This privilege status achieved it across a formidable artistic career where his enormous talent and powerful personality produced a series of fundamental changes: the operatic interpretation has one earlier and one later from his appearance in the musical world.

He had been born on March 25, 1867 in Parma, Italy, and it began his studies at the age of 9 in the conservatory of this city where it graduated in 1885 with excellent notes in cello and composition.

In 1876 it deposited the Conservatory of Parma and for nine years he studied violoncello, piano and composition, graduating with the maximum honors in 1885. His professional life as cellist began and it was in the band that Otello de Verdi released in The Scala in 1887. But in this epoch it was already penetrating like the director, demonstrating an exceptional memory and musical ear, an insatiable curiosity, big power of concentration and a domineering and intransigent character. At the age of 19, during a tour along Brazil with an Italian group, a series of accidents drove to his promotion from the cellos up to taking to his charge the Aída presentation in Rio de Janeiro on June 30, 1886. It directed without score of a notable form achieving big success.

During the following decade Toscanini was employed at diverse Italian theaters and gained an increasing reputation as the exact and hostile director both of the mediocrity and of the routine. One related him to the works of Catalani and to those of the school verista, releasing Pagliacci de Leoncavallo (Milan, 1892) and The Boheme de Puccini (Turin, 1896). He promoted especially Wagner, whose musician was not relatively known in Italy in that one then, and demonstrated interest in the symphonic music, what was strange for the Italian director of the period. In 1895, in addition to directing the Royal Theater of Turin, it was invited to form a municipal band, which in 1898 offered a series of 44 concerts in the Exhibition of Turin, including works of Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and Verdi. At the age of 31 it was hired like artistic director of The Scala and it inaugurated this activity presenting The Main Singers in December, 1898.

Although 15 of them was in The Scala only nearly 70 years that his career lasted, Toscanini considered to this stage the focal point of his existence, the symbol of his struggle for specifying his ideal of the opera as a dramatic art integrated completely. Once it broke with the above mentioned theater it did not direct opera again except like guest in the festivals of Bayreuth and of Salzburg. But until the end of his life he kept on observing the destination and being present at The Scala.

The Toscanini repertoire during his first period in The Scala was based on Wagner, Verdi, new works and Italian premieres of works as Eugenio Oneguin, Pelleas et Melisande, The Condemnation of Magnificence and Euryanthe. From the beginning it was involved in every aspect of the interpretation operática, enclosed in the smallest details of the scenery. He was insisting that his singers should study and should handle completely the libretto, as well as compass was preparing them for compass putting attention both in the inflection and in the gestures and in the tone and the musical phrasing. The standard of the set and the presentations grew in a surprising way, but there was a fierce battle, not only to exceed the bad traditional habits of singers and the economic and administrative evasions, but also to educate the public achieving a more serious attitude towards the opera. The lighting of the theater was diminished, the checkers had to extract the hat and it was not allowed to conclude an opera presentation with a ballet. But the most difficult thing was to suppress the encores orders. It was during one of such requests, in a presentation of A Ballo in Maschera in the last period 1902-3, that Toscanini left The Scala.

It was absent during three periods, driving in Buenos Aires, Bologna and Turin, realizing tours along Italy with the band of Turin, with which it offered the Italian premieres of works of Richard Strauss y Debussy, until it returned only for two periods to The Scala. In 1908 it moved to New York like artistic director of the Metropolitan and during seven following years it governed on one of the singers' most surprising constellations in the history of the opera (between them Caruso, Scotti, Farrar, Destinn and Martinelli) managing in certain way to impose his individual disciplines. Between the premieres, both world and North American, they were of Boris Godunov, Fanciulla del West and Armide de Gluck. Nevertheless, again there were disagreements with the administration and the impatience so much for the conditions as for the authority they led him to resigning.

But also there were other factors. On the one hand, his love affair with Geraldine Farrar, his principal soprano, which got into a crisis in this epoch, and on the other hand, an intense patriotism, which kept him worried while his country was in war. Being in the Metropolitan it spent his summers in Europe and in 1913 he organized presentations of Falstaff and The Traviata for the centenary Verdi in Busseto. And in 1915 it returned to Italy, remaining for five years without a position or fixed income. It directed a short period in the Theater dal to See me of Milan, offered many concerts free to support to his country in war and formed a military band with which it was operating in the front during the assault Monte Santo.

In 1920 he was nominated an artistic director of a reorganized Scala. It formed a band of 100 instrumentalists, a choir of 120 voices and, while the stage and the auditorium were reconstructed following his advices, it realized a tour along Italy, the United States and Canada, leading 137 concerts in three periods of 28 weeks in whole. The Toscanini diet culminated in 1929 when it took the company in a triumphal tour along Vienna and Berlin. His resignation this year there owed to diverse factors, between others, the financial crisis of The Scala, its own weariness, increasing defects in the system of repertoire that it had created, and perhaps the definitive recognition of the inability to specify his ideals in an opera theater. Also he felt necessarily to go into exile of Italy due to the conflict arisen with the fascist diet. Although he shared in the beginning the ideas of Mussolini and was a fascist candidate in Milan in 1919, to a little time it was opposed passionately to the fascism and in numerous occasions it pushed back to direct the fascist anthem Giovinezza. In 1938 Roosevelt had to intervene so that the Toscanini passport was returned.

The politics played a decisive part in the Toscanini career from the decade of 1930. Having driven in Bayreuth in 1930 and in 1931 (and he was the first not German director in doing it), it broke with the festival in 1933 with Hitler's prohibition of the Jewish artists and it never returned there. Also his appearances in the Festival of Salzburg finished abruptamente with the Anschluss. In 1938 and in 1939 it was in the Festival of Lucerne leading a band formed principally of refugees of the Nazism. Also it directed the inaugural concert of the Philharmonic Palestine in Tel Aviv on December 26, 1936 and later concerts in Jerusalem, Haifa, Cairo and Alexandria, returning in 1938.

During this period Toscanini also it acted in London, Paris, Brussels and Scandinavia. But the center of activities of last 25 years of his career was New York. Being the director of the Philharmonic orchestra of New York, between 1928 and 1936, Toscanini reached a climax interpretive in terms of clarity, precision and intensity. Then it went on to the newly formed band of National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), principal entity during 17 remaining years. With her it realized many recordings and tours along South America and the United States. In 1946 it returned to Milan to inaugurate a reconstructed Scala and led several concerts in the following years. His last presentation with the NBC was April 4, 1954 and after his retirement it kept on being employed at the edition of his recordings until a few months before his death.

Energy, impetuosity, inflexibility, perfectionism and self-criticism were some aspects of the personality of Toscanini. It was famous for his fierce artistic demands, an almost dictatorial nature and terrible attacks of anger. That constant state of hypertension with which it was working reflected in the vehemence of his versions, topcoat those of his final period be assined to the Viennese classic composers. But the most positive and significant side of his impatience was the almost electrical intensity of his thinnest interpretations, which for his care in the textures detail, give the impression of being conceived like a quite organic only one. Toscanini had a special talent to handle the big musical structures, the rhythmic continuity, the line of singing and the melody of wide bogey.

Such qualities joined his infallible musical memory, a domineering personality and an insistence in the supremacy and the purity of the musical text. For the same it went forward to the modern style of conduction marked by a respect to the intentions of the composer, opposing the objective and faithful interpretation of the score to that more subjective style of his rival Furtwängler. And although Toscanini was one of the big phenomena of the history of the musical performance of last hundred years, it was criticized by the tightness of repertoire arisen in a late stage of his career, ignoring the contemporary works and the music of Mahler, the Second School of Vienna and the neoclassicism of Stravinsky. But since interpreter of the XIXth century was significantly wide, tackling the music of Richard Strauss, Puccini, Debussy, Brahms, Berlioz and Tchaikovsky so well like that of his three favorites, Beethoven, Wagner and Verdi.