How Arturo Toscanini Defied Both Mussolini and Hitler

When the great Italian conductor was dissatisfied with an orchestra’s performance, Terry Teachout writes, “he flew into screaming rages whose verbal violence would likely not be believed were it not for the fact that there were secret tapes made.” As far as his private life was concerned, he was “a compulsive philanderer whose love letters to his mistresses are explicit to the point of pornography.” Yet, as a new biography shows, he displayed a great deal of moral integrity when he was wooed by murderous regimes: