San Francisco Classical Voice

July 6, 1999

What a remarkable country Czechoslovakia has been! With a language few not born there speak, its artists have found their way into the general culture of Europe - literature, film, drama, and especially music - all out of proportion to the size of the country. Its audiences have consistently been among the most enlightened and progressive, eager for art, especially but not exclusively their own. The adult Mozart enjoyed his greatest successes in Prague, and I can't think of too many countries that would have elected a playwright as head of state. For that matter, I can't think of too many playwrights who could function credibly as head of state.

Despite all that, Dvorak, despite several bona fide hits, seems to attract condescension, much as Mozart did in the late 19th century. It usually comes from people who mistake solemn for profound, not realizing, as G. K. Chesterton pointed out, that funny and good-humored are much harder to pull off. The genuinely humorous or good-natured work of art comes along fairly seldom. As great a critic as Shaw, sharp enough to shape our current perception of Mozart, nevertheless tended to dismiss Dvorak in much the same way he dismissed Brahms. Tovey can't refrain from bringing up "crudities" in Dvorak forms (although almost every one of his examples comes from Dvorak's youth), even as he praises major compositions.

Until the past forty years or so, much of Dvorak's principal work was rarely heard, including symphonies 5 through 8 and the Carnival Overture. To a great extent, this state of affairs persists. The cello concerto gets lots of recordings. The wonderful violin concerto does not. The choral works, operas, tone poems, and a good deal of the chamber music remain pretty much unknown quantities. To me, it expresses yet again the paradox that the music we know least comes from the nineteenth century, the major source of the current standard rep.

Certainly Szell had a hand - as Michael Charry points out in his liner notes - in bringing Dvorak's music to public attention, even though he never performed a symphony other than the last three. He did program all three concerti. His account of the Slavonic Dances I consider among the greatest of all postwar recordings. From what I'm told, many professional orchestra players listen to this CD when they listen for pleasure. He also did similar work on behalf of Smetana's music. In fact, Severance Hall - the Cleveland Orchestra's main venue - was known as the "U. S. Temple of Czech Culture" - behind Szell's back, of course. Szell brought to this music not only his customary elegance, but great wit and fantasy, which contradict directly the rap against him as some dry-as-dust pedant. The people who usually make this charge prefer a more "Romantic" reading - softer attacks, more portamento, and often some bizarre touch of "personality."

Szell didn't help himself much either by his physical appearance (somewhat resembling one of Dracula's minions) or by his public insistence on precision of ensemble. Many people have come away with the idea that's all Szell was about. But the precision worked toward a larger end, one which honored the composer above all. In Szell's performances, you generally hear exactly what the composer wrote. The precision of attack is allied with a musical line of steel which produces an irresistible forward momentum. Szell's orchestras not only could get louder in a smooth continuum, they could also get softer the same way. And they could turn on a dime. This resulted in a musical line of great shade and subtlety and great energy.

Szell not only made the Austro-Germanic European classics the core of his repertoire - from Haydn through Richard Strauss - he excelled in lighter music as well. Bizet, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Grieg, the Strauss family, and Rossini received the same loving care as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wagner, Mussorgsky, Richard Strauss, and Tchaikovsky. Both sides of him - the grave and the light - come together in his Dvorak. As an interpreter of this composer, Szell has few peers.

The Symphony No. 7 may qualify as the composer's most popular symphony among those who don't particularly care for Dvorak, perhaps because it's so solemn. On the other hand, it is without much doubt Dvorak at the top of his game. For me, conductors err when they try to turn it into Bruckner, to go for a massive sound and tragic attitudes at the expense of rhythmic articulation. If nothing else, jolly or somber, Dvorak's music dances. The last three symphonies in particular present an orchestra with a cornucopia of rhythmic subtleties. For example, the final three notes of the opening movement's first strain--two sixteenths and a long note--often get varied to a sixteenth, eighth, and long note, even though the pitches might be the same. That variety contributes to the richness of invention the listener feels in the symphony, and the contrast between the two rhythms constitutes an important structural building block of the movement. To slight it simply spoils one of the composer's major surprises.

