Zeugnisse für die Demokratie. Musik, Freiheit und Menschenrechte bei Arturo Toscanini

The book reconstructs the profile of Arturo Toscanini from the point of view of the close relationship established, in his experience as an artist, between music and the struggle for freedom, equality and human rights. The aim of the contribution is, on the one hand, to analyse the performative practices through which his constant and consistent active commitment to the values of democratic coexistence was manifested, analysing the perspective of meaning that guided Arturo Toscanini’s decisions regarding what was performed at his concerts and the venues for staging them. On the other hand, by closely studying Toscanini’s fragmentary thoughts against anti-Semitism, dictatorships, the exercise of power over others and war, contained in his dense correspondence, the survey aims to reconstruct the fundamental tenets of Toscanini’s conception of democracy and the civil commitment of the artist in the difficult twenties and thirties of the twentieth century, up until after the Second World War.