SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
George Szell was one of the 20th century's most celebrated conductors. Over the course of more than two decades, he turned the Cleveland Orchestra into one of the world's ranking ensembles for classical music. The power of his artistry - and his tempestuous personality - are remembered in a new biography called "George Szell: A Life of Music."
Vivian Goodman, of member station WKSU, reports on a man whose legacy still reverberates in Cleveland's Severance Hall.
VIVIAN GOODMAN, BYLINE: Biographer Michael Charry was Szell's Sorcerer's Apprentice. He was an assistant conductor for the last decade of Szell's tenure in Cleveland. And Charry vividly recalls Szell testing him on how many notes he could find in a chord when he auditioned for the job.
MICHAEL CHARRY: He sat down and played a chord something like this.
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CHARRY: And he said how many? I said six or seven. He said can you name them? And I actually did name them. And passing that, then we went to the rest of the audition. I had the feeling, though, that if my ear hadn't been good enough he would have said thank you very much, but you may go.
GOODMAN: Charry says even as a child prodigy, Szell was a brutal critic:
CHARRY: From the age of 2 on he could sing songs in many languages. He had a wonderful ear. His Mother was a sort of amateur pianist and when she made a mistake he would slap her wrist and say, it's false, Mother, it's false. This is a 2-and-half-year-old child correcting an adult, and he was a phenomenon.
GOODMAN: At 13, Szell's parents sent him to Switzerland to be analyzed by Carl Jung. The conductor said it didn't do him much good and interviews from the Cleveland Orchestra archives reveal that Szell grew up to be an unapologetic authoritarian.
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GOODMAN: But he could be brutal when necessary, and that was evident from his first days in Cleveland when he fired 12 of the orchestra's 84 musicians. Biographer Charry says the orchestra had already been decimated by World War II.
CHARRY: Lots of players left, went to the Army, they were drafted, they went to other places. And so, he felt he had to build by firstly recruiting first chair players, and enlarging the orchestra, and unfortunately letting go players were not up to the standards which were required to make a great orchestra.
GOODMAN: The difference Szell made became evident in very short order.
CHARRY: The reviews were by very knowledgeable writers. Herbert Elwell was a composer. I mean, Mr. Elwell wrote, I think, after three years: This is it. This is the orchestra we've been waiting for.
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GOODMAN: It was not an easy evolution. Charry recalls a rehearsal so filled with foul language, the musicians revolted.
CHARRY: And so at intermission they refused to come back on stage and they went into the auditorium and sat there and they waited for Mr. Szell to make an apology. And he came and he hemmed and hawed long enough for them to feel that he was at least constrained enough so they decided they could go on stage and continue the rehearsal.
GOODMAN: He was demanding, too, of the orchestra's board and managers. He hounded the board until it made a million dollars worth of acoustical improvements to Severance Hall.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED INTERVIEW)
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GOODMAN: Szell ran all four floors of Severance Hall, says double-bassist Martin Flowerman, who recently retired after more than 40 years with the orchestra.
MARTIN FLOWERMAN: From telling the cleaning crew how to clean the floors to ordering certain pencils for the library, Szell was the final word. No beards. Nobody could have a beard. The summer that he passed away, the end of July of '70, three members of the orchestra then started to raise a beard.
GOODMAN: Szell was physically striking, especially on the podium. He was more than six feet tall with a regal bearing, but biographer Charry says he was imposing without flamboyance.
CHARRY: It was directed to the music, to the musicians, not to the audience. His gestures were concise and expressive of the music and very clear. He had a very thin baton, a very light baton, which he used very artfully.
GOODMAN: While Szell was all business, he could also be kind, almost fatherly to his musicians. Michael Charry recalls overhearing a conversation between Szell and an orchestra manager about a violinist who was going blind.
CHARRY: And he said: Poor man. I'm afraid I'll have to let him go after the end of the season. And the personnel manager said to Szell: This man has two more years to go before he gets a full pension. If you release him now he'll get a very small fraction of that. And Szell said, oh, I didn't know that. Thank you. And he kept him on for two more years.
GOODMAN: Michael Charry saw the end of A Life of Music when George Szell was dying of bone marrow cancer at University Hospitals in Cleveland.
CHARRY: He was lying in the bed sedated, his elbow resting on the bed but his forearm extended and he was waving his hands and his lips were pursed as if to whistle but no sound came out and obviously he was going over some great score that he loved.
GOODMAN: Such was George Szell's intense commitment to the music. For NPR News I'm Vivian Goodman, in Cleveland.
SIMON: And you can read an excerpt from George Szell, "A Life of Music," on our website, npr.org. This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon.
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