In 1966, NBC broadcast a Bell Telephone Hour program about George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra called “One Man’s Triumph.” Nowadays, most viewers would find it presumptuous for that phrase to be used as the title of a TV documentary about a hundred-man ensemble whose members included some of America’s top instrumentalists. But no one would have thought to complain at the time—for Szell, who led the Cleveland Orchestra from 1946 until his death in 1970, was universally believed to be solely responsible for the transformation of a merely regional group into a virtuoso ensemble that one awestruck Berlin critic, writing in 1957, ranked among “the elite of great symphony orchestras.”
In 1966, NBC broadcast a Bell Telephone Hour program about George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra called “One Man’s Triumph.” Nowadays, most viewers would find it presumptuous for that phrase to be used as the title of a TV documentary about a hundred-man ensemble whose members included some of America’s top instrumentalists. But no one would have thought to complain at the time—for Szell, who led the Cleveland Orchestra from 1946 until his death in 1970, was universally believed to be solely responsible for the transformation of a merely regional group into a virtuoso ensemble that one awestruck Berlin critic, writing in 1957, ranked among “the elite of great symphony orchestras.”
Even if Szell had never worked with the Cleveland Orchestra, he would still be remembered as one of the most remarkable musicians of the 20th century. A child prodigy whose compositions led some critics to dub him “the new Mozart,” he was in adulthood a superbly finished pianist with an encyclopedic knowledge of the classical repertoire. No sooner did he start conducting at the age of 16 than he attracted the attention of Richard Strauss, who took the young man under his wing, and within a few years he was working in opera houses throughout Europe. In 1940 Arturo Toscanini engaged him to make his New York conducting debut with the NBC Symphony, and thereafter he became equally well known in this country. Glenn Gould praised him as “even more accomplished than Toscanini,” while Robert Shaw called him “the conscience of our profession.”
At the same time, though, Szell was loathed by at least as many of his fellow artists. One young conductor who worked with him later said that he was “one of the world’s great musicians and a cold, cold sonofabitch.” When assured that Szell was “his own worst enemy,” Rudolf Bing, then the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, promptly retorted, “Not while I’m alive.”
Even Szell’s closest friends found him intimidating. In a profession not known for fostering modesty in its practitioners, he was notorious for his sharp-tongued arrogance and bullying behavior. Journalists who wrote about him invariably echoed the reporter for Time who wrote in 1944 that “his outward manner suggests the average American idea of the typical Nazi.” Such comparisons were shockingly inappropriate—Szell was a Hungarian Jew who immigrated to the United States in order to escape the Holocaust—but they were hard to resist, because his accent and demeanor were strongly reminiscent of the POW-camp commandant played by Otto Preminger (another Jew) in Stalag 17.
Szell never left anyone in doubt of his own high opinion of himself, and though he was quick to praise his orchestra, he made it clear who deserved the credit for its special excellence: “My urge to polish and finish details has resulted in a playing style here that distinguishes ours from any other orchestra.” Not surprisingly, his players had sharply mixed feelings about their leader. “Szell considers the orchestra an extension of himself, and so do we,” said Cloyd Duff, the orchestra’s timpanist.
The ambiguity of that “compliment” is not hard to detect. A tyrannical taskmaster who fired anyone who failed to comply instantly with his wishes, Szell was widely thought to be so relentless in the rehearsal room that his public performances lacked color and verve. The great singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, normally a Szell admirer, called his Beethoven “stiff and overly correct,” and for every critic who praised the elegance and lucidity of his style, another dismissed it as pedantic.
So controversial a figure would seem to be a biographer’s dream. Yet Michael Charry’s newly published George Szell: A Life in Music (University of Illinois Press, 464 pages) is, amazingly enough, the first book ever written about Szell. And it is not quite the book one would wish it to be. Charry worked with Szell for 11 years, first as an apprentice and then as one of the Cleveland Orchestra’s assistant conductors. He regards his mentor as a uniquely great artist. And even though he claims to have written “a balanced portrayal” of Szell, this exhaustive account of the conductor’s career not infrequently places the thumb of admiration on the scales of objectivity. That said, it is possible to get an accurate sense of Szell’s personal and professional failings from Charry’s book—as well as to understand why so many musicians were willing to overlook them.
