Getting him back – at sixty-eight

The reform of London's concert life again stimulated invitations to the great foreign conductors who throughout the 1930s were the principal draw. Walter, Weingartner and Klemperer conducted the LSO in 1930–31; Weingartner and Klemperer returned during the following season. Given Turner's exalted estimate of Toscanini in 1930 and later in the decade, it is worth noting his views on Klemperer in February 1932, prescient in the light of this conductor's later prominence: he was ‘the most satisfactory conductor I know of ’ – more satisfying than Furtwängler who had that very week again brought the Berlin Philharmonic to the Queen's Hall. In 1933 the LSO extended an invitation to Toscanini to conduct during its 1933/34 season. The orchestra had recently undergone severe financial losses and its bank overdraft was colossal; not the best juncture, surely, at which to invite such an expensive guest. Toscanini's response was to offer one concert with a programme described by principal viola and orchestra director Anthony Collins as ‘clam-bake’ (details have not survived), for which he required nine rehearsals and a fee of L1000 (today equivalent to some £55,000). Such unheard-of demands seemed designed – probably were designed – to elicit refusal; the LSO duly declined them. Two years later, in December 1935, Albert Coates, once more the LSO's artistic adviser, wrote from Stockholm to invite Toscanini to conduct it but apparently he remained unanswered; and with that the LSO drops out of this narrative.