Preparations and return

On 18 June Toscanini left London with relief for the Isolino where, as we have seen, he received Mase on 29 June. That visit was only one of Mase's activities at the time in furtherance of the Maestro's interests in London. He was in contact with the family (principally Carla) to conclude negotiations on behalf of HMV. In his capacity as a member of the Royal Philharmonic Society's Management Committee, he also sounded her out about the possibility of Toscanini accepting the Society's Gold Medal ‘without ceremony or fuss’ during his October visit. And he persuaded Toscanini to relax his ban on the broadcasting of his two forthcoming autumn concerts abroad on shortwave frequencies, a change of mind that led to NBC's agents in London concluding an agreement with the BBC for their transatlantic transmission. To Mase's persuasive powers, then, we owe the preservation, albeit in primitive sound, of Isobel Baillie's beautifully sung solo in the Brahms Requiem in the first of the two autumn concerts on 30 October.

For Toscanini himself, this was a period of rest and contemplation; the remarks on the beauty of nature in his letters to Ada from the Isolino are lyrical in the extreme. He was also making preparations for his engagements that summer at what was to prove his last Salzburg Festival. Events affecting these preparations caused him unwelcome stress in consequence of, as he saw it (with ample justification in contemporary circumstances), the unlooked-for presence of Furtwängler at the forthcoming Festival.