The lives of immigrants are generally regarded by social scientists as complex and characterized by certain inescapable difficulties associated with assimilation and acculturation and the transformation from a life in a known culture to life in a less understood culture. This process can be challenging and even traumatic but for certain individuals it is less stressful than might be imagined.
A case in point is the famous composer and conductor Arturo Toscanini, born in Italy and yet very much a citizen of the United States whose professional life took him to all corners of the globe often for extended periods of time. While the literature on acculturation and its stresses focuses on the difficulties that ordinary immigrants confront in the migration phenomenon, individuals like Toscanini who are true internationalists may represent a separate class of immigrants. As this study demonstrates, Toscanini's adjustment to later life in the United States does not appear to have been in any way challenging due to the typical stresses of immigration. Instead, Toscanini's career in music as a conductor seems to have positioned him within a relatively isolated social and economic milieu in which nationality and culture were superseded by professional common interests and shared traditions.
Social scientists have often looked at the phenomenon of immigration and identified multiple stresses experienced by those individuals who choose for any of a number of reasons to leave the country and culture of their birth and take root in an entirely different country where language, social norms and values, attitudes and expectations, traditions, and religion may be significantly different (Takaki, 1993). The United States has long been a locus for immigration and as a consequence has acquired what some scientists including Ronald Takaki (1993) have characterized as a multicultural and diverse or heterogeneous population. Consequently, A...