THE GLORIES OF CLASSICAL MUSIC CAN CHANGE PEOPLE! HEREIN WE DELVE INTO ITS ALMOST OTHER WORLDLY MYSTIQUE AND HOW IT AFFECTED THE LIVES OF FOUR LEGENDARY SYMPHONY CONDUCTORS
If you’ve read any of my articles over many years here in this great journal of truth, you’ll know that I have a great affinity—a great and undying love---for “Classical Music” in all its many forms. It is now, and always will be, my music of choice, always welcoming me in times when I want to relax, to unwind my thoughts, to escape from the problems and pressures and concerns that “mankind” has wrought upon this planet, to retreat from the joys and sorrows, the aches and pains, or from the mundane and ordinary events of modern American life—to—in essence—enter into a temporary “existence”—somewhere, somehow—with the minds of the musical “immortals” who will always live on the “Mount Olympus” of great music—music that has endured, and will continue to endure, for centuries, God willing.
Do I enjoy other genres of music? Indeed I do: I love the “Big Band” music of the 1930’s and 1940’s when American culture, despite the challenges of a financial “depression” and a World War, was much more cohesive and loving, and NORMAL. I love the music from Broadway shows, some of it going way, way back into the early 20th century and that many young people, in their musical “illiteracy”, have never heard. I love the “ballads” that men and women sang during those wonderful years, including into the 1950’s, composed when music was “musical” and not the screeching, mostly obnoxious, lewd and anti-human NOISE we hear around us today I especially enjoy Irish music (Celtic Woman is my favorite singing group), a genre that will slowly disappear, I fear, as Irish people are displaced from their own nation by the increasing authoritarianism and moronic stupidity of their “woke” government and by the invited-in horde of 7th Century Primitives that are infesting “the Emerald Isle” presently.
I do love to watch and listen to classical music from all around the world, including performances of ballets and operas, specialized forms of classical music that go back centuries in mankind’s history. And of course I love the music of the Christian Church, some of it going far back in time, inspired, as is classic music, in the mind of God and, in my opinion, transmitted to its composer by our God. Some folks may disagree with my love of classical music, either out of unfamiliarity or poor musical choices. Some think that “my” music is too complicated to understand and enjoy, but it isn’t, really. I’ve been learning about and enjoying it since around 1951, when I was only 14, and “accidentally” discovered it when browsing on some primitive AM radio station in those days My father despised classic music, but it soon got into my soul, and I kept listening to it, much to his chagrin.
A BLIND DATE LEADS TO NEW EXPERIENCES
The next year I met, via a “blind date’ (yes, it was) a girl named Barbara, who needed a date for a Christmas dance event at a downtown hotel. As planned by their parents, I and two of my neighborhood “buds” paired up with three local teen girls, made our choices for partners, and over the next month, directed and overseen by their mothers, learned to dance—real ballroom dancing where you held your lady close to you—a totally new experience—and real dance music was played by a live orchestra in a classy ballroom, and you wore a nice new suit (guys) and a fancy ball gown (girls). It was a heady experience for a 15 year old guy, and for the next three years we went to that event every Christmas. (And, yes, I married Barbara in 1959, and God willing, we’ll celebrate our 66th wedding anniversary this year)!
As it turned out, Barbara’s mother also loved classical music and played it occasionally when I was visiting her house, reinforcing my increasing love for that music (and cleverly reinforcing my “interest” in her daughter). Her Mom’s father had been a classical music pianist, trained in Berlin in the 1890’s, and during the times I was with him in their house, he told me about the classical piano music he loved to play long before, and I listened to some of it with him. Classical piano music has become my favorite of the genre, I must admit. But this article isn’t so much about the “music” as about some of those who were affected for life by their musical passions.
FOUR LEGENDARY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA CONDUCTORS
Now, to the point of this article. Classical music is played by symphony orchestras, composed of from 25 to 110 thoroughly trained musicians who have willingly sacrificed their desire to play any musical notes they desire, and who must play the notes written down on a long musical score by a “composer”, usually many years ago But not only do they follow the notes on the musical score, they are all subject to the dictates (often the “dictatorial” dictates”) of a leader who is called a “Conductor”, or a “Music Director” While I do have many favorite symphony conductors, I’d like to tell you about four very special ones whose conducting took them and their orchestras to “heavenly” heights—to musical excellence. Each one was considered to be a “great”, perhaps even a “legendary” conductor during his lifetime. Two of them were called “baton autocrats” during their careers, and one was a highly controversial advocate of questionable life styles and liberal/left-wing causes. But it will be their musical attainments and leadership of their orchestras that I’ll focus on, for those attributes are what drew me to them and to their orchestras and accomplishments, many years ago.
