George Szell's Reign: Behind the Scenes with the Cleveland Orchestra (Music in American Life) - Hardcover

Kraus, Marcia Hansen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252041313 ISBN 13: 9780252041310

Verlag: UNIV OF ILLINOIS PR, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

George Szell was the Cleveland Orchestra's towering presence for over a quarter of a century. From the boardroom to the stage, Szell's powerful personality affected every aspect of a musical institution he reshaped in his own perfectionist image. Marcia Hansen Kraus's participation in Cleveland's classical musical scene allowed her an intimate view of Szell and his achievements. As a musician herself, and married to an oboist who worked under Szell, Kraus pulls back the curtain on this storied era through fascinating interviews with orchestra musicians and patrons. Their recollections combine with Kraus's own to paint a portrait of a multifaceted individual who both earned and transcended his tyrannical reputation. If some musicians hated Szell, others loved him or at the least respected his fair-minded toughness. A great many remember playing under his difficult leadership as the high point in their lives. Filled with vivid backstage stories, George Szell's Reign reveals the human side of a great orchestra ”and how one visionary built a premier classical music institution.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marcia Hansen Kraus is a musician and composer in Cleveland, Ohio.

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George Szell's Reign

Behind the Scenes with the Cleveland Orchestra

By Marcia Hansen Kraus

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2017 The Board Of Trustees Of The University Of Illinois
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-252-04131-0

Contents

Introduction, ix, 
CHAPTER 1. A Prodigy's Apprenticeship, 1, 
CHAPTER 2. The Orchestra's Beginnings, 9, 
CHAPTER 3. Szell's Improvements, 13, 
CHAPTER 4. The Woodwind Section, 24, 
CHAPTER 5. World Tour, 35, 
CHAPTER 6. Szell's Dictates, 40, 
CHAPTER 7. The String Section, 44, 
CHAPTER 8. The Brass Section, 54, 
CHAPTER 9. Auditions and Mavericks, 64, 
CHAPTER 10. Conductor Wannabes, 75, 
CHAPTER 11. The Percussion Section, 80, 
CHAPTER 12. Szell's Methods, Touring Travails, 86, 
CHAPTER 13. Prodigies, Masterpieces, Boulez, 92, 
CHAPTER 14. Concert Experiences, 98, 
CHAPTER 15. Szell's Haydn and Schumann Interpretations, 106, 
CHAPTER 16. Attire, Duty, Respect, Decorum, 110, 
CHAPTER 17. A New Chorus Conductor, 119, 
CHAPTER 18. The Musicians' Insurrection, 129, 
CHAPTER 19. Picketing and Resolution, 133, 
CHAPTER 20. A Suitable Summer Site, 138, 
CHAPTER 21. Blossom's Creators, 147, 
CHAPTER 22. The Blossom Triumph, 155, 
CHAPTER 23. The Death of the Maestro, 162, 
Epilogue, 169, 
Acknowledgments, 175, 
Notes, 181, 
Bibliography, 223, 
Index of Names, 229, 

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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF ILLINOIS PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0252041313
• ISBN 13: 9780252041310
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland