George Szell’s Reign by Marcia Hansen Kraus

Abstract

Reviewed by: George Szell’s Reign by Marcia Hansen Kraus Michael J. Pfeifer Marcia Hansen Kraus, George Szell’s Reign. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. 233 pp. $23.00. In the early to mid-twentieth century, prominent orchestras arose in mid-western urban centers such as Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Detroit, driven by a “symphony craze” in which business classes funded symphonies as a way to enhance the culture and prestige of their rising metropolises. Often employing musicians who had immigrated or had been trained in Europe, especially Germany and Austria, orchestras became meaningful features of the urban (and through extensive touring) rural Midwest between the Progressive Era and the post-World War II eras. The Chicago Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra became particularly prominent in these years, joining a pantheon of American orchestras focused in the urban Northeast that included the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic. Marcia Hansen Kraus’s entertaining book charts the ascendance of the Cleveland Orchestra under its brilliant, tyrannical, Budapest-born and Vienna-raised conductor George Szell, who led the orchestra to national and global prominence during his years as music director from 1946 until 1970. The Cleveland Orchestra originated in 1918 under the aegis of musician and administrator Adella Prentiss Hughes and conductor Nikolai Sokoloff; this was several decades later than the origins of orchestras in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and Minneapolis. The hiring of Szell, who had served in posts before the war in Berlin and Glasgow, would take the Cleveland Orchestra to the top ranks of American and indeed international orchestras. Kraus attributes Szell’s success with the orchestra to his personal genius and insistence on musical perfection and the free reign he was given to fire and hire musicians largely unhindered by union and management interference for much of his tenure. While Szell was highly demanding and could be [End Page 197] brusque and dismissive of musicians that did not meet his high standards, in Kraus’s account he ran his orchestra paternalistically with a deep concern for the development of his orchestra and for the personal lives of his musicians. Szell took such an interest in the lives of his musicians that he did not countenance them seeking to divorce their spouses and insisted that they eat modestly before concerts, avoid facial hair, and wear galoshes in winter, all in the service of greater music-making. As Kraus notes, in 1967 Szell virtually wrote his own epitaph in his foreword to Robert Marsh’s book, The Cleveland Orchestra, “First there must be a love of music on my part, and then what is being asked of the players for the love of music must be made convincing to them. Honesty and integrity in performance are matters of artistic morality” (167). Kraus’s book is organized into short chapters focusing on Szell’s early life; the early history of the Cleveland Orchestra; Szell’s interaction with different sections of the orchestra (woodwinds, strings, percussion, etc.) and his musical interpretations; international touring; the 1967 musicians’ strike (in which many members of the orchestra finally gained greater salaries); the building and opening of the orchestra’s summer venue, the Blossom Music Center, in 1968; and Szell’s death in 1970. The book concludes with a brief epilogue discussing the ways in which the Cleveland Orchestra and the popular reception of symphonic music have changed since the death of George Szell. Kraus’s narrative draws richly on anecdotes from musicians who played in the orchestra, and here she benefits greatly from her marriage to one of the orchestra’s oboists, Felix Kraus, who played under Szell for seven years. Indeed, the musicians’ perspective is the most valuable part of the book, which while not as deeply researched as, for example, Michael Charry’s 2011 biography of George Szell (George Szell: A Life in Music; University of Illinois Press, 2011), nonetheless makes a meaningful effort to wed archival research with personal anecdotes, especially through extensively annotated endnotes. This midwestern historian would have liked a bit more discussion of the social and cultural contexts in which prominent Cleveland donors funded their city’s orchestra’s rise to...