_____________
Born in Budapest in 1897, Szell moved with his family to Vienna, the center of the Austro-German musical tradition, when he was three years old. The rigorous training he received there allowed him to make the most of his phenomenal gifts, and once he understood that he was not destined to become a composer of importance (his music was well crafted but derivative) and opted instead to specialize in conducting, his success was assured. By 1939, when he moved to the United States, he had become one of Europe’s most critically admired conductors.
Part of what set Szell apart from his contemporaries was his strongly anti-romantic orientation. He believed that “the style of performance usually described by the cliché ‘Romantic’ had degenerated to mannerism and excess.” He specifically cited such conductors as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Nikisch, and Strauss, his own mentor, as sharing “one common characteristic: they interpreted the composer subjectively to the point of arbitrariness (and/or distortion).” What he sought was a new musical model, and he found it when Arturo Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic toured Europe in 1930.
Not only was Szell attracted by Toscanini’s objective approach to musical interpretation, but he was also, like the rest of his contemporaries, overwhelmed by the Italian maestro’s unrivaled ability to galvanize his players:
The clarity of texture; the precision of ensemble; the rightness of balances; the virtuosity of every section, every solo-player of the orchestra—then at its peak—in the service of an interpretative concept of evident, self-effacing integrity, enforced with irresistible will power and unflagging ardor, set new, undreamed-of standards literally overnight.
Once Szell began conducting American orchestras, he discovered that Toscanini’s achievement, if unparalleled, was not unprecedented. The technical standards of orchestral playing were far higher in the United States than in Europe, where (in Mahler’s pungent phrase) tradition had frequently degenerated into slovenliness. But America’s other great orchestras—Serge Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony and Leopold Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra—were led by men strongly inclined to the kind of romantic exaggeration that Szell disdained.
In later years Szell summed up his new musical goal with typical pithiness: “I wanted to combine the Americans’ purity and beauty of sound and their virtuosity of execution with the European sense of tradition, warmth of expression, and sense of style.”
But he was hampered in his goal of doing so in part—possibly in large part—due to his abrasive personality. Even a friend such as the violinist Henri Temianka admitted that his rehearsal technique was “irritatingly pedagogical,” and Toscanini barred Szell from working with the NBC Symphony after a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Third Symphony during which the younger conductor stopped the group 54 times to make niggling corrections in the slow movement.
Szell had not yet broken into the top ranks of European conductors by the time he came to America on the cusp of World War II, and none of this country’s first-tier orchestras was then looking for a new leader. The only way for him to advance his career was to take a second-class orchestra and turn it into a world-class ensemble. The opportunity for him to do so came at last when the Cleveland Orchestra hired him as its musical director in 1946.
_____________
Founded in 1918, the Cleveland Orchestra was a solid but undistinguished provincial band. Szell’s brief was to raise its profile, and he vowed “to make the Cleveland Orchestra second to none in quality of performance.” He insisted that he be given total artistic control over the orchestra, and he wielded that power ruthlessly. He fired 17 musicians during his first season in Cleveland and 16 more the following year, then personally chose their replacements. Those who survived this weeding-out process were subjected to a brutal rehearsal regime. “The Cleveland Orchestra plays seven concerts a week, and admits the public to the final two,” Szell bragged.
That this was no mere boast soon became evident to all who heard the orchestra in concert and on record. Within a few years, the Cleveland Orchestra was playing with a breathtaking blend of
technical exactitude and tonal euphony, and by 1957, when the orchestra embarked on its first European tour, it was generally acclaimed as equal in quality to—if not better than—its opposite numbers on the East Coast.