The four “legendary” conductors are: ARTURO TOSCANINI, GEORGE SZELL, FRITZ REINER, and LEONARD BERNSTEIN. You may know them as well as I do, but the likelihood is that you’ve never heard of them, with the possible exception of Bernstein, who was widely known. Let me share my thoughts about, and my admiration for, each of them.
ARTURO TOSCANINI (1867-1957)
Of all of the classical conductors I admire, Arturo Toscanini is at the top of my list.. When my future in-laws gave me an album of all of the Beethoven Symphonies for my birthday in 1953, it featured a great photo on its cover of Maestro Toscanini. The album introduced me to the symphonies of my musical idol, Beethoven, and the music was played by the now legendary NBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Toscanini for many years. Their gift introduced me to THE Maestro for the first time, and to most of Beethoven’s symphonies for the first time (I was quite familiar with his 3rd and 5th Symphonies by that time, but there were seven more gems to discover)
Born in Italy in 1867, Toscanini has long been considered by critics, musicians, and most classical music lovers, to have been the greatest conductor of his era. I’ll amplify those kudos by claiming that he was the greatest of ANY era! According to The New World Encyclopedia, “He was renowned for his brilliant intensity, his restless perfectionism, his phenomenal ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his photographic memory which gave him extraordinary command over a vast repertoire of orchestral and operatic works….”
He was a trained cellist by his teenage years and became a member of an opera company’s orchestra, touring South America in 1886. During the performance of my favorite opera, Aida, in 1887 the orchestra’s conductor was “booed” off of the stage by the audience. Toscanini had no conducting experience, but his fellow musicians persuaded him to conduct the rest of the performance, doing it magnificently and completely from memory. Thus, at age 19, he began his illustrious career as a conductor of symphony orchestras that would span 67 amazing years.
By 1898 he had the greatly prestigious position of the resident conductor of the La Scala Opera Company in Milan, remaining as such until 1908, and returned to La Scala again in the 1920’s, during which he took the La Scala orchestra on a concert tour to the United States. Toscanini was an Italian patriot who was strongly opposed to Italian fascism and German Nazism. He left Italy for good in 1937 and came to the U.S. permanently. Prior to coming to the U.S. he conducted the Metropolitan Opera in NYC from 1908 to 1915, and the New York Philharmonic from 1926 to 1936. He was the first non-German conductor to appear at German and Austrian music festivals during the 1930’s during the Nazi madness, and conducted the inaugural concert of the Israel Philharmonic in 1936.
In 1937 Toscanini moved to the U.S., where in that year the soon-to-be-great NBC Symphony Orchestra was created solely for him. He conducted his first radio broadcast concert on Christmas Day, 1937, and was its increasingly “legendary” conductor, including on TV broadcasts, until his retirement in 1954, becoming world famous as a conductor of concerts and operas, and MY favorite conductor.
GEORGE SZELL (1897-1970)
A long time ago when I was in junior high school, the then “enlightened” Cleveland school district had a program they called “Classical Music For Young People”, which the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra began way back in 1921. It was intended to familiarize public school kids with the instruments used in symphony orchestras, including some of the sounds that symphonic instruments made, plus having them attend actual classical music concerts in person during the school day, at the glorious Severance Music Hall in Cleveland. During the years 1948 through 1951 (when I was in junior high school) kids in Northeastern Ohio school districts were taken by bus once per school year to enjoy a real live concert by the Cleveland Symphony. Thus it was that in the year 1948 I had my very first experience listening to the glorious music of the Cleveland Symphony, and my very FIRST time of watching George Szell conducting. I even remember one piece of music that the CSO played during one of those years: The William Tell Overture by Rossini. It’s one of my favorite pieces of music to this very day.
Long considered as one of the 20th century’s truly great conductors, Szell was the Music Director of the CSO from 1946 until his death in 1970, and turned that orchestra from an undersized group struggling to recover from the disruptions of a world war, to what many music critics considered to be one of the world’s finest symphony orchestras. My many recordings of CSO performances have convinced me that the critics were correct.
One of the high points of my life occurred back in April of 1958, when I and my future wife, Barbara, along with her mother (who paid for our tickets) watched George Szell and the CSO perform two of my very favorite piano concertos—Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and Rachmaninoff’s brilliant Piano Concerto No. 2. The piano soloist was the incomparable ARTUR RUBINSTEIN, a legend in his own right at that time, and one of the greatest concert pianists of the 20th century. I STILL remember that evening as though it occurred just recently!
Szell was born in Hungary but grew up in Vienna. His family originally was of Jewish background but they converted to Catholicism. He began his music career studying to be a pianist and composer, and began to tour Europe as a pianist and sometimes as a composer. He made his London concert debut in 1908 at age eleven! European newspapers of that day often called him “the next Mozart”. Throughout his teen years he performed with orchestras as a pianist, and an up and coming conductor, conducting the Berlin Philharmonic when he was only 17 years old!
