Виктор де Сабата: Итальян дирижеры мен композитордың өмірі мен шығармашылығы

Italian conductor and composer

Victor Alberto de Sabata (10 April 1892 – 11 December 1967) was an Italian conductor and composer. He is widely recognized as one of the most distinguished operatic conductors of the twentieth century, especially for his Verdi, Puccini and Wagner. De Sabata was acclaimed for his interpretations of orchestral music. Like his near contemporary Wilhelm Furtwängler, de Sabata regarded composition as more important than conducting but achieved more lasting recognition for his conducting than his compositions. De Sabata has been praised by various authors and critics as a rival to Toscanini for the title of greatest Italian conductor of the twentieth century, and even as "perhaps the greatest conductor in the world". In 1918, aged 26, de Sabata was appointed conductor of the Monte Carlo Opera, performing a wide variety of late 19th century and contemporary works, and earning acclaim from Maurice Ravel. De Sabata became the music director at La Scala in Milan, a post he would hold for over 20 years. His animated conducting style led one observer to describe his appearance in performance as "a cross between Julius Caesar and Satan." De Sabata began playing the piano at the age of four, and composed a gavotte for that instrument at the age of six. He composed his first work for orchestra at the age of twelve. His formal musical studies began after his family moved to Milan around 1900. In Milan, de Sabata studied at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory, excelling at piano, violin, theory, composition and conducting, and graduating cum laude in composition, piano and violin. He would remain a virtuoso pianist and violinist up until the end of his life. In 1911 he performed in an orchestra under the baton of Arturo Toscanini who influenced him to become a conductor.

In 1918 de Sabata was appointed conductor of the Monte Carlo Opera, performing a wide variety of late 19th century and contemporary works. In 1925, he conducted the world premiere of L'enfant et les sortilèges by Ravel. Ravel said that de Sabata was a conductor "the like of which I have never before encountered" and wrote him a note the next day saying that "You have given me one of the most complete joys of my career". Ravel also claimed that, within twelve hours of receiving the score to L'enfant, the conductor had memorized it. In 1921, while still conducting opera at Monte Carlo, de Sabata began his career as a symphonic conductor with the Orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. In 1927 he made his U. S. debut with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, substituting for Fritz Reiner in the first eight concerts of the year. He did the same in 1928.

De Sabata conducted the orchestra of La Scala in concert starting in the 1921–22 season, and conducted opera there from 1929. He became the principal conductor in 1930 in succession to Toscanini. Soon after taking up the post, he resigned because of a disagreement with the orchestra over the poor reception of his composition A Thousand and One Nights. During the 1930s, de Sabata conducted widely in Italy and Central Europe. In 1933 he made his first commercial recordings with the Orchestra of the Italian Broadcasting Authority in Turin, including his own composition Juventus. According to Benito Mussolini's son Romano, de Sabata was "a personal friend" of the Italian dictator, and gave "several concerts" at the leader's Villa Torlonia home. According to George Richard Marek's biography of Toscanini, de Sabata's friendship with Mussolini became another factor distancing him from his former mentor Toscanini. In 1936, he appeared with the Vienna State Opera. Among the audience at Bayreuth was the young Sergiu Celibidache, who hid in the lavatory overnight in order to surreptitiously attend rehearsals. In the closing stages of the war, de Sabata helped Karajan relocate his family to Italy. In 1940 he met the seventeen year old Valentina Cortese in Stresa, with whom he began a romantic relationship; They separated in 1948.

After World War II, de Sabata's career expanded internationally. He was a frequent guest conductor in London, New York and other American cities. In 1946 he recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra for the Decca recording company. In 1947 he switched labels to HMV, recording with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome. These sessions included the premiere recording of Debussy's Jeux. He would go on to make more recordings with the same orchestra in 1948. In 1950 he was temporarily detained at Ellis Island along with several other Europeans under the newly passed McCarran Act (the reason was his work in Italy during Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime). In March 1950 and March 1951 de Sabata conducted the New York Philharmonic in a series of concerts in Carnegie Hall, many of which were preserved from radio transcriptions to form some of the most valuable items in his recorded legacy. De Sabata's base remained La Scala, Milan, and he had the opportunity to work with two upwardly mobile sopranos: Renata Tebaldi and Maria Callas. In August 1953 he collaborated with Callas in his only commercial opera recording: Puccini's Tosca for HMV (also featuring Giuseppe Di Stefano and Tito Gobbi along with the La Scala orchestra and chorus). This production is widely regarded as one of the greatest opera recordings of all time. One critic has written that de Sabata's success in this Tosca "remains so decisive that had he never recorded another note, his fame would still be assured".

The Tosca recording was planned to be only the first of a series of recordings in which HMV would set down much of de Sabata's operatic repertoire. However, soon after the sessions, he suffered a heart attack so severe that it prompted him to stop performing regularly in public. His decision to stop conducting has also been attributed to "disillusionment". He resigned his conducting post at La Scala and was succeeded by his assistant Carlo Maria Giulini. Between 1953 and 1957 he held the administrative position of "Artistic Director" at La Scala. This period was notable for a reconciliation with Toscanini (with whom he had had a cool relationship for twenty years) during a La Scala production of Spontini's La vestale in 1954. De Sabata conducted only twice more, once in a studio recording of Verdi's Requiem from June 1954 for HMV, and for the last time at Arturo Toscanini's memorial service (conducting the funeral march from Beethoven's Eroica Symphony at La Scala opera house followed by Verdi's Requiem in Milan Cathedral) in 1957. The last decade of his life was devoted to composition but with few results. Although Walter Legge (husband of Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf) offered de Sabata an opportunity to conduct the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1964 and later suggested de Sabata write a completion to Puccini's opera Turandot, neither opportunity was realised. He enjoyed solving mathematical problems in his retirement.

