George Szell

1897 (Budapest) — 1970 (Cleveland)

George Szell was a German and American conductor, pianist, teacher, and composer. He was born in Budapest and grew up in Vienna. He studied piano with Richard Robert, alongside Rudolf Serkin, with whom he later had a long professional collaboration. He studied composition and music theory with Eusebius Mandyczewski at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts, and later studied for a time with Max Reger at the Leipzig Conservatory. Szell began performing as a pianist at age 10 and played his own compositions from age 14.

Szell made his conducting debut in 1914 with the Blüthner Orchestra in Berlin. He was a second conductor at the Royal Court Opera in Berlin through 1916 and chief conductor of the opera house in Strasbourg in 1917–18. From 1919 to 1924 he worked in Prague, Darmstadt, and Düsseldorf. He led the orchestra of the German State Opera from 1924 to 1929 and, from 1927, was also a professor at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. From 1929 to 1937, he was music director of the New German Theatre and a professor at the German Academy of Music in Prague.

From 1932, Szell conducted major European symphony orchestras, including the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the London Philharmonic. He was chief conductor of the Scottish National Orchestra in Glasgow from 1936 to 1939 and also led the Residentie Orchestra in The Hague in 1937–38. During the 1938 and 1939 seasons, he worked in Australia, conducting the Australian Broadcasting Commission Orchestra, and toured widely in Europe and the United States.

Szell lived in the United States from 1939 and became a U.S. citizen in 1946. He conducted leading American orchestras and worked at the Metropolitan Opera from 1942 to 1946. In 1946 he became conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, which under his leadership became one of the world’s leading orchestras. He toured Europe with the orchestra in 1957 and 1965, including a tour of the Soviet Union in 1965, and appeared at many music festivals, including the Salzburg Festival. He died in Cleveland in 1970 and was buried in Sandy Springs, Georgia.

Szell’s conducting was described as Romantic in style, with refined taste, flexible tempos, and expressive rubato. His broad repertoire centered especially on major works, including Schubert’s “Great” Symphony in C major, Beethoven’s Third Symphony (“Eroica”), and Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. His compositions include Variations on an Original Theme for orchestra (1916), the Lyric Overture (1920), a piano quintet, and works for piano. In a 2010 BBC Music Magazine survey of 100 conductors, he ranked fourteenth among 20 leading conductors of all time. He was inducted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame.

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