The James B. Meriwether
Arturo Toscanini Collection

Table of Contents

-Special Collections
-Front Page
-Descriptive Summary
-Administrative Information
-Biography
-Scope and Content
-Series Description
-Container List

Administrative Information

Provenance

Professor James B. Meriwether graduated from the University of South Carolina in 1949 with a double major in English and History. He received his M.A. in 1952 and his Ph.D. in 1958, in English, from Princeton University. He taught at his alma mater from 1964 until his retirement in 1990. He has held Guggenheim and American Council of Learned Societies Fellowships, and has three times been awarded Fulbright Professorships for teaching and research abroad.

 

Professor Meriwether began collecting recordings of classical music when he was in high school. His admiration for Arturo Toscanini began in 1935 or 1936, listening to Toscanini's radio broadcasts, conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, with his mother, Margaret Babcock Meriwether. Then came the years of the NBC Symphony broadcasts (1937-1954), and the opportunity, when in graduate school, of attending Toscanini concerts in Philadelphia and New York.

 

Over the years, Professor Meriwether's collection of records grew steadily and benefited from mail-order catalogs, from graduate student years near the record shops of New York, army years near Boston, and most of all from trips abroad, especially to Europe and Japan, which permitted the acquisition of foreign pressings and issues of recordings unavailable in this country, or available only in sonically inferior forms. Today, the collection represents more than a dozen different orchestras, in many different countries, from 1920 to 1954.

Access

Materials in the Arturo Toscanini Collection are available for use Monday through Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. by appointment. Please telephone 803-777-5139 for further assistance.

Publication Rights

All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Head of the Music Library.