Barbirolli and Szell Masters of a Changing Art

NEWSPAPER obituaries for Sir John Barbirolli this summer were condescending. Barbirolli was unfashionable, unpopular, and vaguely old fashioned. The modern critics sneered at his approach to music, his method of conducting, his choice of composers. To the musical establishment, he was the archetype of the out-person.

For all his unpopularity, Barbirolli was an impressive conductor. He was the embodiment of the classic American caricature of the maestro. His stature, his long flowing hair, his stately appearance, and his knighthood completed the effect. Appearance does not assure good press, though, and Barbirolli never got it. While most of the great British conductors-Beecham, Goossens, Sargent, Boult-stayed primarily in their native country, Barbirolli came to America to conduct the New Pork Philharmonic when Toscanini left it in 1937. His disastrous career here insured him of a bad critical reputation for the rest of his life.

After he left New York, some of the finest contemporary composers chose him to conduct their work. He directed premieres of works by Britten, Vaughan Williams, Rawsthorne, and Arthur Benjamin. But this did little to better his reputation. The New York episode is the best remembered of Barbirolli's career.

It may have been a mistake to give him Toscanini's job, and Barbirolli made a greater mistake in accepting it. No two conductors could have been more different-in style, in approach to music, in taste, in general attitude toward conducting. Toscanini, the legendary martinet who kept the smallest details in perfect order, was the complete opposite of the mild-mannered Barbirolli, whose relaxed, romantic interpretations were based more on love than on technicality. When his contract at New York ran out, Barbirolli returned to England, by all accounts a failure, and took over the almost moribund Halle Orchestra of Manchester.

AN ORCHESTRA is in many ways like a pet which grows so used to one master that it is unable to adapt to a new one. Any orchestra conducted by Toscanini was, by definition, an orchestra designed and molded by Toscanini, used to his style, his interpretations, his way of life. Barbirolli could never have hoped to succeed under such circumstances, and indeed he did not.

But Barbirolli's career was long, and certainly distinguished. Educated at the Royal Academy of Music, he was a successful cellist while scarcely out of his teens. In his early twenties, he began his conducting career, first as a choral conductor, then as a conductor with the British National Opera. It was here that his conducting style was shaped. For years, he concentrated on Italian opera, almost to the exclusion of every form of music, and developed his free-wheeling, easy, unquestionably romantic form of conducting. After some years with the British National Opera, and later the Scottish Symphony, came his ill-fated call to New York.

Even in his disastrous New York period, Barbirolli made important contributions to music. Here he conducted several Britten premieres, including the Sinfonia da Requiem, and the Violin Concerto. Nonetheless, he could not control the orchestra as it needed to be controlled, and was left to return home, disheartened.

The near-miracle which Barbirolli wrought with the Halle Orchestra is legendary. The orchestra had been without a permanent conductor since the retirement of Hamilton Harty, a decade before Barbirolli's arrival in 1943. Barbirolli managed to make Halle one of the world's leading orchestras, and in the process gained more control over his own florid style. The recordings which he made with the Halle during his decades of association with it are some of the finest in the literature. The Mahler First Symphony which he did with them for Vanguard is a definitive version, a masterpiece which puts to shame such recordings as the Leinsdorf version with the Boston Symphony, or Ormandy's frivolous attempt to incorporate the Blumine Movement into the work. His recordings of Mahler and Vaughan are all first rate, and many of them are the generally accepted standard versions. Yet, for all the accomplishments of Barbirolli later life, American critics seem to be unable to forget the unhappy New York section of his career.

HAVING rehabilitated the Halle, Barbirolli set himself higher tasks. He rejuvenated the Salzburg Festival, which had lapsed during the war, and there he conducted the newly discovered Mozart Oboe Concerto, with his wife, Evelyn, as soloist. His career flourished as he was invited to serve as guest conductor of one of the finest orchestras on the continent, and in the United States he accepted the post of conductor of the Houston Symphony, in addition to his duties at Halle.

Barbirolli's conducting was an experience in sheer physical grace. The emotive power of his body seemed at times to be equal to the emotive power of the music he conducted, as every muscle of his body, and every inch of himself to the very tips of his hair, seemed to involve itself in the music. He was not a histrionic conductor, as Giulini so often is, but he was a man deeply involved in his music. He seemed never to analyze a piece of music in terms of the individual notes and phrases, but as an emotional experience, in its entirety. This sort of thing is dangerous in the hands of the incompetent conductor, for it can lead to an awkward, syrupy, and altogether unsatisfactory end product. But, in the hands of a genius like Barbirolli, it led to a well-integrated and understandable piece.

Barbirolli did some work as a composer and arranger, but certainly his reputation will not rest on this, for, in fact, he wrote nothing that can be considered a masterpiece. He was an accomplished cellist, however, and his experience as an instrumentalist, perhaps more than his training as a conductor, influenced the shape of his work, for he conducted with a remarkable understanding. He was, in the final summing up, a conductor of vastly underrated talent, a man who never received the recognition that was due his talent as an interpreter of modern and Romantic composers. Certainly he lacked the breadth and far-ranging talent of his predecessor Toscanini, but few outranked him in that area of music which he knew and performed best.

