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Szell managed to survive his Vienna days without picking up any Gemütlichkeit. A few days before his 16th birthday, his fellow piano prodigy, Rudolf Serkin, noticed some of Szell's own compositions on Professor Robert's desk. Serkin, then only twelve and in deep awe of Szell, took the pieces home and practiced furiously so he could play them for George as a birthday gift. When the day came and Serkin played through his gift, Szell cut him into the carpet by saying "Serkin! How can you play such trash?" The remark still makes Serkin wince, and it still makes Szell chuckle.
In the summer of his 17th year, Szell was vacationing with his family at the Bad Kissingen spa when the conductor of the visiting Vienna Philharmonic was hit in the groin with a tennis ball and knocked out of action. He turned his baton over to Szell, who had been pestering him all summer, and Szell was an immediate success. The following year Szell was in Berlin, appearing as conductor, pianist and composer at a concert of the Berlin Philharmonic. Richard Strauss heard Szell play his transcription of Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, and soon afterward chose him as his assistant in Berlin. Though Szell continued to give occasional piano recitals, he made up his mind to devote himself to conducting from that point on. Today, Szell elaborately insists that he abandoned the piano because a committee of the world's three greatest pianists called on him and begged him to retire.
Surrender. Szell began to spend his spare time bumming around bandrooms, pestering musicians to teach him the technique of their instruments. At 19 he succeeded Otto Klemperer as principal conductor of the Strasbourg Municipal Theater; at 24 he moved on to Darmstadt, where there was a fresh supply of virtuosos to wheedle. "What stood out in Szell's talent," says his old friend Max Rudolf, now a downstate neighbor as conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony, "was his early genius at reading and remembering musical scores." Szell used that genius for his own amusement—playing full orchestrated scores on the piano in one dazzling transcription that called out all the orchestra's hidden voices. All his life, playing Till Eulenspiegel has been almost a hobby with him; at any party, at the faintest invitation, he will sit down and race through the piece, and in the old days, he would run a cuff link down the keys to sound the staccato turns of the ratchet that hangs Till.
Before he was 40, Szell had conducted all Europe's leading orchestras, and it was clear that he was a prodigy who had kept all his promises. He married young, but lost his wife to his ardent first violinist.
A few years later, Szell married his present wife Helene, who had two sons by a former marriage. At the outbreak of World War II, the Szells were marooned in New York, and they decided to remain in the U.S. for the duration. Helene's children, however, were left behind. One disappeared during the occupation of France as did Szell's parents, who were presumed to have died in a Nazi concentration camp. The other son rejoined his family in 1945 on the first postwar immigration visa issued in France—a sign that Szell was already in string-pulling position in his new country.