Italian practice, and he demanded obedience from the singers and players whom he directed. Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist, who worked in happy association with him at concerts in New York, bears astonished testimony to his impulsiveness and to the general acceptance by others that his will was law. To stop a telephone bell ringing during a private rehearsal with Menuhin Toscanini pulled the instrument from the wall, plaster and all, and returned without a word to the piano. No one expressed any surprise, though Menuhin confesses that he had never before seen such an uninhibited obedience to impulse. There were therefore some qualms at the bbc when that body invited him to come and direct its orchestra, but he won the players’ confidence, enthusiasm, and loyalty without any of the explosions with which he has been credited elsewhere. Indeed, Mr Bernard Shore, the violist who played under him, says in his book The Orchestra Speaks that playing under Toscanini becomes a different art. ‘He stimulates his men, refreshes their minds; and music that has become stale is revived in all its pristine beauty.’
But his autocracy at Milan was bound to bring friction with those whose artistic concentration was less than his own, and after having taken the Scala Company abroad to Germany and Vienna and given performances, more particularly of Verdi’s Falstaff, which entranced German-speaking audiences, he announced his intention of leaving Milan, and in the winter of 1929 accepted the post of conductor to the Philharmonic Society of New York. It was with the New York Orchestra that he first came to England and toured Europe. He remained with them until 1936.
Later Tours
He then formed his own orchestra, the National Broadcasting Company Orchestra, with which he gave concerts all through the Second World War, touring Latin America and making the gramophone records which preserve his interpretations for the rest of the world. In 1946 he returned for a while to Milan for a few months in order to contribute the proceeds of some concerts towards the rebuilding of La Scala in addition to a financial gift of a million lire. When the Festival Hall was being built in 1950 it was announced that he was willing to come to London and direct some of its inaugural concerts. This plan, however, had to be abandoned. Notwithstanding, he did conduct in the Festival Hall, when in September, 1952, he came to London to give two concerts devoted mainly to the four symphonies of Brahms. In this connection it is worthy of remark that though he denounced other musicians for tampering with scores, he did himself play some tricks with the timpani of Brahms’s C minor symphony.
This symphony also showed him sacrificing the brooding tragedy of the opening in favour of creating immediately a feeling of tremendous tension, a treatment which leaves him with a problem of what to do with the development section. In the milder Brahms of the St Anthony Variations and the D major symphony he showed a more ingratiating temper and in his interpretation of Debussy’s La Mer sensuous tonal shading was not neglected. But in general it was the intensity, the urgency, the magnification of the life of a score, upon which he seized, and it was this remarkable dynamic drive which he preserved into extreme old age.
His last concert was given at Carnegie Hall in New York no longer ago than in April 1954, when he bade farewell to his orchestra and his public in a Wagner programme, at the end of which he dropped his baton and went out, not to return to face the plaudits of his audience, a symbolic gesture of retirement after 68 years of active music-making.
Signor Toscanini’s wife predeceased him in 1951. There were a son and two daughters of the marriage, of whom one is married to Mr Vladimir Horowitz, the pianist.
Christian Dior
A master of couture design
24 October 1957
M. Christian Dior, the famous French couture designer, died suddenly yesterday at Montecatini, Italy, at the age of 52, as announced in our late editions. Never strong, Dior had been in ill-health for some time and his death, although so sudden, was not entirely unexpected.
A master of his craft, a rare genius, Dior’s name will stand high in the records of fine achievement in the field of couture design. Even more than this he will be honoured for the help that he, with the Marcel Boussac organisation, was able to give France just after the war when it was so greatly needed. Then, the great textile industry, the third most important in France, was nearly at a standstill, but following the tremendous success of his first collection in January, 1947, with its full-skirted styles each requiring many yards of fabric, orders began to flow into the French mills.
Today thousands of workers throughout the world owe their living directly to his inspiration, not only as a result of his couture showings, but also through the success of the wholesale houses and accessory businesses built up under the umbrella of the central organization in Paris, with offices in London, New York, and Caracas.
Born on January 21, 1905, at Granville, in Normandy, he was the only son of Maurice Dior, a wealthy chemical manufacturer. As a youth he enjoyed designing clothes for his sisters, and a costume representing Neptune, which he designed and wore at a fancy dress ball, won him the first prize. The Diplomatic Corps, however, not dress designing, was originally planned as a career for the intelligent, rather delicate, youth. He studied political science at the Sorbonne, but the French financial crisis of 1930–31, which crippled the family business, enabled him to escape from the prospect of a career which had never greatly attracted him. Always interested in art, with the collaboration of friends, he set up a small salon in the Rue la Boétie, in the centre of Paris, and helped to launch Christian Bérard among other young painters. Later Bérard was always to be seen sitting on the floor of the large salon at the première of Dior’s collections, until the former’s death in 1949.
Forced to give up his art gallery for reasons of ill-health Dior was sent to the mountains to recover. Returning eventually he took up couture designing in earnest, first of all with Agnes, for whom he designed hats, and later with Robert Piguet.
Shortly after the outbreak of war Dior retired to the country where he remained for some time with a sister who had a market garden business. On his return to Paris he became one of Lelong’s designers, and remained with Lelong until the fortuitous meeting with a friend of his youth, Marcel Boussac. At this time Boussac was, in fact, looking for a designer in order to set up a couture house, and a partnership was arranged culminating in the widely publicized first collection in the spring of 1947.
Christian Dior’s very real affection for England and things English stemmed from his first visit at the age of 19 when, to assist his recovery from a serious illness, his father gave him a sum of money and suggested it should be spent exploring Britain. He had, indeed, many English friends and always made a practice of having at least one English mannequin in the house on the Avenue Montaigne. And he always gave sympathetic attention to the products of British fabric manufacturers.
His feeling for line was allied to a wonderful appreciation of colour and texture, and whatever the ‘line’ the result was always feminine clothes designed to flatter the wearer. His early death at this moment is not only a tragedy for the house of Dior, but could have serious consequences for the French industry as a whole, following as it does the death or retirement of a number of other important French designers in the past few years.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Christian apologist and novelist
17 December 1957
Miss Dorothy L. Sayers died at her home at Witham, Essex, on Tuesday night at the age of 64.
Sudden death would have had no terrors for her. She combined an adventurous curiosity about life with a religious faith based on natural piety, common sense, and hard reading. She made a name in several diverse fields of creative work. But the diversity of her success was founded on an inner unity of character. When she came down from Somerville with a First in Modern Languages she tried her hand at advertising. The directness and the grasp of facts that are needed by a copywriter stood her in good stead as a newcomer to the crowded ranks of authors of detective fiction. During the 1920s and 1930s, she established herself as one of the few who could give a new look to that hard-ridden kind of novel.
Her recipe was deftly to