the 35 people on board died.
Among them was Guido Cantelli, 36, a “conductor’s comet,” as one critic called him, and Arturo Toscanini’s protégé. In just eight years, Cantelli had shot from obscurity to a career whose brilliance still dazzles. He was a frequent guest of the New York Philharmonic, which he was on his way to conduct, and had been announced as music director of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan a week before the crash.
Perhaps it is the manner in which Cantelli died, its prodigality, that explains some of the fervent interest that surrounds him. It’s hard to think of many conductors whose careers can be examined in comparably close – albeit macabre – detail to get closer to what could have been.
Not only are all of Cantelli’s studio recordings for EMI, primarily with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, found in a 10-disc Warner box, but his blazing-fast progress can be followed week by week, in an extraordinary volume. of his radio broadcasts with the Philharmonic, the NBC Symphony and other groups have been restored and released on labels such as Testament, Music & Arts and Pristine. We now have as complete a portrait of Cantelli as we are likely to ever get.
And what a portrait. Forget the what if that smoke from those Parisian flames. Forget the mystery of how the history of music in the United States would have been rewritten if Cantelli, and not Leonard Bernstein, had succeeded Dimitri Mitropoulos at the Philharmonic, as Mitropoulos apparently would have liked. Also forget the lament that Cantelli barely had time to grow up, as if the efforts of a younger musician are necessarily of less value.
Cantelli, who emerged as if fully formed in the works of Schumann and Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Debussy, was arguably the greatest conductor who never quite was — as DailyExpertNews critic Olin Downes wrote in 1953, one who “the notes understands and envelops his heart around each of them.”
Serious, uptight, and introverted, Cantelli was not the copycat he was often accused of, as if disqualifying Toscanini’s mark in a century when his mentor’s influence was immense. Even if he wielded a tension of rhythm, a ferocity of line and a strict discipline that were well known, those traits were tempered with an elegance of expression, a taste for color and a mania for details that he tortured himself and his musicians to perfect. . † He treated all music as a song, and he sang it with the care he felt it deserved.
Singing itself played only a minor role in Cantelli’s training. Born in Novara, Italy, on April 27, 1920, he was the second son of a military bandmaster who put him on a table to conduct a band when he was 5.
As a boy, Cantelli learned piano as well as trumpet, horn and various percussion instruments, and soon he was taken to study with the organist of the Basilica di San Gaudenzio. He sang in the choir and first conducted it at the age of 8; wrote a mass at 10; and began replacing on the organ when he was 14, even playing themes from “Tristan und Isolde” during services.
He was often seen in the gallery of the Teatro Coccia, reading scores by torchlight; other evenings were spent tuning a radio he had saved with his pocket money, or his records, including Toscanini’s. He entered the Milan Conservatory in 1939 and completed a seven-year composition course in three, but he was not a composer. Shortly after graduating, in 1943, he made his debut as leader of “La Traviata” in the Coccia, a theater that Toscanini had opened in 1888.
After German forces occupied Novara in September, Cantelli was sent to a concentration camp on the Baltic coast, where he was worked so close to death that he ended up weighing just 80 pounds. The way the story was later told, in order to promote him as an anti-fascist, as brave as Toscanini had supposedly been, he refused to cooperate with the Nazis and eventually became a partisan hero one hour after he was shot when the allies liberated Milan.
Not quite, according to Cantelli’s biographer, Laurence Lewis, who describes him as essentially apolitical. The Germans probably deported him, a weak conscript, to a labor camp because he refused to fight, if ever given the choice, and after a few months they drafted him to serve the rear Italian Social Republic of Mussolini. On the way back, he escaped a hospital and returned to Novara, where he forged documents for the partisans while working at a bank. He married his lover, Iris, the day Mussolini was shot.
After the war, Cantelli found food scarce and opportunities scarcer. He made his outdoor debut in July 1945 with the La Scala orchestra, but did not return until May 21, 1948. Coincidentally, Toscanini was at the theater that evening and was confronted with a vision of his youth. Within days, the world’s most famous conductor was at the Cantellis’ tiny apartment in Milan, playing his latest record and inviting Cantelli to spend a few weeks conducting the NBC Symphony.
