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CHAPTER 1
A Prodigy's Apprenticeship
At age two and a hal f George Szell had strong musical opinions. One day his mother, noticing that her precocious son seemed musical, had put him on her lap and played a tune on the piano. She hadn't gone very far when he slapped her wrist. He didn't like the mistake she had made and wouldn't tolerate it. That was the beginning of his years as a prodigy.
If that slap had been administered to an uneducated hausfrau in a remote village, George would have received a paddling and that would have been the end of the incident. But in a random stroke of luck, he was born in 1897 to upper-class parents who lived in a fine neighborhood in Budapest, cultivated the arts, and had left their Jewish roots behind when they converted to Catholicism. The elements necessary for George's future success were therefore present, including even the right city, because in 1900 his parents moved to Vienna, a center of amateur and professional music making.
George was fortunate to have a music-loving father. Kalman doted on his only child and, realizing his son was exceptional, determined to do everything in his power to foster the boy's talent. He wasn't wrong in his assessment of his son's superiority because the child soon began composing. Kalman had sired a wunderkind.
Six-year-old George was taken to Richard Robert, one of the city's foremost piano teachers, where he joined a class of other talented children, among them young Rudolf Serkin. That wasn't enough for the proud father. He regularly brought the child with him to opera and orchestra concerts, hired tutors so there would be no time wasted in public schools, provided a fine piano for lengthy practice sessions, and agreed with the teacher that there should also be music theory and composition lessons. In this nurturing environment George flourished, eagerly competing with his fellow students, memorizing great chunks of piano literature and giving frequent recitals. He soaked up music like a sponge, retaining it all.
At nine years of age George was a sturdy lad with regular features, blond hair, blue eyes, a sense of humor, and a fondness for pranks. At eleven he made his public debut playing his own compositions, and critics hailed him as the new child Mozart. A year later, in 1909, the Emil Gutman concert agency put out an eight-page brochure extolling George's accomplishments as a pianist and composer, affirming that he was "not a conventional prodigy but a genuine artist in the person of a child."
Like the young Wolfgang Mozart, who listened to a Miserere by Giorgio Allegri and then wrote it down note for note, young George could listen to an orchestral piece and then transcribe it. Few musicians in the world can duplicate such a feat.
His parents wisely refused to exploit him, limiting his public appearances despite lucrative offers from concert managers. With no need for money, they consented to only a single concert tour of major European cities including London, where George dazzled critics and audiences alike. It would be wrong to conclude that George, thus shielded by his parents, was unaware of his exceptional abilities, because his adoring father kept proofs of George's musical achievements in glass display cases in the family's parlor. Such exhibits contributed to George's growing sense of his own superiority; modesty was not one of his virtues. As the young boy demonstrated his improvisational abilities on the piano, he would announce to admiring listeners what instruments should be playing certain passages. He even predicted his own future, saying that he would become a conductor.
Vienna's newspapers were filled with accounts of what had transpired the night before at the Staatsoper, the city's world-famous opera house. In coffeehouses people gossiped about the latest opera productions, the latest piano and orchestral concerts, which conductor hewed closest to Beethoven's intentions, which divas were good or mediocre, and which string quartet was worth listening to.
Viennese weren't content with merely listening to music. Many of those in the middle and upper classes also played an instrument, either in amateur orchestras or chamber music groups. A favorite pastime consisted of playing string quartets in each other's homes, their friends listening intently to a Beethoven or Haydn composition and then everyone enjoying a delicious assortment of strudels and tortes. All were expected to authoritatively discuss the music. The tone-deaf boned up on musical facts and composers' lives, not letting it slip that they were congenitally unfit for music. In Vienna that was tantamount to revealing you were illiterate.
The paths of prodigies aren't all strewn with roses. After the initial acclaim, they have to weather puberty when they are no longer cute and their minds begin to register things theretofore ignored. It is then that many of them fade from public view, unable to cope with approaching adulthood and the loss of youthful appeal. When George was fourteen and already a finished musician, he went through a difficult period. One of his friends, Hans Gal, recalled that George began shirking piano practice, indulging in sadistic pranks and becoming physically violent with his teachers and the household servants.
He became so impossible that his parents, unable to control their young tyrant, packed him off to Carl Jung in Switzerland. Although there is no evidence George's behavior was caused by any mental aberration, psychoanalysis was becoming acceptable in Vienna — it was actually a fad in certain social circles — and the Szells were well able to pay for treatment. Whatever treatment he received in Switzerland, however, seems not to have changed him much. After a couple of months he returned to his parents barely improved, though his already extensive vocabulary now contained bits of psychological jargon.