Right from the opening measures, Szell and the Cleveland take the symphony airborne. It sweeps through like swift storm clouds and rolling thunder. Szell never allows the weight of the material to drag the movement's progress. Consequently, Szell shifts from high drama to song seamlessly and without resorting to hokey tricks. Naturally, the rhythmic oppositions stand out clearly. The unanimity of attack gives the musical line a lovely spring, and each player's awareness of his proper strength in the texture makes the inner lines clear in this reading as in no other. To the latter point, at the climax of the recapitulation, about two minutes before the end, one can hear Dvorak juggling his major themes in one magnificent contrapuntal fitting.

The woodwind chorale that opens the Poco adagio sets a tone of dignified lyricism for the movement's length. Even at the entrance of the strings, Szell resists the urge to schmaltz it up, instead giving us a gorgeous glide of instrumental colors from clarinet-dominated winds to strings to brass, all melting into flute- and oboe-led winds, accompanied by plucked strings. The movement relies a lot on the blending of melody instruments, and the Cleveland plays so tightly that the combination of instruments often sounds like one new instrument. Dvorak constructs transparent, delicate textures, and in the Cleveland's hands, they rapture the listener out.

It sounds a bit odd even to me as I write this, but in the background of at least the last three symphonies, I keep running across footprints that seem to say, "Beethoven was here." I find this particularly true of the scherzi, particularly in the rhythmic games under way. In the seventh, it's the syncopations and hemiola shifts (the fact that a 6/8 measure can be tapped as two groups of three or three groups of two) that recall the scherzi of Beethoven's Seventh and Ninth.

Dvorak's syncopations are less wildly original than Beethoven's. They essentially work a device at least as old as the Renaissance, but it's a damned effective use, strongly related to folk dances. Tovey complains of the "four-square" themes of the finale. To him, this leads to a movement where the themes lay simply side-by-side, rather than engender a sense of "becoming." I would counter that Dvorak knows the exact nature of his themes, because he's always extending them with odd, asymmetrical "tails," thus fulfilling the requirement Tovey sets. Furthermore, the movement does contain one asymmetrical theme - with a strong, "stamping" rhythm (you'll recognize it immediately when you hear it) - whose importance Tovey seems to minimize by calling it a "transition" motive.

But to me Tovey has gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick. Again, it helps to achieve the very dynamism he wants. A "transition" passage implies that it merely gets us from here to there. This theme has far too distinctive a shape for that, and furthermore Dvorak repeats it at important rhetorical points. We would do well to recall that Tovey wrote his essays mainly as program notes to concerts he conducted. I strongly suspect that this was probably the first time he had ever heard this particular symphony, since a performance tradition outside Czechoslovakia hadn't yet built up. It makes me wonder how Tovey's own performance went. At any rate, Szell's account gives this theme far more emphasis than Tovey's comments imply and shapes one of the great finales in symphonic literature. I don't think this a matter of luck - either Szell's or Dvorak's.

Szell and the Cleveland don't play the Carnival Overture so much as shoot it out of a gun. The first time I heard this, the opening immediately snapped my head back, the first chord ringing out sharp as the crack of a whip. This piece counts as undoubtedly one of my favorite Dvoraks, if not one of my favorite overtures, and the Szell as my favorite account, with thrilling brass work. Tovey again admits its popularity but claims it has nothing to do with the "intrinsic quality" of the piece. Dvorak, in his opinion, had written far greater. I have no idea what he's talking about. The remark strikes me as, again, the simple inability to comprehend the difficulty of writing a truly joyous piece of music. For me, there's more sheer brilliant invention in this work than in, say, Parsifal, and it's a lot shorter. Szell and the Cleveland will start you dancing as if possessed. At any rate, I can't keep still. But it's not all manic energy. The lyrical minor-key subject moves along in a grand sweep. The pastorale middle section sings nostalgically, without wallow. Here, Szell manages to remind us of the quieter passages of Beethoven's Sixth. It's as if we listen to nature holding its breath. As to the dance sections, much of the energy of course comes from the Cleveland's unanimity of attack. A spectacular example comes at the recap, when the horns give out wild, quick fanfares - in chords yet - and rhythm stays razor-sharp.

