Sourced

• Who knows what the new century holds for music? I predict that we will bury most of the musical modernism of the 20th, with its need to shock and cause distress.
  • American Reord Guide, March/April 2000, quoted in Ashby, Arved, ed. (2004). The Pleasure of Modernist Music. ISBN 1580461433.
• I have always heard in the music what I am finding out from the books: the man was a tyrant who beat his musicians with insults and temper tantrums. He never smiled when conducting (not even in rehearsals!) never thanked or complimented his men, never made them feel they were valuable partners or had even done a creditable job. He would fail to give them cues, then blame them with curses and insults for needing them! Besides being a compulsive perfectionist, he was childish, petulant, inconsiderate, monomaniacal, and monstrously self-centered. His technique was fear, and I always heard that fear in his music...Reading about him - especially books by people who worked with him - strongly confirmed what I had felt in my bones"
  • On the subject of Toscanini - from Vroon's foreword to The mystery of Leopold Stokowski, By William Ander Smith, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1990, ISBN 0838633625