Neglecting his musical work, he began frequenting bookstores, cramming into his head the classics of German literature and indulging his taste for fine food and clothing, proclivities he shared with his father. He soaked up books, his retentive memory enabling him to fill gaps in his knowledge caused by years of total immersion in music, and emerged with a fairly well rounded education. He picked up what remained to be learned by listening to the Viennese intelligentsia in coffeehouses where they traded critical remarks about art, music, literature, philosophy, and each other. Soon, however, he collected himself, returning to playing and conducting.
George fit right into the musical hothouse that was Vienna. At sixteen the tall, strapping musical whiz began accompanying the Staatsoper singers and pestering the pit musicians with questions about their instruments. This paid off two years later when the composer Richard Strauss was late for a recording session of his tone poem Don Juan. Confidently stepping onto the podium, George conducted the first part of the sixteen-minute piece. Arriving soon after, Strauss was greatly impressed by what he heard. Here was an eighteen-year-old conducting more than competently — brilliantly in fact. When George relinquished the podium to the great composer, Strauss declined to start over from the beginning, saying that young Szell's interpretation was good enough to go out on the record as Strauss's own.
By then George had composed more than three hundred works, and his proud father hired an orchestra to perform several of them so George could hear what he had written. Composing, however, fell by the wayside. When Rudolf Serkin surprised him on his sixteenth birthday with a performance of a Szell piano composition, Szell admonished his friend, "Rudy, how can you play such trash?" This realistic estimation of his own compositions when measured against those of the great composers drove his conviction that his genius was to be fulfilled through conducting.
In an effort to understand one of the most important instruments of the orchestra, George took up the French horn. It's possible he chose it because of his admiration for Richard Strauss, who had written two horn concertos and prominent horn parts in his tone poems. Under the influence of those beautiful solos, he began practicing the instrument. Here he had limitations. The horn was much more difficult to play than the piano, and his great intelligence seemed of little avail in trying to bring it to heel. The slightest tension of facial muscles could cause cracked notes, and theoretical knowledge was fairly useless.
Chagrined that the capricious horn wasn't yielding to his will, he gave it up, though the hours of practice hadn't been entirely wasted. He had learned enough about the intricacies of the instrument to enable him to impress hornists with his knowledge. What he had not been able to learn by himself he gleaned from other French horn players.
Although he didn't have the time or inclination to learn to play the string and woodwind instruments, he impressed many violinists by watching their fingerings and then demanding different ones. Theoretical knowledge coupled with close observation enabled him to earn the respect of string sections. It was easy to see what was going on with violinists' moving fingers and arms. But woodwind and brass instruments were mysterious because they were played using the tongue, diaphragm, and muscles inside the mouth. Only puffed cheeks, pursed lips, and reddened faces indicated the effort involved in playing them. And the woodwind instruments in particular could be intractable because of their need for delicate reeds and perfectly adjusted mechanical parts.
Szell prided himself on knowing a great deal about most orchestral instruments but paid scant attention to the percussion ones. In his experience, they were mostly just rhythmic devices. It would have surprised him to know that, many years in the future, choosing a triangle would confuse him and a problem with a drum would cause him public humiliation.
Among Richard Robert's advanced piano students was a talented young woman named Olga Band. She and twenty-three-year-old Szell began studying orchestral scores together and performing piano duet recitals. Perhaps sharing the same piano bench made it then seem logical to share their lives. So they married. But after six years Olga wearied of Szell's obvious superiority of mind and uncompromising nature. Their artistic differences and Olga's insecurities escalated into spats, and they stopped speaking to each other. This estrangement did not go unnoticed by Josef Wolfstahl, concertmaster of the Berlin State Opera, who was madly in love with Olga. He accidentally blurted out his feelings in a tearful confession. Gratified by this turn of events, Olga ran off with Josef, choosing a less talented musician who wasn't a hypercritical perfectionist preoccupied with his flourishing career.
Not one to be defeated by rejection, Szell rallied and continued directing all his considerable energy toward conducting. His years of forays to Holland, Russia, and Great Britain, as well as St. Louis in the United States, gave him a chance to make many contacts and stay away from areas of Europe where right-wing politicians and anti-Semitism were making life dangerous for minorities. By 1937, at the age of forty, he was established in Glasgow as principal conductor of the Scottish National Orchestra with Polish violinist Henri Temianka as his concertmaster.
