Arturo Toscanini on the Isonzo front — August 1917

Four days and four nights on a summit captured only hours before, with a military band hauling its instruments two thousand feet up the mountain and the Austrian artillery trying to silence it. The little-known story of Italy’s greatest conductor, who brought music to the soldiers of the Isonzo.

We ask our readers to forgive this digression: but this, too, is history. And it is worth telling, because it concerns a great Italian, much loved and esteemed, whose name is linked not only to music but also to the Great War.

Arturo Toscanini was born in Parma on 25 March 1867 and died in New York on 16 January 1957. He is regarded as one of the greatest conductors of all time: a man of absolute rigour, prodigious memory and indomitable character. But in the summer of 1917, while Italy was fighting its hardest war, the Maestro was not on the podium at La Scala. He was at the front. And not by chance.

The background: the Bainsizza and the fall of Monte Santo

To set the episode in context we must go back a few days. The Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo is under way, the last great Italian offensive of that war. On the night of 23 August 1917 the Austro-Hungarians withdraw in good order from the Bainsizza plateau, falling back on new lines hastily prepared further east. The Italians, exhausted after days of fighting, fail to exploit the opportunity: Cadorna, for once, is too cautious to order a pursuit.

The Austrians also abandon Monte Santo — 681 metres, today in Slovenia — the peak that for more than two years had barred the southern approach to the plateau. The Italians climb it the following day, hailing its capture as the greatest victory since the taking of Gorizia in August 1916. Instead of pushing east from the Bainsizza, Cadorna decides to attack Monte San Gabriele, the last of the “Three Saints” that overlooked Gorizia from the north-east, hoping then to break through with cavalry and cyclist troops. It is a calculation that will not bear the hoped-for fruit.

A father at the front, a band to be assembled

Among those celebrating the capture of Monte Santo is none other than Arturo Toscanini. He has been at the front for a few days, but not as a distinguished guest or a figurehead: he has come to visit his son Walter, who is serving in the artillery of the Second Army. A father like so many others in those months, come to look for his boy among the communication trenches of the Isonzo.

It was on that occasion that the Maestro persuaded the commander of the Second Army, General Luigi Capello, to let him put together a military band to bring a little moral relief to the troops. General Antonino Cascino also lent his support to the initiative, inviting him to conduct performances on the Isonzo front. Toscanini accepted without hesitation: he recruited a number of musicians, went to the soldiers’ theatre at Cormons and placed himself at the army’s disposal.

Two thousand feet of climbing with the instruments

On 26 August 1917 — less than three days after the summit had still been in Austrian hands — the band managed the feat of carrying its instruments up more than two thousand feet (a little over six hundred metres of ascent) to the top of Monte Santo. Anyone who has walked in the mountains with a drum slung over one shoulder or a tuba on their back knows what that means: not a hike, but a small logistical epic.

Up there, on the newly captured summit, Toscanini remained for four days and four nights. He conducted the band in the repertoire every soldier knew by heart: marches, anthems, military songs, the Marcia Reale (Royal March), the Inno di Mameli. Among men moved and jubilant.

Despite the precarious situation — the front was still active, and shells were falling all around — the music conducted by the Maestro could be heard as far as the Bainsizza plateau. It is one of those episodes that enter an army’s collective memory: the most famous conductor in the world wielding his baton like a weapon, on a summit just wrested from the enemy, and standing up to the shells with the Marcia Reale.

The Silver Medal of Military Valour

For that gesture — conducting an orchestra under artillery fire, on a peak captured only hours before — Toscanini was decorated with the Silver Medal of Military Valour, conferred on him by General Capello. The episode is considered one of the most iconic moments of the moral support that Italian intellectuals and artists were able to give the fighting men during the Great War.

As for Monte San Gabriele, on which Cadorna was counting to break through to the east, it would remain firmly in Austrian hands. A few months later, on 24 October, Caporetto would come. But for four days at the end of August, on the summit of Monte Santo, Italy had had its own front-line orchestra.

There is something in this story that speaks directly to us Alpini: the idea that even in the darkest hours a song, a march, a band can hold men together better than any written order. Anyone who has sung in a choir under canvas, or in a mountain church, knows what we mean.

Michele Sacchet

Gruppo Alpini “Gen. Pietro Zaglio” — Salce (Belluno) · Col Maòr