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Two weeks ago 94-year-old Isaac Fishberg came home after a night out and had to be put to bed because of a serious nosebleed. He refused to tell where he had been. The truth finally leaked out. Bored with the routine of domestic life, Isaac had sneaked away with his flute to a Jewish wedding where he had played for four hours at a stretch.
Perfect Order
The latest conductor to make a first-class impression on U.S. musical criticism is George Szell (pronounced Sell). This week the husky, formidable-mannered Czecho-Hungarian winds up a season at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera during which he has directed some of the finest Wagner the U.S. has heard in a generation.
Szell's Wagner, like his Strauss and Moussorgsky, is remarkable not only for power and dramatic vitality (as was that of the late Artur Bodanzky) but also for its meticulous clarity. He manages to keep the highest lucidity of musical patterns among half-a-dozen stars, a hundred chorus singers and a hundred orchestra players. He does this by being one of the most coldly efficient tyrants who ever stood in the Metropolitan's orchestra pit.
George Szell is a Jewish refugee from Nazi Europe and a fervent Hitler-hater. But his outward manner suggests the average American idea of the typical Nazi. He fixes his orchestra with a thick-spectacled stare that would do credit to a cinema Prussian. Some conductors get their effects by kindness and psychological subtlety; some approach the technique of a lion tamer. George Szell is among the latter. For him the Met's lions jump through their hoops under dazzling control.
Born in Budapest, George Szell grew up an infant prodigy, made his debut as a pianist and composer at the age of ten with the Vienna Symphony. He rose to be chief maestro of the pre-Hitler Berlin Opera. This summer he will conduct at Philadelphia's Robin Hood Dell, Chicago's Ravinia Park and the Hollywood Bowl.
Szell lives with his striking, chestnut-haired Czech wife in a Manhattan apartment so scrupulously kept that visitors are almost afraid to sit down in it. A devout gourmet, he frequently terrifies his wife by tying an apron around his muscular torso and assuming autocratic control of the kitchen. He resents all imputations of artistic temperament. Says George Szell: "There is nothing interesting about me. I have no hobbies. I am not melancholy. My accounts are all in perfect order. I am so damn normal.. . ."
*Now with the U.S. armed forces.