Szell and his family came to the U.S. in 1939 as war was breaking out in Europe, and during the war he taught composition, orchestration, and music theory at a college of music in Manhattan. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1946, and came slowly into my life experience. Named Music Director of the Cleveland Symphony in 1946, he determined to make the CSO second to none in performance excellence. He began enforcing his will on his musicians—firing some of them and hiring new replacements to get his desired sound quality. He expected technical perfection from his musicians and total commitment from them. He had very stringent standards that often “ruffled some feathers” of his orchestra members.
During his tenure the CSO became one of the foremost symphonies in the world. The quality of their music is on par with the great orchestras of our nation and the rest of the world. I’m blessed to have witnessed George Szell’s conducting excellence and musical accomplishments many times.
FRITZ REINER (1888-1963)
I only became familiar with Fritz Reiner while he was Music Director of The Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1953 to 1963. During the late 1950’s the Chicago Symphony came to my attention in recordings of piano concertos that had become some of my favorites, and I often heard their recordings on FM radio. Reiner and his Chicago group struck me then as a superb group producing truly memorable and soul-stirring music, and I soon rated that orchestra, at least in my mind, as one of my favorites as long as Reiner was the conductor. I wasn’t aware, then, that behind the scenes was a story not widely known.
Born in Hungary, Reiner got his musical education at the Royal Conservatory in Budapest. His first conducting experience was with Budapest’s “Volksoper” (Peoples’ Opera) from 1911 to 1914, and then the Court Opera in Dresden from 1914 to 1921. He relocated to the U.S. in 1922 as Conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony, and then from 1931 to 1941 was the Conductor of the Curtis Institute Orchestra. He became Music Director of the Pittsburgh Symphony from 1938 to 1948, then the Metropolitan Opera from 1948 to 1953, and finally Conductor of the Chicago Symphony from 1953 until his death in 1963.
Relationships between Reiner and his musicians were not always “tranquil” during his tenure. Those who knew and had worked with him knew well what was perceived as his “dark side”, and he had a bad reputation among musicians as being a difficult conductor to play under. Reiner, essentially, was a perfectionist who expected perfection from his players. Those who didn’t, or couldn’t, produce that musical perfection were promptly fired, sometimes during rehearsals.
Despite his demanding demeanor as a conductor, most of his players respected him. As Arnold Jacobs wrote about Reiner in his book, Song and Wind (published in 1996 by Windsong Press, Ltd): “He wouldn’t just fire people off hand. If you made good—he always asked for good playing—and if you made a few mistakes, he might hop on you and chew you out a bit. But if the playing came around and was what he wanted, he would always acknowledge it. It was not just a one-way street—he wouldn’t just find fault. He would very definitely acknowledge good work.”
Reiner’s insistence on “good work” paid off, and the Chicago Symphony, which was a very excellent orchestra pre-Reiner, became a world-class great orchestra in the ten years he was its Director.
LEONARD BERNSTEIN (1918-1990)
Perhaps the most controversial, and probably the most talented, symphony conductor of the four featured in this article was Leonard Bernstein. His musical accomplishments have put him in a “special class” of musical “demi-gods” in the minds of musical purists the world over. It was often said of him that his greatest importance during his many professional years was not what he did with music but rather what he did for music--- as a truly great musical “communicator” and a “popularizer” of all things musical. He was called a brilliant showman and musician who could eloquently talk about music’s “mysteries” in a way that everyone—even common, non-musically trained men, women, and children, could understand.
He surely had undesirable personal idiosyncrasies, including being a practicing homosexual, and he entertained unpopular political philosophies, and surely was a left wing “influencer” (we’d call him today). Yet despite his feet of clay, he was, to my mind, the most introspective and yet emotional conductor of the 20th century. He was truly a man of great conflicts and great musical talents. To watch him conduct a Beethoven Piano Concerto or a Tchaikovsky Symphony is to be transported into a different realm of soul consciousness, a realm where few classical music lovers ever manage to enter. But I have entered that realm many times while listening to the “musical Immortals”, even though I may be unable to “explain” that in this article.
Bernstein was the first U.S. born conductor to have received wide acclaim internationally. Music critic Donal Henahan wrote that “Bernstein was one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history”. I believe that’s true, for his “honors and accolades” include “seven Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, and 16 Grammy Awards (including the Lifetime Achievement Award) as well as an Academy Award nomination. He received the Kennedy Center Honor in 1981”, according to Wikipedia.
Many Americans know that Bernstein composed in many musical genres, which included symphonic/orchestral music, ballet, film and musical theater compositions, chamber music, works for piano, choral works, and opera music. Quite a list, to say the least. In addition, he was an accomplished concert pianist, becoming the first American-born person to lead a major American symphony orchestra (The New York Philharmonic), and also conducted other major orchestras throughout the world, often conducting piano concertos from his piano keyboard as he played the soloist part.