The results of Szell’s meticulous training can be heard in his 1964 recording of Brahms’s “Haydn Variations,” in which the orchestra’s exquisitely well-balanced and flawlessly tuned playing is superior to that of Arturo Toscanini’s classic 1936 recording of the same piece with the New York Philharmonic. No better example exists of Szell’s approach to the art of orchestral playing:
Perhaps I can best characterize my idea when I say it should be a chamber-music approach. … I personally like complete homogeneity of sound, phrasing, and articulation within each section, and then—when the ensemble is perfect—the proper balance between sections plus complete flexibility—so that in a moment one or more principal voices can be accompanied by the others.
What Szell did with the ensemble that he dubbed his “glorious instrument” is epitomized in a tribute that he paid to the cellist Emanuel Feuermann: “He was given to understatement. He was dead set against what you would call ‘schmaltz.’” Much the same thing could be said of Szell himself. Robert Shaw, who worked closely with him in Cleveland, explained that Szell’s conducting “favored structure over color, clarity over sonority, temporal stability over eccentricity, remote control
over balletic ecstasy … elegance over extravagance.”
Szell’s determinedly unsentimental approach was that of a classicist, Apollonian rather than Dionysian. “You must never give everything away,” he told the composer George Rochberg. “Always hold something in reserve so that at the right moment you can release it.” But his belief in the need for restraint too often prevented him from transfusing his performances with Toscanini’s soaring, fiery intensity. So, too, did his obsessive perfectionism. According to Gunther Schuller, who played under Szell in the Metropolitan Opera’s pit orchestra in the
1940s, “he would rehearse … to the point where often enough the music would become stale and mechanical and lose all its bloom and vitality.”
Szell’s limitations as an interpreter are enshrined on the many recordings that he made with the Cleveland Orchestra for Columbia and Epic, most of which have been transferred to CD and remain in print. His performances of the music of Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, and Dvorak are immaculately played but sometimes lack the spark of life (though never when Szell was accompanying Leon Fleisher, his favorite pianist after Schnabel, in the 19th-century concerto repertoire). In the less overtly emotional music of Haydn and Mozart, by contrast, he was always at ease, while his legendary 1957 recording of Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel, one of his favorite pieces, combines wit and polish to bedazzling effect.
Though Szell had mixed feelings about most 20th-century music, his recordings of such modern masterpieces as Paul Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes of Carl Maria von Weber, Sergei Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, and William Walton’s Variations on a Theme of Hindemith are, like his Haydn and Mozart performances, stupendously poised and incisive. “How can one comment on a performance which is flawless in every aspect?” asked an astonished Walton after hearing a concert performance of the last of these works.
_____________
When Szell died, Paul Myers, his record producer, paid him an unusually revealing tribute:
He was the last of a generation of great musicians … whose concern was to pass on the traditions of noble musicianship coupled with superlative technique. They were acquired through a lifetime of virtuosity, continual study, and dedication, in an era when orchestral playing blossomed into unparalleled greatness. Most of today’s orchestras are more democratic, perhaps, and conductors no longer demand that kind of authoritarian discipline from a body of players.
Four decades later, Myers’s words have proved prophetic. No modern-day conductor has a fraction of the power wielded by Szell in Cleveland, or by any of the other great conductors active in America and Europe throughout the first half of the 20th century and beyond. It is now taken for granted that a symphony orchestra is a cooperative enterprise in which a conductor and his players work together to make music. When Alan Gilbert became the music director of the New York Philharmonic in 2007, Anthony Tommasini, the chief classical-music critic of the New York Times, described him as “an unpretentious musician with no whiff of the formidable maestro about him.” No one ever said anything like that about George Szell.
No doubt the advent of today’s democratic conductors has made for more comfortable rehearsals. But does it make for better orchestras? To hear any of the recordings made by Szell in the 1950s and 60s is to hear the answer to that question. In the absence of the “authoritarian discipline” that can only be imposed from above by a conductor of genius, no orchestra, however gifted its individual members may be, can hope to play the way that the Cleveland Orchestra did for Szell. Hated he surely was, but every musician who had the uneasy privilege of playing for him knew that he was—for better and worse—one of a kind.
