George Szell

Among the distinguished group of Hungarian-born conductors who assumed leading roles in American musical institutions around the time of World War II, alongside Fritz Reiner, Antal Dorati, and Eugene Ormandy, George Szell rapidly elevated a modest Midwestern ensemble to membership among the nation’s premier orchestras. Through rigorous standards of preparation and execution, his work with the Cleveland Orchestra established a model of ensemble discipline that raised performance levels throughout the country.

Although his birthplace was Hungary, Szell grew up in Vienna and pursued studies in composition under Eusebius Mandyczewski and in piano under Richard Robert; he furthered his compositional training in Prague with J.B. Foerster. Recognized early as a prodigy, he performed a Mozart piano concerto with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra at age ten and produced several substantial chamber and orchestral pieces in a rich late-Romantic idiom during his childhood and adolescence. He was already seventeen when he led the Berlin Philharmonic in a program that featured one of his own works.

Despite these youthful achievements, Szell advanced through the established sequence of operatic appointments customary at the time: Royal Opera of Berlin (1915-17), Strasbourg (1917-18), Prague (1919-21), Darmstadt (1921-22), and Düsseldorf (1922-24). His first major position arrived in 1924 with his appointment as first conductor of the Berlin State Opera, a role he combined with a professorship at Berlin’s Hochschule für Musik. In 1929 he became general music director of the German Opera and Philharmonic in Prague, remaining there until 1937. These responsibilities largely curtailed his compositional activity, though he later created a notable orchestration of Smetana’s String Quartet No. 1, “From My Life.”

Szell turned greater attention to symphonic repertoire during the 1930s, making his American debut as guest conductor of the St. Louis Symphony in 1930. In 1937 he was named conductor of the Scottish Orchestra in Glasgow while continuing regular appearances with the Residentie Orkest in The Hague. Caught in the United States when war began in Europe in 1939, he remained through the conflict, sustaining himself initially with guest engagements before joining the Metropolitan Opera as a regular conductor in 1942, where his Wagner interpretations drew particular acclaim. Szell acquired American citizenship in 1946 and assumed the music directorship of the Cleveland Orchestra, a position he held for twenty-four years; during the final two years of his life he also served the New York Philharmonic as music advisor and senior guest conductor.

Although he recorded occasionally in Europe for Decca during the 1950s and 1960s, at the close of his career for EMI in Cleveland, and sporadically on 78-rpm discs, the core of his extensive recorded legacy stems from his extended association with Columbia Records in Cleveland.

There Szell inherited a competent yet unremarkable orchestra and, through exacting leadership, shaped it into one of America’s foremost ensembles. His performances were noted for their clarity of texture, chamber-like equilibrium among sections, and exactitude in attacks and releases. He rehearsed the players relentlessly, even in repertory they had recently performed under his direction. Szell earned widespread respect for his interpretations of the Austro-German canon from Haydn to Richard Strauss, for incisive accounts of selected twentieth-century scores by Bartók, Prokofiev, Janácek, and Walton, and for his natural affinity with Dvorák; many collectors still regard his monaural early-1950s recording of Dvorák’s Eighth Symphony with the Concertgebouw Orchestra as unsurpassed. His readings of French composers, by contrast, were sometimes faulted for insufficient atmosphere, and critics occasionally charged that his emphasis on precision came at the cost of expressive warmth. When pressed for a more indulgent approach to Mozart, whom he deeply admired, Szell is said to have retorted, “One does not pour chocolate sauce over asparagus.”