It was a grim week for the world of music. On Wednesday, news came of the death of British Conductor Sir John Barbirolli, 70, whose early failure with the New York Philharmonic had long been erased by his direction of the Hallé orchestra (see MILESTONES). The same day, Conductor Jonel Perlea, 69, died in New York, ending a career whose flickering brilliance had been dimmed by war and a succession of illnesses. Then came perhaps the saddest word of all. George Szell, 73, had died in Cleveland, victim of fever, bone cancer and heart attack.
Szell's loss to the world of music, like Toscanini's before him, is incalculable. The two conductors resembled each other in many ways, though they had arrived at the resemblance by opposite paths. The Italian had brought Verdian passion to the Viennese world of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, restraining his fire with a rigorous intellectualism. Szell, born in Hungary and schooled in Vienna, brought a Viennese richness and Teutonic thoroughness to the mainstream of Central European music, touching it with a fierce temperament unheard of in most Germanic conductors. He had enough dramatic depth to disdain mere showmanship, enough inner fire to opt for ice.
Szell was an extraordinary pianist, and though he could not play a single orchestral instrument, he knew exactly what each could do, often proving he knew more about it than the players themselves. His beat was sharply defined and unfailing as an atomic clock. He was a scholar with a mania for research and a memory that neatly stored away the data in mental cubbyholes for instant retrieval. Though he cared deeply for paintings and literature and was a gourmet, music was his passion. Everything and everybody, including himself, was to be sacrificed to its perfection. He was fearsome, unforgiving and, in his own performances, nearly flawless. "Well, what do you know," chortled a musician once when Szell momentarily beat a measure incorrectly. "Somebody just threw a spitball into Univac."
The New Mozart. Szell's demand for perfection from himself and his musicians grew from a lifelong, almost superhuman, discipline. A child prodigy, he could sing some 40 folk songs in four languages at the age of two. He could also scribble musical notations, he liked to recall, "that made no sense at all. That's the way the modern composers do it today." At four, he was slapping his mother's hand when she hit a wrong note on the piano.
As a boy, he was being called "the new Mozart" and regarded with awe by his classmates. One of them, a skinny twelve-year-old named Rudolf Serkin, stole some of Szell's compositions from a piano and practiced them furiously to play for Szell's birthday. Serkin still winces at Szell's uncompromising comment: "Serkin! How can you play such trash?" At 17, Richard Strauss hired young Szell as assistant conductor at the Berlin State Opera.