Victor de Sabata died of heart disease in Santa Margherita Ligure, Liguria, Italy in 1967, aged 75. At his memorial service, the Orchestra of La Scala performed without a conductor as a mark of respect. De Sabata is buried in the cemetery of it near Bergamo. The "Award Victor de Sabata" is named after de Sabata. A prize for young musicians sponsored by the province of Genoa and the region of Liguria, the competition takes place in Santa Margherita.

De Sabata's conducting style combined the fiery temperament, iron control and technical precision of Toscanini with greater spontaneity and attention to orchestral color. He was exceptionally demanding of his players: according to one musician: "Those eyes and ears missed nothing the players had been made to work harder than ever before and they knew that, without having been asked to play alone, they had been individually assessed". On the podium he "seemed to be dancing everything from a tarantella to a sabre dance". He suffered from a limp as a result of a childhood polio infection. Norman Lebrecht describes him as "a musician whose mild manners turned to raging fury whenever he took stick in hand". One critic used the phrase "lull and stun" to summarize his technique. A violinist in the London Philharmonic Orchestra compared de Sabata with Sir Thomas Beecham, saying that while Beecham made the orchestra "red hot", de Sabata made it white hot. describes de Sabata as "undoubtedly the finest conductor I have ever encountered". A musician who played under both Toscanini and de Sabata at La Scala compared them, saying:[Toscanini] wasn't like "Dede" – De Sabata: he, too, was a great conductor, but he was changeable. One day he would be fine and would conduct a certain way; the next day he would be full of aches and pains and would conduct a different way. He was always somewhat ill. He, too, would be transformed, once he picked up the baton and I must admit that Tristan und Isolde made an even bigger impression when De Sabata conducted it than with Toscanini. Toscanini was perfection: upright, even. De Sabata, on the other hand, pushed and pulled the music. Afterwards, when Toscanini had left, De Sabata was the only one who could take his place. Despite his faults, he, too, was a great conductor and a musician of the highest order. Once, in Turandot, he heard a mistake made by the third trombone, and it was discovered to be a printer's error that not even Toscanini had caught. Conductor Riccardo Chailly reports that de Sabata would have the strings sing along with the trombone glissandi at the climax of Ravel's Boléro, and that Chailly himself asks orchestras to do the same thing.

Toscanini did not approve of de Sabata's conducting style or of many of his interpretations: he considered the younger man's gestures to be too flamboyant. Puccini wrote in a letter dating from 1920 that "although [De Sabata] is an excellent musician of the other school – that is, the modern school – he can't, and does not know how to, conduct my music."

After de Sabata was shown the score for the first time of Elgar's Enigma Variations, the next day he conducted a rehearsal of the work from memory and pointed out several errors in the orchestral parts which no one, including Elgar himself, had noticed previously. During a rehearsal of Respighi's Pines of Rome in London, de Sabata "demonstrated the bowing and fingering of the high cello part in the first movement by playing it—without even a glance at the part. The pianist asked for advice about the solo cadenza, which de Sabata also played by heart. In the rehearsal interval, he asked the flicorni for the final movement to play their brass fanfares. They did. 'What are you playing?' he asked. 'It is an octave higher.' 'Can't be done, Maestro.' The Maestro borrowed one of their instruments and blew the correct notes in the right octave." "A visitor [to La Scala] rehearsing Tristan asked Victor de Sabata to take the baton while he tested the sound from the centre of the auditorium. Needless to say, the sound he heard was totally different from the one he produced. De Sabata, without uttering a word, asserted his dominance of the orchestra just by standing there". When Herbert von Karajan was making his own recording of Tosca in 1962, he would often ask his producer John Culshaw to play selections from the de Sabata/Callas recording to him. Culshaw reports that "One exceptionally tricky passage for the conductor is the entry of Tosca in act 3, where Puccini's tempo directions can best be described as elastic. Karajan listened to de Sabata several times over during that passage and then said, 'No, he's right but I can't do that. That's his secret.'"

De Sabata's compositions are written in a late romantic style with similarities to Respighi and, especially, Richard Strauss (one early commentator went so far as to call de Sabata the older composer's "adoptive son"). It was as a composer that de Sabata first came to widespread attention, with the production of his opera Il Macigno in La Scala's 1917 season followed by performances of his orchestral Symphonic Suite (1912) and symphonic poem Juventus (1919) by conductors such as Walter Damrosch, Pierre Monteux, and Arturo Toscanini during the early 1920s. His compositions are little known today, although Lorin Maazel had them in his repertoire. while a critic for International Record Review, writing in the early 2000s, said that the same work "contains some of the loveliest orchestral sounds I have heard in years".

Juventus, studio recording with the Turin Orchestra of the Italian Broadcasting Authority conducted by the composer, Naxos, 1933) is married to conductor Aldo Ceccato, who was also de Sabata's pupil. His granddaughter, Isabella de Sabata, was married to conductor John Eliot Gardiner. His grandson, Cristiano Ceccato, son of Eliana, is a former student of CAD pioneer John Frazer and worked for architects Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid. His second grandson, Francesco Ceccato, is the CEO of Barclays Europe.

"I have in my mind a million notes, and every one which is not perfect makes me mad."

The capitalizations Victor de Sabata and Victor De Sabata are both found, and the first name is often given in the Italian form Vittorio, especially in Italy. However, examples of the conductor's autograph signature clearly show that he spelt his name Victor de Sabata with a lower case "d", and contemporary playbills indicate that he used the first name Victor, even when performing in Italy.