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Hard Szell
- Abstract
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.”
About the Author
Terry Teachout, COMMENTARY’s critic-at-large and the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal, wrote about Tony Bennett in the last issue. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his first play, opened in September in Orlando, Florida.
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