Perfection by Lake Erie
NORDLINGER, JAY
Perfection by Lake Erie George Szell's Strict Musical Creed By Jay Nordlinger If American orchestras had a golden age, it was the 1950s, when titanic conductors commanded the podiums: Eugene...
...Szell's approach to Mahler is, typically, straightforward, as he shears the Ninth Symphony of its many complications...
...But it would not occur to him to capitulate...
...Lesser conductors, luxuriating bathetically, cause it to die...
...Szell responded that "the borderline is very thin between clarity and coolness, between self-discipline and severity," and that he took care to keep to the safe side of it...
...He does not allow the concluding Adagio to lag, mindful of the arc of the work...
...The orchestra agreed...
...His standards were fear-somely exacting, and he was famous for walking out on projects— rehearsal time was always insufficient, singers and instrumentalists were offensively lazy, administrators and producers were too thick-headed to grasp what he wanted from them...
...As Shaw puts it, Szell stood for "structure over color, clarity over sonority, temporal stability over eccentricity, remote control over balletic ecstasy, and right notes over best wishes...
...The hundredth-anniversary set begins with excerpts from Wagner, recorded live in 1956, shortly before the orchestra began to tour and to receive worldwide applause...
...In truth, Szell discovered that the orchestra was the only instrument capable of fulfilling him...
...Most of those around him lived in constant terror...
...So maniacal was his devotion to music that he even lamented that concert audiences no longer hooted and heckled when something was wrong: "It's like looking on when a woman is being murdered down the street without calling the police...
...To have the best of music or to give members unchallengeably permanent jobs...
...He thought nothing of shoving acclaimed pianists from the bench during concerto rehearsals, to show them how it was done...
...The Cleveland Orchestra, celebrating this year the hundredth anniversary of Szell's birth, has issued a remarkable set of seven compact discs, six of them showing off the conductor in live performance, and the seventh reproducing interviews he gave to various broadcasters...
...Szell permits no melodrama or emotional indulgence in his Wagner...
...When he conducted, the listener was aware, not of an interpretation, but of the piece alone...
...Szell was quick to point out that, despite everything, he was no "dogmatist," and the Schubert F-major octet is presented here in unusual form, with an expansion of strings...
...When Szell stalked out of the Metropolitan Opera in a huff, an aide to the general manager, Rudolf Bing, sighed, "That George Szell—he's his own worst enemy...
...The old master took a shine to the fiercely dedicated young man, remarking in 1916, while listening to Szell handle his Don Juan, "I can go ahead and die if this is what the new generation will do...
...His judgment and tongue were merciless...
...In a strange way, an especially fine performance of this symphony is difficult to listen to, as Mahler packs it with struggle, nostalgia, and pain...
...He liked to tell young conductors, "Think with your heart, feel with your head," a neat if slightly enigmatic formulation of music's union of art and science...
...Particularly effective is the violin concerto of William Walton, who was one of Szell's favorite modern composers...
...The players all hear one another, as in a much smaller group...
...While other powerful conductors played the piano in public simply because they could have their way, Szell was the real thing...
...For Szell (pronounced "Sell" in Hungarian, but "Zell" by most English-speakers), the composer's purpose was sacrosanct...
...He unhesitatingly sacked players who failed to meet his expectations, because, as he put it, "What is the purpose of a symphony orchestra...
...He dispels some of the Romantic fog that can beshroud that composer, giving the music a Beethovenian punch...
...Of his decision to turn to conducting, he would explain (now, this is characteristic), "When I was twelve or thirteen, the three greatest living pianists got together and decided to pay me a lifelong retainer in exchange for my promise not to continue as a pianist...
...Szell's aim, as he often said, was to combine "the best qualities of European orchestras with the best qualities of American orchestras"—in other words, the "spontaneity, warmth, flexibility, and tradition-consciousness" of Europe with the "virtuosity, brilliance, impeccable intonation, and smoothness of execution" of America...
...Every entrance is clean, every note accorded its proper value...
...He left his native Budapest to study in Vienna, where at age eleven he performed a piano concerto of his own composition with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra...
...He had already made a name for himself in the United States, mainly because Arturo Toscanini, recognizing a kindred spirit, had showcased him with the NBC Symphony Orchestra...
...the middleman of record stores), they are well worth the effort, for they remind us—if reminding is necessary—that the Szell legend is fully justified...
...The word "style" made him cringe, and he cited with contempt an answer the conductor Thomas Beecham gave when asked why he had changed tempo abruptly in the middle of a Mozart symphony: "Oh, just a whim...
...He was conscious of the criticisms leveled by his detractors (who were relatively few, but insistent) that he was a cold, unbending fanatic...