Cantelli, then 28, arrived in New York in late December and was swept up in a world of musical feats and obsequious socialites. Toscanini declared him a son of honor. In January and February, four concerts, each broadcast, each a sensation. For a week there was a remarkably passionate account of Hindemith’s ‘Mathis der Maler’ symphony alongside elegant Haydn; a stingingly powerful Tchaikovsky “Romeo and Juliet” with Casella next; and another heated Bartok Concerto for orchestra.
“We feel in Mr. Cantelli a musician with a destiny for him,” Downes wrote after the last program, with music by Ravel and Franck. Toscanini took Cantelli to see the Rockettes to celebrate before his journey home; he would return each winter, adding long stints with the Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony that outlasted his appearances with the NBC, which ended in 1954.
Throughout Cantelli’s career in the United States, his repertoire has been criticized, which ranged from Frescobaldi and Monteverdi to Barber and Dallapiccola, but proved to be repetitive from season to season. There were also more fundamental complaints that he was too much of the precision-ist. “Other men mature from uncontrolled passion to control,” Downes wrote after his Philharmonic debut in January 1952. “Mr. Cantelli’s way may be to go from control to letting go.”
That check was hard-earned. Cantelli did not ignore the life of a composer, or deliberately filter the music through his own aesthetic; he only read scores, and without the memory of a Toscanini or a Mitropoulos, he learned them painstakingly through their melodies. It was not unusual, he said in 1955, for him to sing an obscure bassoon line in a room during the six hours a day he studied.
He was fixated on how to let go of notes and attack them, how to give a line both an end and a beginning, how to achieve a balance that makes the parts resound. But if his exacting lyricism bestowed grace and drive on Mozart and his Rossini, his ability to spin a score taut gave his Mendelssohn, and even his Debussy, tremendous cumulative power.
Cantelli’s perfectionism was reflected in his fanatical sessions in London with the Philharmonia. Ravel’s “Pavane pour une enfant défunte,” to cite one example, took him 20 tense takes to get the six minutes of music right, during which he stormed off stage, the harpist Renata Scheffel-Stein wept and the horn player Dennis Brain frightened. wax before his lip burst.
In some stories, however, he prefers meekness to the sweat-soaking volatility he might induce live. His Brahms First captivates in the studio, but shines with the 1954 Boston Symphony on Pristine. His Philharmonia Beethoven Seventh dances merrily, but the same symphony paralyzes on a Music & Arts release of a 1953 performance that, a puzzled Downes wrote, seemed to evoke the composer’s “ghost brooding gigantically across the universe.”
It is enough to raise the question of why Cantelli didn’t occupy a major position until his sharply rendered “Così Fan Tutte” at La Scala in 1956 that house forced him to make an offer he couldn’t refuse. Performing as a guest with a handful of prestigious, very different ensembles afforded him “more interest, performance and variety of expression than he could get from a single orchestra,” one profile paraphrased him as saying.
The Philharmonic’s counterfactual is too far from the truth to even ask. At the time of his death, Cantelli intended to devote most of his time to La Scala, his beloved Philharmonia aside; his ties with the New York players had already been severed.
His only recording with the Philharmonic, a Vivaldi “Four Seasons,” is his worst studio effort, and the effort he had to make to overcome the orchestra’s intransigence once led to him collapsing in the wings of Carnegie Hall. . Despite outstanding performances – powerful but refined – in the spring of 1956, Cantelli was then so enraged at the players’ antics that he begged the Philharmonic’s management to release him from his contractual obligations in November. They refused.
And then he was gone.
In New York, where the ailing Toscanini was not informed of the death of his heir, Mitropoulos conducted Strauss’ Tod und Verklärung in remembrance with the Philharmonic, a performance that – unlike Cantelli’s own compelling stories – seems to be dissolving. in sorrow.
In Milan, the orchestra of La Scala played Handel’s “Largo”, the last piece he had conducted, from the well as his hearse stopped in front of the theater. The former conductor, Victor de Sabata, offered to conduct; the players preferred that Cantelli do it himself one last time.