Szell's account of Smetana's Bartered Bride overture is more of the same, in spades. For some reason, Columbia recorded it only in mono, even in 1958. In the rapid figurations, so susceptible to smear, particularly in the strings, each note maintains a diamond-like distinctness. Yet, the line is never stiff. The orchestra not only maintains its killer pace, but crescendos and decrescendos within the long chains of quick notes. For a few, this may be even too exciting an account. I must admit that had it gone on a little longer, I would have been pooped. The overture races almost without letup, and yet Szell gives the piece a definite shape, with the momentum especially strong three minutes from the end to the final measures, where I can almost see dancers flinging out their arms.

Szell's orchestration of the Smetana e-minor string quartet (From My Life) has a curious history. He began it in the early Forties, when he struggled to build an American career. To some extent, it served him as a calling card. But what do we make of an orchestration from a conductor known for his obsessive attention to the details of a score and concern for the composer's intent? At the time, few string quartets active in the U.S. had this work in their repertory, so few of the classical audience knew the work. To some extent, Szell used his orchestration to proselytize the quartet. Significantly, he never performed it live after 1948.

This recording, from 1949, represents his last performance ever of the piece. The orchestration, like almost all of Szell's original music I've heard, shows great good taste, and that's the trouble. Nothing leaps out and shakes you. For me, almost all really wonderful music risks going over-the-top. Compare the quartet's last movement of Czech dance music to Smetana's Bartered Bride overture, and the difference between damn nice and jaw-dropping immediately hits you. To paraphrase Shaw, Szell's music would have benefited had it been a little less nice and a little more damned. At any rate, I prefer the original string quartet, where the music threatens to bust the medium.

I have heard only two other recordings of what turns out my favorite Dvorak symphony, the Eighth: Rowicki's and Kertesz's. Kertesz's rhythm is too spongy for me. Rowicki does better, but I find myself comparing him to Szell, who turns in one of the greatest readings of his career. I'm willing to admit the possibility of a finer account, but, like Joshua, it would have to stop the sun. The opening is alone worth the price of the CD. The introductory chorale and the skipping theme of the flute create another air of hushed expectancy, and, before you realize it, you're in the middle of the first climax. That skipping theme, of course, turns out to be one of the key signposts of the movement, even though, since it doesn't seem to go anywhere, it doesn't promise much for development. Yet Dvorak squeezes incredible mileage out of it.

As in the Seventh, Dvorak ties the themes of his movement together mainly through rhythmic correlations, particularly the skipping rhythm. Essentially, the composer has his cake and eats it: a memorable idea which births a litter of other themes. The joy of the movement recalls Mendelssohn, even down to turns of phrase, particularly from the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture. The climax of the recap blazes and glows. The Adagio second movement seems to me one of the toughest to bring off. It tends toward stasis. At one point, a pedal point on the dominant of the scale lasts close to three minutes. The forward movement comes from, among other things, Dvorak's changes of color. The incredibly clear textures Szell gets from the Cleveland promote this, as, of course, do the long spans of melody he draws, mainly from inner parts. In the Verdi-like canzonetta theme (with the downward runs from flutes in thirds), Dvorak gives the lower strings long notes. Szell uses these like a skater gliding on ice. The Cleveland players don't merely hold the note, they infuse it with a sense of forward motion.

Dvorak gives us a Brahmsian allegretto rather than a scherzo for the third movement, my favorite of the work. Filled with new orchestral textures of great imagination, this section sings in triple-time, for the most part bitter-sweet, with a dancer's surprise at the end, like Dvorak's favored dumka. Szell's reading approaches the Mozartean grace and elegance of his account of the Slavonic Dances. It meditates as it sings, finding unexpected depths in the almost parlor-piece material. At least, it staggered me when I first heard it.

The finale - a sonata-rondo with variations - takes for its main idea a variant of the skipping theme of the first movement, this time as a Brahmsian chorale. The playing here never falls short of superb, with seamless transitions from the opening trumpets to one of the low winds to the timpani to the celli. Perhaps the Berlin Phil on its best day with its best conductor lucks out and does as well. The movement juxtaposes essentially two moods: noble and fiercely energetic. The latter puts Szell and the Cleveland in their Carnival Overture mode - delicate in some passages and wildly exuberant in others. Significantly, Szell picks his spots and his dynamics. He never runs out of room if he needs to get louder, and one hears only one loudest point in the movement. The breakneck finale whizzes by, but not in a smear. Even the brass runs cut like diamonds. Even though this kind of talk undoubtedly brings to mind Szell the technician, the performance nevertheless comes across as one of great humanity.