...Szell could probably not survive in today's musical world, where conductors no longer function as absolute dictators, and standards, when they are recognized, are sacrificed to assorted expediencies...
...The recorded legacy leaves no doubt: He achieved what he had imagined...
...Personally, Szell was no humanitarian...
...But if his conducting—of Mozart, for example—was too dispassionate for some, well, "I cannot pour chocolate sauce over asparagus...
...He insisted, he said, on performances "of which I do not have to be ashamed...
...They took it, too...
...He viewed performers not as creators but as servants—priests, so to speak, at the musical altar...
...Perfection by Lake Erie George Szell's Strict Musical Creed By Jay Nordlinger If American orchestras had a golden age, it was the 1950s, when titanic conductors commanded the podiums: Eugene Ormandy in Philadelphia, Fritz Reiner in Chicago, Charles Munch in Boston, Dim-itri Mitropoulos in New York...
...In 1946, the Cleveland Orchestra undertook to lure Szell to Ohio...
...Szell was uncompromising with the Cleveland board: He did not need the job, and if the orchestra wanted him, it would have to accept his terms, which included total artistic control...
...Though the recordings must be ordered directly from the orchestra (the larger musical organizations having figured out how to eliminate Jay Nordlinger, associate editor and music critic of The Weekly Standard, last wrote about Johannes Brahms...
...Capturing the spiritual majesty of the work, Szell is appropriately awed by Beethoven, but never intimidated by him...
...But the most impressive of them all was the one in the least likely place: Cleveland...
...He eventually came under the tutelage of Richard Strauss in Berlin...
...He manages the piece's sprawling forces—orchestra, chorus, and vocal quartet—with ease...
...Szell makes a compelling argument for Samuel Barber's Music for a Scene from Shelley, and he gives the other new music as well the benefit of his customary preparation and enthusiasm...
...The conductor Robert Shaw, who was an assistant to Szell in Cleveland, notes that when Szell threw one of his frequent fits in rehearsal, "he was distressed, not for himself, but for the composer...
...Szell never recorded the Missa in the studio, so this disc is a welcome complement to his much-admired recordings of Beethoven's symphonies...
...Szell's own version of his credo was, "Freedom and imagination within the musical law"—adminis-tered, of course, "by me...
...Szell was the conscience of our profession," Robert Shaw once claimed, and "it is not the function of a conscience to be comforting...
...Szell could be generous toward his principal players: The French hor-nist Myron Bloom and the clarinetist Robert Marcellus, who shine in the Schubert, became international stars during his tenure...
...He did, however, declare, "I do not believe in the mass grave of an all-contemporary concert...
...Szell reviled showmanship, artifice—any expression of mere personality...
...Toscanini used to complain to his own orchestra, "Ah, you spoil my dreams...
...The weightiest, most consequential works performed in the set are Beethoven's Missa Solemnis and Mahler's Ninth Symphony...
...Answered Bing, "Not while I'm alive...
...For the next three decades, Szell made his march through the opera houses, learning reams of music, honing his craft, and earning a reputation as the prickliest man in the business...
...In a field cluttered with child prodigies, he was extraordinary...
...Twenty years after the conductor's death in 1970, a Cleveland official recalled, "The fact that perfection had to be fought for unceasingly was the sine qua non of George Szell's existence...
...When he took his pieces to London that same year, the Daily Mail proclaimed him "the new Mozart" (about which Szell later remarked, with wholly uncharacteristic modesty, "Newspapers do make mistakes...
...The soloist is Zino Fran-cescatti, a player in the Szell mold...
...The second disc in the series is a surprising one—it contains twentieth-century music, which Szell was thought, inaccurately, to disdain...
...Szell how to cook...
...Szell was a notorious know-it-all, of whom one acquaintance observed, "He teaches expert golfers how to play golf, racing drivers how to drive, Parisian couturiers how to make dresses, writers how to write, and Mrs...
...George Szell made the orchestra by Lake Erie the envy of the world, and no one has heard anything like it since...
...Szell was born in July 1897, three months after Brahms died...
...The pianissimo that Szell elicits at the end is astonishing—a clear, heartbreaking whisper...
...The Cleveland Orchestra realized Szell's...
...he was a cutting, caustic, and often intolerable man...
...And perfection, for him, was not some unattainable ideal—it was his unquestioned obligation every time he raised his baton...
...If he heard his wife whistling around the house, he corrected her emphatically, reasoning, "If she is going to do it, she might as well do it right...
...He was a superb pianist as a child, and he would remain one for the rest of his life...
Vol. 3 • December 1997 • No. 13
