About a decade ago, a Manhattan friend of mine read the then recently published memoirs of Joseph Volpe, the Metropolitan Opera’s former general manager, and decided to follow up with those of Volpe’s predecessor Sir Rudolf Bing. In a moment that could only have happened in New York, my friend encountered Volpe soon thereafter and told him of his foray into the annals of arts administration. A curious Volpe asked how he and Bing were different. Intending to reply that Bing was more “autocratic,” my friend fell victim to a Freudian slip and pronounced the earlier general manager more “aristocratic.” Volpe, who suffered decades of snobbery for his blue-collar background, furrowed his brow and quickly disengaged.

Harvey Sachs’s thousand-page tome on the famous Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini (1867–1957) tackles a subject who had elements of both characteristics. Sachs’s feat is all the more impressive because this is in fact his second biography of the conductor, the first having appeared as long ago as 1978. What could safely be called a lifelong obsession continued after that first effort with an edited volume of hundreds of previously unavailable letters and an exploration of about one hundred hours of taped personal conversations from the final years of Toscanini’s life, many of which were recorded without his knowledge. The additional information is so comprehensive that Sachs claims that barely a single sentence from his first biography found its way into the second, which is three times longer and would have taken