The New World Symphony has won and deserved all the popularity it gets, but all that love can make it a little sticky, like a toddler with ice cream. Then there's the parochial interest we United States people take in it and the sentimental thrill we get when someone has noticed us. Finally, there's the still-heated controversy over the slow-movement tune: Spiritual? Czech folk song? Dvorak's own? One of the many things I like about Szell's reading is that it scrubs off all this cotton-candy smear and allows me to hear the symphony in a new way: as an heir of Beethoven.

The sound of the Cleveland here is remarkably Beethovenian - not simply a matter of Dvorak's orchestration (since other accounts don't sound like this), but of Szell's springier rhythms. In the slow intro, for example, I hear the syncopation Dvorak actually wrote - for once neither hammered nor slurped over - just taking its natural place clearly in the melody. It's an amazingly beautiful passage, right up there with the intro to Dvorak's Eighth. But the opening of that symphony generates most of the musical ideas. Here, however, the composer essentially throws the passage away. It appears and leaves, not to return, just like the intro to Beethoven's Seventh. It also has the distinction in this symphony of being one of the few ideas not based on an articulated triad.

It's this last feature that ties so much of the symphony together and allows Dvorak's very bold, experimental coup to triumph: a union of cyclical procedures (themes appear in more than one movement) with classical forms. Beethoven, of course, does (in the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies) mix themes from different movements to telling effect, but it's not a classical effect, rather a sublime one. It's because of the family resemblance among ideas and the fact that ideas thus constructed combine so easily that each reappearance of a Dvorak theme, regardless of the movement, seems an organic part of the symphonic argument, rather than a striking interruption.

The intro has the edge of a threat, which Szell takes in a masterly transition to the first full-fledged theme. The main glue of the movement is, as you'd expect by now, the syncopation of that first surging theme and its quick, dance-like answer. Szell's rhythms sizzle, always good for dances. In many ways, this reading has less weight than others. The power comes not from a heavier beat or orchestral color, but from the crackle and snap of the orchestra's articulation. In the second movement, Szell resists all sweetly sentimental extra-musical references and simply lets Dvorak sing, although apparently there's nothing simple about that, since this is one of the few readings which makes no overt effort to tug at the heartstrings - like the tear painted on a mime's mask.

The movement has the beauty of a freshly-scrubbed face and shows how to maintain linear intensity at low dynamic without obvious push. The scherzo whirls like a dervish, taking from the corresponding movement in Beethoven's Ninth, down to the timpani punctuation and quasi-canonic entries. But Dvorak, for all the borrowing, retains his own voice, strongly assertive in the trio. The finale starts out like a thrill ride - I have a hard time not letting out a "wheeeee!" or "yippee!" All the energy seems unleashed, mainly because Szell has never relinquished the intensity of the scherzo, not even at the end. Indeed, he fashions the scherzo's coda as the gateway to the finale. The last movement broods and erupts. Even the relatively joyful passages - especially the delightful "Three Blind Mice" variant - contain the dark undercurrent of rolling timpani. Finally, Szell and the orchestra reach the peak of the movement - the chords that opened the slow song, now glorious as a god of storms - and negotiates the tricky, suddenly soft end without mishap. In all, the power of the reading comes from its grace, rather than from the conducting equivalent of a broad wink and a nudge.

Sony has improved the sound of the Dvorak items remarkably over the original LPs. Strings and winds sound fuller. On the LP, they had a steely, even shrill edge, worlds removed from their sound live. A slight tape hiss still remains, but you have to listen for it. Even the mono sounds good, excepting the Smetana quartet, which really does seem to come from another era, and The Bartered Bride overture contains, I believe, some Szell grunts (I hear them on earphones, not through speakers). Perhaps the conductor spurs the orchestra on. For those of you interested in more of Szell's Dvorak, I recommend the complete Slavonic Dances (Sony 48161), the only stereo recording other than this one still available. Keep your eyes peeled, however, for the Cello Concerto with Fournier (stunning!) and the Piano Concerto with Firkusny, as well as for Smetana's Moldau and dances from The Bartered Bride.

©1999 Stephen Schwartz, all rights reserved