George Szell: Master of the Cleveland Orchestra
George Szell (7 June 1897 – 30 July 1970) was an Austro-Hungarian-born American conductor, composer, and pianist. Considered one of the twentieth century’s greatest conductors, he transformed the Cleveland Orchestra into what many regarded as the world’s finest symphonic ensemble.
Early Life and Education
György Endre Széll was born in Budapest but grew up in Vienna. His family was of Jewish origin but converted to Catholicism, and as a young boy he attended Mass regularly. He began formal music training as a pianist under Richard Robert, whose other notable student was Rudolf Serkin; Szell and Serkin became lifelong friends and musical collaborators.
Career and Achievements
At eleven years old, Szell began touring Europe as a pianist and composer, making his London debut at that age. Newspapers called him “the next Mozart.” Throughout his teenage years he performed with orchestras in multiple roles—composer, pianist, and conductor—including an appearance with the Berlin Philharmonic at seventeen.
Szell made an unplanned public conducting debut at seventeen while vacationing at a summer resort when the Vienna Symphony’s conductor injured his arm and he was asked to substitute. He quickly recognized that conducting offered the artistic control he preferred and turned to it full-time, though he occasionally played piano with chamber ensembles for the rest of his life.
In 1915, at eighteen, Szell won an appointment with Berlin’s Royal Court Opera. There he was befriended by music director Richard Strauss, who recognized his exceptional talent and was particularly impressed with how the teenager conducted Strauss’s own music. Szell conducted part of the world premiere recording of Don Juan; Strauss had arranged for him to rehearse the orchestra but arrived an hour late to the session. With only Szell present and the session already paid for, Szell conducted the first two sections of the recording. When Strauss arrived and heard the result, he declared it so good it could bear his own name, and he recorded the final two sections himself, leaving Szell’s conducting as part of the official premiere recording.
Strauss became a major influence on Szell’s conducting style, shaping his baton technique, his approach to orchestral sound, and his philosophy of orchestra building. The two remained friends after Szell left the Royal Court Opera in 1919, even maintaining contact after World War II when Szell had moved to the United States.
During the fifteen years following World War I, Szell worked across Europe with opera houses and orchestras in Berlin, Strasbourg (where he succeeded Otto Klemperer), Prague, Darmstadt, and Düsseldorf. He became principal conductor of the Berlin State Opera in 1924 and served as first Kapellmeister there from 1924 to 1929. Simultaneously, he directed the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and taught at the Berlin Academy of Music from 1927 to 1930, also making recordings with the Vienna Philharmonic. From 1936 to 1939 he led the Scottish National Orchestra, and from 1937 to 1939 the Resident Orchestra of The Hague. In 1939 he returned to Prague as general music director and director of the Prague State Opera.
When war broke out in Europe in 1939, Szell was returning to the United States from an Australian tour and chose to settle in New York City with his family. From 1940 to 1945 he taught composition, orchestration, and music theory at Mannes College of Music in Manhattan; his composition students included George Rochberg and Ursula Mamlok. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1942 and conducted there regularly for the next four years. In 1946 he became a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Notable Events and Milestones
In 1946, Szell arrived in Cleveland to take over the orchestra, which was respected but undersized and struggling to recover from World War II disruptions. Over the next two decades, he rebuilt it into what critic Donal Henahan described as “the world’s keenest symphonic instrument.” Through his extensive recordings, Szell maintained a presence in classical music long after his death, and his name became inseparable from the Cleveland Orchestra. When conductor Christoph von Dohnányi led the orchestra on tour in the late 1980s, he remarked that whenever they gave a great concert, “George Szell gets a great review.”
Additional Resources
Szell’s legacy extends far beyond his lifetime through the extensive recordings he made with the Cleveland Orchestra and other ensembles. Readers seeking more detailed information about his life, his relationship with Richard Strauss, his European conducting career, and his transformation of the Cleveland Orchestra can find comprehensive biographical material in Wikipedia and other classical music archives.
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