At first Toscanini agreed with Fascism but later, when the dictator Mussolini came to power, he became against it. He refused to perform an opera at La Scala and was beaten up, so he left Italy and went to the United States.
There was no orchestra for him in the USA so they made a new orchestra for him to conduct. This was the NBC Symphony Orchestra, created for him in 1937. He conducted the first broadcast concert on December 25, 1937, in NBC Studio 8-H in New York City's Rockefeller Center.
Toscanini was often criticized for not performing much American music and contemporary music (music by living composers). However, in 1938, he conducted the world premieres of two orchestral works by Samuel Barber, "Adagio for Strings" and "Essay for Orchestra (Barber)|Essay for Orchestra". In 1945, he led the orchestra in Carnegie Hall recording sessions of American music including "An American in Paris" by George Gershwin. He also conducted broadcast performances of Copland's "El Salon Mexico" and Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" with soloists Earl Wild and Benny Goodman and "Concerto in F" with pianist Oscar Levant, as well as music by other American composers, including two marches of John Philip Sousa.
In 1940, Toscanini had a disagreement with the NBC and he threatened to move to CBS. Although they agreed in the end it was this time that Leopold Stokowski began conducting some of the concerts and continued to appear sometimes as a guest conductor of the orchestra.
In July 1942 Toscanini conducted the American premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich's "Symphony no 7". Due to World War II, the score was microfilmed in the Soviet Union and brought by courier to the United States. At first Stokowski wanted to conduct it but then he agreed that Toscanini would. Unfortunately for New York listeners, a big thunderstorm made it difficult to hear the music on the radio. Later the performance was reissued.
The orchestra went all over the world with Toscanini. In 1950 the NBC concerts moved to Carnegie Hall. In a programme of music by Richard Wagner in 1954 Toscanini was not well and forgot how the music went. He never conducted in public again after that.
Toscanini married Carla De Martini on June 21, 1897, when she was not yet 20 years old. They had four children although one died. He worked with many great singers and musicians, including the pianist Vladimir Horowitz who was a great friend. Horowitz married one of Toscanini’s daughters.
When he died of a stroke in New York City at the age of 89, his body was returned to Italy and was interred in the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan.
Many years after his death, in 1987, Toscanini was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Philip K. Dick
Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982) was an American writer. He is mostly known for his works of science fiction. In addition to his published novels, Dick wrote "approximately 121 short stories. He wrote most of them for science fiction magazines." At least eight of his stories have been adapted into movies.
Philip K. Dick developed what would later be called cyberpunk. Many of his works are about themes from sociology. Often, politics also play an important role. Very often there are Authoritarian Governments, and very powerful companies in his books. In his later books, Dick writes about drug use. He writes about characters that have paranoia or schizophrenia. In novels such as "A Scanner Darkly" or "VALIS" he uses his own experiences.
He was awarded the Hugo Award for his novel, "The Man in the High Castle", in 1963. "I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards," Dick wrote of these stories. "In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real." Dick spent most of his career as a writer. He did not have much money.
Dick died of a stroke. In 2007, he became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series (#173).
"The Man in the High Castle" (1962) takes place in an different universe. There the United States is ruled by the Axis powers, who have won the Second World War. Many people consider it to be one of the important novels about a different view on history. It is the only Dick novel to win a Hugo Award. Philipkdickfans.com recommends this novel, along with "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and "Ubik" as an introductory novel to readers new to the writing of Philip K. Dick.
"The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" (1965) uses many concepts from science fiction. It has several layers of reality and unreality. It is also one of Dick’s first works to explore religious themes.
"The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" takes place in the twenty-first century. Under the supervision of the United Nations authority, mankind has colonized the solar system's every habitable planet and moon. Life is physically daunting and psychologically monotonous for most colonists, so the UN must draft people to go to the colonies. Most entertain themselves using "Perky Pat" dolls and accessories manufactured by Earth-based "P.P. Layouts". The company also secretly creates "Can-D", an illegal but widely available hallucinogenic drug allowing the user to "translate" into Perky Pat (if the drug user is a woman) or Pat's boyfriend, Walt (if the drug user is a man). This recreational use of Can-D allows colonists to experience a few minutes of an idealized life on Earth by participating in a collective hallucination.
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" is the story of a bounty hunter policing the local android population. It occurs on a dying, poisoned Earth. All "successful" humans have left, the only remaining inhabitants of the planet are people with no prospects off-world. Androids, also known as andys, all have a preset "death" date. However, a few andys seek to escape this fate and supplant the humans on Earth.
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (1968) is well known as the literary source of the influential 1982 movie "Blade Runner." It is about the question "What is real, what is fake? Are the human-looking and human-acting androids fake or real humans? Should we treat them as machines or as people? What important factor defines humanity as distinctly alive, versus those merely alive only in their outward appearance?
"Ubik" (1969) uses big networks of psychics and a suspended state after death in creating a state of eroding reality. In 2005, "Time Magazine" listed it among the All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels.
"Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said" (1974) is about Jason Taverner, a television star living in a dystopic near-future police state. After being attacked by an angry ex-girlfriend, Taverner awakens in a dingy hotel room. He still has his money in his wallet, but his identification cards are missing. This is no minor inconvenience, as security checkpoints manned by pols and Nats, the police and National Guard) are set up throughout the city to stop and arrest anyone without valid ID.
Jason at first thinks that he was robbed, but soon discovers that his entire identity has been erased. There is no record of him in any official database, and even his closest associates do not recognize or remember him. For the first time in many years, Jason has no fame or reputation to rely on. He has only his charisma to help him when he tries to find out what happened to his past and avoid the attention of the pols.
"Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said" was Dick's first published novel after years of silence. In these years, his critical reputation had grown, and this novel was awarded the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. It is the only Philip K. Dick novel nominated both for a Hugo and for a Nebula Award.