EVERY obituary writer, and every music critic, in this country has by now observed that John Barbirolli and Goerge Szell were polar opposites. While Barbirolli was the actual successor of Toscanini in the New York post, Szell was, in a very real sense, his spiritual successor. Toscanini and Szell were cut from the same cloth: men of precision who held tight rein over their orchestras and insisted on perfection in their performers. Like Barbirolli, Szell was a distinguished soloist in his own right. To a far greater degree than Barbirolli, he pursued his career as an instrumentalist all his life, and at his death was a fine concert pianist.

Szell's musical training was remarkably good. Max Reger was his composition teacher, and his mentor was Richard Strauss. It was at the recommendation of Strauss that he received his first appointment as a conductor, at the Strasbourg Opera. His career was more scholarly than Barbirolli's had been; when he advanced to the post of principal conductor of the Berlin State Opera, he also served as Professor at the Hochschule fur Musik in Berlin. A Hungarian national, Szell left Germany during the Nazi era and conducted throughout the world, from Australia to Edinburgh.

Szell's musical odyssey ended in Cleveland, where he put together a fine orchestra. But due to the unfortunate priorities of the record market, we do not have as much of Szell on discs as we could have. The company for which he recorded also holds contracts with the New York Philharmonic, and, until recently, recorded the Philadelphia Orchestra. It is widely believed Szell felt severely neglected by Columbia, which recognized the general popularity of such well-known figures as Leonard Bernstein and Eugene Ormandy, and conducted elaborate advertising campaigns for their records. The company seemed to record less of Szell than of its more popular conductors, and to make less effort to bring the Cleveland orchestra to a larger market. It is useless to speculate at this point how much of this is true, but it certainly seems that Columbia made less of an effort with Szell than with its bigger moneymakers.

SZELL conducted a wide variety of composers, and a large number of works. He was weakest where Barbirolli was strongest, in the post-Romantics. Nonetheless, a recording which Columbia released after his death, of the Bruckner Eighth Symphony, is a truly fine work. Szell's genius was diffuse. He conducted so many composers well that it is hard to single out one set of performances for particular distinction. Besides being a great conductor, he was a great man. Although his control of the orchestra was tight and somewhat tyrannical, he was still well liked. Before he died, he conducted several benefit performances for the victims of the Kent State tragedy.

The deaths of Barbirolli and Szell leave a gap in the musical universe. This year, both were scheduled to give a large number of guest concerts with the New York Philharmonic, and several other orchestras. It will certainly be impossible to find men of equal stature, and it will be difficult to find competent men to replace them. There is a hiatus in the world of conductors at the moment; many of the older greats have died and retired, while the talented younger men are still too immature to take their places. A premature elevation to high status can ruin a promising conductor, and the deaths of Szell and Barbirolli would be even greater tragedies if they ruined the careers of younger men.

OTHER musical figures passed away this summer. Among them was Jonel Perlea, an ill-fated man whose promise as a conductor was never fulfilled. A dedicated teacher and inspired conductor, the fates seemed to conspire against his ever achieving the success which he deserved.

Perlea's career was marred by a

series of disabling strokes which left him physically unable to continue conducting. He did sustain a teaching career, and a few of the operatic recordings which he made before he was forced by illness to quit entirely are highly prized by connoisseurs.

Perlea, Szell, Barbirolli-all dead. Each of them leaves something of himself in his recordings, in the orchestra he led, in the students he taught, but there is no doubt that the world of conducting has been robbed of some of its finest people. Who will take their places? At the moment, it is hard to tell. Most of the men taking over major orchestras today are young, perhaps too young to command the positions they hold. Pierre Boulez has reached the stage where he is ready to take over the New York Philharmonic, but Michael Tilson Thomas is, alas, too immature for the arduous duties which. William Steinberg's illnesses have forced on him at the BSO. Seiji Ozawa is starting to change from 'the young conductor' to 'the conductor,' but he has yet to prove himself in the difficult circle of the conductors. Colin Davis is certainly ready to assume his role at the top of his field, and there are many more waiting in the wings.

The age of Szell and Barbirolli has come to an end. The school of conductors which they represent has been virtually laid to rest. Composers have changed, and conductors need new training, and new attitudes, to meet the requirements of the new music. It is hard to say where music is going, but easy to see that it is at a crossroads. Music is now a plastic art, and musicians also must be plastic. Conducting has come far from the day when the first conductor beat time with a large wooden staff. Each of the conductors we have recently lost added something to the art, contributed something to its future. None of them, however, could predict where the art would go after their deaths. The future of the art is in new hands, in the hands of men who will have to live up and add to the tradition and the greatness of Barbirolli and Szell.