Bernstein was always in the public limelight, often being portrayed either positively or negatively, depending upon one’s point of view He did marry a lovely woman and had three children with her. But he was also an admitted homosexual who had several “affairs” with other men, with the knowledge of his liberally inclined wife.. He was a strong supporter of “civil rights” and opposed the Vietnam War during that time period (as I and many conservatives also did). He supported the liberal/leftist goals of nuclear disarmament, AIDS awareness and research, and spoke out for human rights and world peace, not altogether unworthy goals.
He was widely criticized for his January, 1970 meeting, in his home, with a member of the Black Panther Party, an event I recall well and for which he was roundly criticized. But Bernstein will always be remembered for leading a multinational orchestra and choir in a soul-stirring performance—near the Brandenburg Gate, between East and West Berlin—of Beethoven’s immortal Symphony No. 9, called “The Choral Symphony” or “Ode To Joy”, on Christmas Day of 1989, to celebrate the FALL of the infamous Berlin Wall and the supposed “end” of communism in Eastern Europe. Bernstein modified Beethoven’s words from “Ode To Joy” to “ODE TO FREEDOM”. It was televised all over the world, and millions of people, myself included, wept while watching and listening to what some music lovers perceive as the greatest symphony ever written!
It’s very difficult to cover all of the musical and political ramifications of his life. Some of it was very admirable, some was deplorable, much was controversial, but through it all one thing remains: His absolute devotion to musical excellence and his determination to bring his world of significant music to all people, both young and old, rich and poor, men and women and children. For that, despite his other imperfections or sins, and for both his willingness to speak out passionately for things he believed in (some of which I could have supported), and for his love of freedom for mankind (in his own musical way) he deserved the honors aimed at him, even if they sometimes were accompanied by criticisms and media attacks.
In closing, I must confess a deep fascination with the musical “soul” that Bernstein often exhibited, especially as he aged. Always a heavy smoker, I think he knew in his last few years that the “music” would soon end for him, and in his conducting, especially of the Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5, and Beethoven’s Piano Concertos Numbers 3, 4, and 5, (with piano soloist Krystian Zimerman), the depth of his love for music for its own sake became totally apparent. The pathos that great music can instill in one as it figuratively “shreds” one’s soul with the emotional reactions of being “spoken to” by a composer long dead physically, but never dead “artistically”, as he or she speaks from the grave and the music that came from his/her now dead mind, washes over its listeners, a tsunami of emotions induced by the commitment of musicians (many of whom are themselves long dead by now) to bring the musical “once upon a time” thoughts of its composer to the contemporary world—to us—many of whom still refuse to listen to the glory that surely was inspired by the Mind of God!
To better understand what I’m talking about, one has to actually see and hear the music that has the power to transport a person out of this earthly plain and into the realm of almost “other worldly” awe. There are two classical pieces conducted by Bernstein that you MUST watch (even if you think you don’t “like” classical music), which illustrate what I can only poorly describe via the written word. So on your browser call up, first:
TCHAIKOVSKY SYMPHONY NO. 5, Conducted by Leonard Bernstein with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood (late 1988).
This was his final appearance at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony, and may be the greatest and most emotional performance of that symphony I’ve ever heard;. Performed about two years before his death, his love for the music and its effect on his emotions (and mine) is totally apparent. Here, Bernstein and the music are ONE, and the listeners in the audience (and via the recording) are left in total musical glory over the performance they are experiencing, probably a once in a lifetime event, including for the conductor. (Turn your sound up loud for maximum effect).
BEETHOVEN PIANO CONCERTO NO. 5, Conducted by Leonard Bernstein with the Vienna Philharmonic; Piano Soloist Krystian Zimerman (1989)
This has always been my favorite Beethoven piano concerto. It is nicknamed “The Emperor”, and it lives up to its name. Zimerman’s playing of the music is magnificent, and his emotionalism is as apparent as is Bernstein’s, whom I suspect at this time realized his days of bringing glorious music to audiences was rapidly coming to an end, for he was ill and passed away the following year. In this performance Bernstein’s emotions are on the surface, and his conducting is emotional as the glorious mind of a musical “immortal” consumes him, yet at times is restrained and totally introspective, as though he’s communicating with the “spirit’ of Beethoven and basking in the afterglow of his musical “master’s” magnificent composition. To let the soul shredding music of Beethoven into one’s soul, aided by great musicians and a legendary conductor is an experience to be sought and enjoyed. (Turn your sound up as loud as you can, because Beethoven should never be listened to “softly”)!
I hope that all of you will seek and enjoy these two classical music pieces. You’ll be glad you did! You might even discover that you enjoy listening to classical music. So let your “adventure” begin!
