James Zehm wrote:

>...  Imagine now to find your own gebiet after having tried to make
>career in the fascist party of Italy...Could anyone provide detailed
>information on this period in Toscanini's life?

 From The New Grove (David Cairns):

   "....Toscanini began his professional life as a cellist (while still
   a student he had played in the orchestra of the Teatro Regio, Parma),
   and was second in the cello section for the premiere of Verdi's
   *Otello* at La Scala in 1887 [when T was 20].  But by that time he
   had already embarked on the career of conductor, for which a prodigious
   musical memory and ear, insatiable curiosity, great powers of
   concentration, and a dominating and uncompromising character alike
   destined him.  At the age of 19, on tour in Brazil with an Italian
   troupe, a series of accidents led to his being promoted from the
   cellos to take over a performance of *Aida* in Rio de Janeiro (30
   June 1886).  He conducted, without a score, in masterly fashion, and
   achieved a success from which there could be no turning back."

Regarding T's flirtation w/ Fascism:

   "....Toscanini's regime [as artistic director of a reorganized Scala]
   culminated in 1929, when he took the company on a triumphant tour to
   Vienna and Berlin.  His resignation the same year was due to a number
   of different factors: La Scala's financial crisis, his own exhaustion,
   growing defects in the repertory system he had created, and perhaps
   a final recognition of the impossibility of realizing his ideals in
   an opera house.  He must also have felt the need to provide for his
   coming exile from Italy, with whose Fascist regime he was in
   increasingly open conflict.  Toscanini had been at first attracted
   to Mussolini's ideas, and in 1919 had stood, unsuccessfully, as a
   Fascist candidate in Milan.  Before long, however, he had become a
   passionate opponent of Fascism, on numerous occasions (including the
   premiere of *Turandot* in 1926) refusing to conduct the Fascist hymn
   *Giovenezza*.  In 1938 Roosevelt had to intervene with Mussolini to
   have his passport restored (Toscanini never renounced his Italian
   citizenship).

   "Politics played a decisive part in Toscanini's career in the 1930s.
   Having conducted at Bayreuth in 1930 and 1931 (the first non-German
   to do so), he broke with the festival in 1933 over Hitler's ban on
   Jewish artists and never returned there.  Similarly, his appearances
   at the Salzburg Festival (1934-7; *Falstaff*, *Fidelio*, *Die
   Meistersinger*, *Die Zauberfloete*) ended abruptly with the Anschluss;
   in 1938 and 1939 he went to the Lucerne Festival instead, conducting
   an orchestra largely composed of refugees from Nazism."

   (David Cairns)

Walter Meyer