(5 of 9)
Szell's signals spring from an orderly and highly developed sense of the orchestra, which he regards as an extension of his baton. "My urge to polish and finish details has resulted in a playing style here that distinguishes ours from any other orchestra," he says. "The extreme care and cultivation of each of the elements of phrasing and articulation result in a delivery that puts vital musical qualities into relief—a relief that may have gone blurred before in a hundred hearings."
Some critics have found Szell's voice in French music distressingly guttural. Even some of his own musicians are displeased with the maestro's appreciation of the romantic repertory. When Szell schedules Debussy's La Mer, the boys in the band-room call it "Das Merde." Szell's few shortcomings are all in this direction. His music sometimes lacks the panache necessary to take life, the exuberant joy in filling the air with sound that marks the music Boston has heard for years and that Ormandy makes in Philadelphia. Such criticism wins only a lofty bat of the eyes from behind the maestro's thick glasses. "It is perfectly legitimate to prefer the hectic, the arhythmic, the untidy." he says, "but to my mind, great artistry is not disorderliness."
The articulate clarity and precise balance that Szell has brought to the Cleve land give its performances a depth of detail and an intricacy that approach chamber music. The "chambermusic sound'' is Szell's preoccupation, and before the Cleveland rehearses any new score, Szell adds to it a whole vocabulary of his own signs and symbols that refine the musical directions until the maestro's ideas are inescapable. His musicians respond to his directions with astonishing agility. Once, when Szell assured a guest pianist that the orchestra would follow the piano in the first notes of a concerto, the pianist prankishly swooped into the music at double time; the orchestra spoke back in perfect echo, and Szell beamed with delight from the podium.
New Mozart. With his watchmaker's taste for orderliness and for small details, Szell is misty only about his early years, casting much of his childhood into the narrow closet that contains the very few things he has ever forgotten. He was born in Budapest and grew up in Vienna as the only child of a Hungarian father and a Slovak mother. His father was director of the Wach-und-Schliess Gesellschaft ("Wake-Up and Lock-Up Company"), a private door-shaking police force for Vienna's gentry. At four, George expressed both his musical precocity and his podium personality by reaching up and slapping his mother's wrist whenever she struck a wrong note on the piano. Three years later, Szell had two music teachers—young girls who came to his house every day to discipline his practice and teach him theory—and before he was ten, he was the master pupil of Vienna's famous piano teacher, Richard Robert. The following year, even English papers were calling Szell "the new Mozart."