An Excerpt From

Arturo Toscanini: The NBC Years

By Mortimer H. Frank
Foreword by Jacques Barzun

Admittedly, certain features of the NBC Symphony presentations departed from concert norms. This is because the network thought of them primarily as broadcasts and only secondarily as concerts, many of the details affecting their production being rooted in standards and customs that radio had generated. Paramount among them was the distribution of tickets. The law prohibited the sale of tickets for public broadcasts. Instead, tickets were free and could be obtained for almost any program by a written request to the network. But a Toscanini concert was not any program, and for his first appearance with the orchestra NBC received fifty thousand requests for fourteen hundred available seats. Throughout Toscanini's NBC career, tickets for one of his broadcasts required either special access or the courage to go to the event in the hope that someone in the long line would have an extra ticket to give away. In Toscanini's third NBC broadcast (8 January 1938), this situation was obliquely acknowledged by the announcer when he noted that tickets for the conductor's 6 February benefit concert marked his "first appearance with the orchestra open to the general public."--in other words, the first for which tickets would be sold.

Also departing from concert-hall convention were NBC's printed programs. Rather than being provided in a playbill-like magazine, the three works comprising Toscanini's first concert were specified on a single sheet of satin. Not mere ostentation but also practical consideration may have motivated such an exotic treatment. This was, after all, a broadcast, and broadcasting procedures dictated elimination of all extraneous noise. Conventionally printed programs rustled and rattled and consequently would not do. Satin, of course, was expensive and subsequently gave way to linen, which in turn proved too expensive and was replaced wth unrustleable cork or cardboard. And on the programs was a printed admonition to the audience not to cough or produce other audible intrusions.

But what most set the NBC Symphony presentations apart from conventional concerts was the hall in which they took place--a large studio on the eighth floor of the RCA building in New York's Rockefeller Center that seated fourteen hundred. Its identifying number--8H--was to become anathema in the world of symphonic music. Like all broadcasting studios, 8H was designed to absorb, not reflect, sound and thereby produce a resonance-free background that would promote clarity. For the spoken word, this is an ideal acoustic environment. But music's requirements are different, and the extreme acoustical deadness of 8H ran counter to musical needs. At its worst--as heard on some Victor recordings and over miles and miles of telephone lines through which NBC concerts were transmitted across the continent--the studio took on a surrealistic deadness that suggested the orchestra was performing in a padded closet. Indeed, many wondered why Toscanini tolerated the studio.

The most frequent explanation for Toscanini's acceptance of the acoustical shortcomings of 8H is that he liked the dryness of the hall for its clarity, which complemented the textural transparency he favored. Certainly the clipped, staccato effect he preferred on certain chords--so as to ensure that what followed them would be well defined--was more readily achieved in 8H that in a more resonant concert hall. Toscanini may also have accommodated himself to the sonic peculiarities of 8H because of a desire to reach the wide audience that the broadcasts attracted.