PERFECTION BY LAKE ERIE

For Szell (pronounced “Sell” in Hungarian, but “Zell” by most English- speakers), the composer’s purpose was sacrosanct. He viewed performers not as creators but as servants — priests, so to speak, at the musical altar. The conductor Robert Shaw, who was an assistant to Szell in Cleveland, notes that when Szell threw one of his frequent fits in rehearsal, “he was distressed, not for himself, but for the composer.”

Szell reviled showmanship, artifice — any expression of mere personality. When he conducted, the listener was aware, not of an interpretation, but of the piece alone. The word “style” made him cringe, and he cited with contempt an answer the conductor Thomas Beecham gave when asked why he had changed tempo abruptly in the middle of a Mozart symphony: “Oh, just a whim.” As Shaw puts it, Szell stood for “structure over color, clarity over sonority, temporal stability over eccentricity, remote control over balletic ecstasy, and right notes over best wishes.”

Szell’s own version of his credo was, “Freedom and imagination within the musical law” — administered, of course, “by me.” He liked to tell young conductors, “Think with your heart, feel with your head,” a neat if slightly enigmatic formulation of music’s union of art and science. He was conscious of the criticisms leveled by his detractors (who were relatively few, but insistent) that he was a cold, unbending fanatic. Szell responded that “the borderline is very thin between clarity and coolness, between self-discipline and severity,” and that he took care to keep to the safe side of it. But if his conducting — of Mozart, for example — was too dispassionate for some, well, “I cannot pour chocolate sauce over asparagus.”

Szell was born in July 1897, three months after Brahms died. In a field cluttered with child prodigies, he was extraordinary. He left his native Budapest to study in Vienna, where at age eleven he performed a piano concerto of his own composition with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. When he took his pieces to London that same year, the Daily Mail proclaimed him ” the new Mozart” (about which Szell later remarked, with wholly uncharacteristic modesty, “Newspapers do make mistakes”). He was a superb pianist as a child, and he would remain one for the rest of his life. While other powerful conductors played the piano in public simply because they could have their way, Szell was the real thing. He thought nothing of shoving acclaimed pianists from the bench during concerto rehearsals, to show them how it was done. They took it, too.

Of his decision to turn to conducting, he would explain (now, this is characteristic), “When I was twelve or thirteen, the three greatest living pianists got together and decided to pay me a lifelong retainer in exchange for my promise not to continue as a pianist.” In truth, Szell discovered that the orchestra was the only instrument capable of fulfilling him. He eventually came under the tutelage of Richard Strauss in Berlin. The old master took a shine to the fiercely dedicated young man, remarking in 1916, while listening to Szell handle his Don Juan, “I can go ahead and die if this is what the new generation will do.”

For the next three decades, Szell made his march through the opera houses, learning reams of music, honing his craft, and earning a reputation as the prickliest man in the business. His standards were fearsomely exacting, and he was famous for walking out on projects — rehearsal time was always insufficient, singers and instrumentalists were offensively lazy, administrators and producers were too thick-headed to grasp what he wanted from them. When Szell stalked out of the Metropolitan Opera in a huff, an aide to the general manager, Rudolf Bing, sighed, “That George Szell — he’s his own worst enemy.” Answered Bing, “Not while I’m alive.”

In 1946, the Cleveland Orchestra undertook to lure Szell to Ohio. He had already made a name for himself in the United States, mainly because Arturo Toscanini, recognizing a kindred spirit, had showcased him with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Szell was uncompromising with the Cleveland board: He did not need the job, and if the orchestra wanted him, it would have to accept his terms, which included total artistic control.

The orchestra agreed. Szell’s aim, as he often said, was to combine “the best qualities of European orchestras with the best qualities of American orchestras” — in other words, the “spontaneity, warmth, flexibility, and tradition-consciousness” of Europe with the “virtuosity, brilliance, impeccable intonation, and smoothness of execution” of America. The recorded legacy leaves no doubt: He achieved what he had imagined. Toscanini used to complain to his own orchestra, “Ah, you spoil my dreams!” The Cleveland Orchestra realized Szell’s.

The hundredth-anniversary set begins with excerpts from Wagner, recorded live in 1956, shortly before the orchestra began to tour and to receive worldwide applause. Szell permits no melodrama or emotional indulgence in his Wagner. He dispels some of the Romantic fog that can beshroud that composer, giving the music a Beethovenian punch. Every entrance is clean, every note accorded its proper value. The players all hear one another, as in a much smaller group.

The second disc in the series is a surprising one — it contains twentieth- century music, which Szell was thought, inaccurately, to disdain. (He did, however, declare, “I do not believe in the mass grave of an all-contemporary concert.”) Szell makes a compelling argument for Samuel Barber’s Music for a Scene from Shelley, and he gives the other new music as well the benefit of his customary preparation and enthusiasm. Particularly effective is the violin concerto of William Walton, who was one of Szell’s favorite modern composers. (The soloist is Zino Francescatti, a player in the Szell mold.)

Szell was quick to point out that, despite everything, he was no “dogmatist, ” and the Schubert F-major octet is presented here in unusual form, with an expansion of strings. Szell could be generous toward his principal players: The French hornist Myron Bloom and the clarinetist Robert Marcellus, who shine in the Schubert, became international stars during his tenure.

The weightiest, most consequential works performed in the set are Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Szell never recorded the Missa in the studio, so this disc is a welcome complement to his much-admired recordings of Beethoven’s symphonies. He manages the piece’s sprawling forces — orchestra, chorus, and vocal quartet — with ease. Capturing the spiritual majesty of the work, Szell is appropriately awed by Beethoven, but never intimidated by him.

Szell’s approach to Mahler is, typically, straightforward, as he shears the Ninth Symphony of its many complications. He does not allow the concluding Adagio to lag, mindful of the arc of the work. (Lesser conductors, luxuriating bathetically, cause it to die.) In a strange way, an especially fine performance of this symphony is difficult to listen to, as Mahler packs it with struggle, nostalgia, and pain. The pianissimo that Szell elicits at the end is astonishing — a clear, heartbreaking whisper.

Personally, Szell was no humanitarian; he was a cutting, caustic, and often intolerable man. Most of those around him lived in constant terror. His judgment and tongue were merciless. He unhesitatingly sacked players who failed to meet his expectations, because, as he put it, “What is the purpose of a symphony orchestra? To have the best of music or to give members unchallengeably permanent jobs?” Szell was a notorious know-it-all, of whom one acquaintance observed, “He teaches expert golfers how to play golf, racing drivers how to drive, Parisian couturiers how to make dresses, writers how to write, and Mrs. Szell how to cook.” If he heard his wife whistling around the house, he corrected her emphatically, reasoning, “If she is going to do it, she might as well do it right.” So maniacal was his devotion to music that he even lamented that concert audiences no longer hooted and heckled when something was wrong: “It’s like looking on when a woman is being murdered down the street without calling the police.”

Szell could probably not survive in today’s musical world, where conductors no longer function as absolute dictators, and standards, when they are recognized, are sacrificed to assorted expediencies. But it would not occur to him to capitulate. He insisted, he said, on performances “of which I do not have to be ashamed.” “Szell was the conscience of our profession,” Robert Shaw once claimed, and “it is not the function of a conscience to be comforting.” Twenty years after the conductor’s death in 1970, a Cleveland official recalled, “The fact that perfection had to be fought for unceasingly was the sine qua non of George Szell’s existence.” And perfection, for him, was not some unattainable ideal — it was his unquestioned obligation every time he raised his baton.

Jay Nordlinger, associate editor and music critic of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, last wrote about Johannes Brahms.