Looking for ways to enjoy himself and earn money, Szell teamed up with Temianka, also a former child prodigy. The pair quickly became successful, performing recitals and garnering favorable reviews, although one critic pointedly singled out Temianka for praise, taking exception to Szell's domination of the performance.
There seemed to be nothing musical that Szell didn't know. Quick to notice anyone's musical abilities, he realized that Temianka's gorgeous tone and virtuoso technique made him a fit partner in their concert collaborations. What made them lifelong friends, however, was their mutual enjoyment of off-color jokes, pranks, and elaborate postconcert dinners. Afterward, primed by wine and admiring friends, Szell would sit down at the piano and perform entire operas from memory. Temianka was particularly impressed by Szell's flawless two-hour rendition of Mozart's Magic Flute, not a page of music in sight. He could do the same thing with orchestral scores or any other piece of music that crossed his path.
British orchestras, unlike those in Europe, had women in their ranks, many of them the equal of their male counterparts. In Glasgow Szell was surprised to find that a woman, Evelyn Rothwell, was the first oboist. Intrigued, he began courting her and wrote a piano and oboe piece for the two of them. Such a display of his musical feathers would surely captivate her. Evelyn later reminisced about Szell's courtship: "The composition he wrote for me was very Straussian and romantic. He was quite a fine musician. Once I had only the oboe part to the Mozart Oboe Quartet and he sat down at the piano and played the other parts without the music. He treated me to expensive restaurant dinners. It was a little embarrassing." She had another swain: the conductor John Barbirolli. When Barbirolli spotted Szell's composition on her music stand, he noted the name of the composer and, realizing that he had a rival, tore the piece to shreds. Years afterward, Rothwell spoke of Szell's typically impatient approach. "He asked me to marry him and gave me an ultimatum. If I didn't accept his proposal within three months he was going to marry someone else. But I was tangled up with John at the time."
Szell didn't waste time moping about his rejection because he had another woman in his life, beautiful, vivacious Helene Teltsch in Prague, who at twenty-four had sat for her oil portrait by a popular society artist. Although married, with two children, she was irresistibly drawn to Szell's verve and abilities. She manifested her interest in him with looks and teasing, and he, getting the message, reciprocated by throwing her into a swimming pool.
That flirtatious dunking was more than mere high jinks. The incident marked the beginning of an enthrallment lasting eight years as he waited for Helene to make up her mind to marry him. It could not have been an easy decision for Helene. In marrying Szell she would be leaving her husband, two young sons, and a gracious lifestyle that included a large house with servants. But George was witty, enormously gifted, successful, and deeply in love with her. She gradually succumbed to the prospect of a life of glamour with a man who was obviously a musical genius. Her mind made up, she divorced her husband, joining Szell in Scotland. Both were old enough to know what they wanted in a spouse — Szell was forty-two, Helene thirty-nine. Helene came from a well-to-do Prague family and had received the education and piano lessons of a properly brought up girl of that era.
In 1938 Helene and George were married in a courthouse ceremony in Glasgow witnessed by Temianka and his sister. A newspaper reported that the bride and groom were fashionable in fur-collared coats, while Helene also wore chic Russian boots and a fur hat. They proved well suited to each other and became inseparable. Szell privately addressed her with sentimental endearments: "Dear Mugele" and "Dear Mugi," and signed his letters "Pussi" and "Pussi Teddybear." Such verbal intimacies would have astonished all but a few of his closest friends who knew how much he adored her.
Helene ably handled her brilliant husband. One reason for her success as Mrs. George Szell was her ability to tolerate her husband's ceaseless focus on conducting. Tactfully quelling him when he sometimes raged out of bounds, she stayed out of the line of fire when he got too wound up. She was an ideal wife for him, bringing him much-needed stability. They should have been able to enjoy Szell's rapid ascent in the musical world, but then the bottom fell out of their life. World War II began.
In the wake of the Nazis' rise to power, George and Helene joined the mass exodus of artists, musicians, scientists, writers, actors, and theater directors, all booking passage to the United States or South America. They reached New York City in 1939, prepared to stay in the United States for the war's duration.
Unlike many talented refugees who had difficulty acclimating themselves to a different culture and finding employment, George landed on his feet. In 1942 he was hired to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera and teach composition and advanced theory at Mannes School of Music, where he frequently dazzled students with his fabulous memory and ability to play piano transcriptions of complicated orchestral and string quartet scores.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "George Szell's Reign"
by .
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