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Imperfect Footing. Szell claims he would have laughed but he did not know the tune. His blessing and his misfortune is that he remains an Old World personality, bridging two cultures, and finding imperfect footing in the new one whenever he runs into anyone less serious and dedicated than he is himself. At the orchestra's Severance Hall, he snoops around the box office and the business office, upsetting secretaries and clerks, all the while musing about "a little legacy left to me by Richard Strauss—always consult the box-office man."
Szell's fascination with the box office is no idle pastime. By quizzing the ticket sellers, he learns how his musical-education program is going and whether the audience is hungry for new music or homesick for old. Though he has encouraged young composers by playing their works in the height of the orchestra's season, he is generally thought to be a conservative programmer. He worries about encroachments upon the classical repertory by music's popularizers: he would like to play Dvorak's "New World" Symphony more often, but now that the magic violinists have had their day with it, it has become almost an embarrassment. "The repertory is shrinking," he says, "but there is one consolation. Every day new people come to life who have never heard Beethoven's Fifth. They are a small benefit of the population explosion." In the music that Szell knows and likes best—Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Schumann, Dvorak and Smetana—the Cleveland is hard to beat.
Two Tickets. To those who do not know him, Szell often appears menacing —and to a degree he is. A pair of managers have had their walking papers from Szell. He is a compulsive pedagogue, teaching janitors how to sweep, clerks how to type, chauffeurs how to drive. He looks over press releases and programs; when he walks down the hall and notices a paper in a man's hand he stops and says, "May I?" When he coaxed the management to spend $200,000 to rebuild the acoustical interior of the orchestra's grandly opulent hall four years ago, predictably, the man who did the job was Szell's man. Predictably, too, the job was an amazing success: the first day of rehearsals, the orchestra nearly deafened itself in the lively new room.
Szell's few close friends in Cleveland say that success has mellowed him, but only rarely do hints of this change drift out to the world at large. On forays into guest-conducting, he always bags a new enemy or two for his trophy room. At the New York Philharmonic, where he will conduct during March, he has always scored low with prideful musicians; when Toscanini died, a musician who was refused an invitation to the funeral said, "All right, but reserve me two tickets for Szell's." In San Francisco, where he broke off a conducting assignment and huffed back to Cleveland, many people remain convinced that his only aim was to embarrass the West Coast orchestra. Such accusations leave Szell almost wordless with dismay: "Oh, my," he will say, "and for once I was trying to be a good boy." Pressed further he retreats into Szellish humor: "The cause of such troubles? Perhaps the incompatibility of the artistic and inartistic temperaments."