In those years when Central Europe began to rebuild itself upon the rubble of World War II, a number of German conductors—emigrés and wartime remainers alike—had already fled to their homeland’s alpine neighbor to the south. Switzerland, memorably gibed by another postwar cultural figure as a five-hundred year peaceful democracy whose greatest contribution to world culture was the cuckoo clock, would be the setting where Otto Klemperer, Carl Schuricht, and Hans Rosbaud all breathed their last.

Although his dying weeks were spent in Wiesbaden, Germany (and was ultimately laid to rest about an hour’s drive south in Heidelberg), it was in Clarens—today a suburban municipality of Montreux, the second largest city in the majority Francophone canton of Vaud—where Wilhelm Furtwängler made his final home. He had known the country well since his journeyman days as third conductor at the Opernhaus Zürich, a brief and rocky engagement which drew to an abrupt close after a disastrous performance of The Merry Widow. As a lifelong mountaineer and skier, the Swiss Alps were naturally his frequent vacation destinations. But the chain of events which made Switzerland his adopted homeland was borne out of more worrisome considerations.

On January 23, 1945, Furtwängler led his last concert in Nazi Berlin. Allied bombing had pulverized the old Philharmonie and Staatsoper, forcing the Berlin Philharmonic to decamp for the Blüthner-Saal. At the concert’s intermission none other than Albert Speer, Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, came to pay the conductor a visit in the green room. He pointedly asked Furtwängler what his plans in the near future would be. Only days before, Speer had learned of the Soviet capture of the strategic industrial region of Silesia, an outcome which terminated any wild hopes the Nazi leadership may have entertained for a conclusion to the war that resulted in anything other than Germany’s unconditional surrender. When Furtwängler replied that he was engaged to conduct in Switzerland in a matter of weeks, Speer subtly suggested that he extend his stay there. “After all,” he coolly remarked to the conductor, “you look so very tired.” The hint was taken.

Five days later in Vienna, Furtwängler conducted his final concert in the crumbling German Reich: A program of Franck, Brahms, and Beethoven with the Vienna Philharmonic (an event gratefully preserved for posterity). Earlier that day, he had slipped on ice and suffered a concussion. Not only did this threaten to derail the concert, but it also jeopardized his ulterior motive for which the performance had served as pretext. Recuperating at the city’s Hotel Imperial, which only a few weeks later would be among the many structures damaged and destroyed in the Allied bombing of Vienna, he received an urgent call from a mysterious bureaucrat at the Foreign Office in Berlin demanding to know who signed off on Furtwängler’s exit visa. In the early hours of the next morning, the conductor was surreptitiously led out of the hotel, placed on a milk train, and (after a number of stops and changes) eventually arrived at the town of Dornbirn along the Austro-Swiss border. Days later, after a last burst of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, Furtwängler crossed over into Switzerland.

While he and his family were grateful for the safe passage provided to them by the Swiss authorities, the country’s press and many of its citizens were less than thrilled about receiving a man they considered a Nazi cultural grandee. Leftist publications and political groups called for a ban on his performances, claiming that the purity of Swiss neutrality was at stake. In late February, a Furtwängler concert in Winterthur was disrupted by protesters with stink bombs, dispersing only when local police turned water hoses on them. Heeding the advice of friends who suggested that he step away from public life at least for a time, the conductor checked himself into a sanatorium in Clarens where he waited out the inevitable end to the war.

By the time of this Lugano concert on May 15, 1954, that animosity had long dissipated. Thanks to friends and colleagues such as Ernest Ansermet and Edwin Fischer, Furtwängler firmly established himself in Swiss musical life, becoming especially associated with the Lucerne Festival. Few in the audience at the Teatro Apollo that day would have guessed that this would be among the conductor’s very last public performances, although his intimates were well aware of the hearing loss which was making him increasingly despondent. Whether his sorrow over that played a part in the valedictory tone of these performances (or in his death six months later) is impossible to ascertain. But there is a sense, such as one hears in this performance of the Beethoven Pastoral, of its “cheerful and thankful feelings” for life made bittersweet by one’s awareness of its transience. It would be a mistake to believe, however, that these performances are exhausted, weak. While his earlier studio recordings of Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel are more polished, neither matches this performance’s fusion of tragic power and grim irony. Equally rewarding and revealing is his accompaniment to Yvonne Lefébure’s magisterial interpretation of the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20, the best known part of this concert, as well as the only recorded collaboration between these two extraordinary artists.

One wonders whether Furtwängler was familiar with Miguel de Unamuno’s Of the Tragic Feeling of Life: “Only the weak resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of death.” Regardless, something of that permeates this concert; a testament to the inextinguishable lifeforce of music, of the artists documented here, long since vanished into the eternity of history.

This essay will be included in the liner notes of a forthcoming reissue of Furtwängler’s May 1954 Lugano concert on the Japanese ATS label.

Furtwängler (left) with Ernest Ansermet shortly after fleeing to Switzerland, February 1945.

Arguably, the most lasting musical achievement of the 1960s was the elevation of the record producer to auteur. The work of Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, George Martin, and Joe Meek among others are well known, but their use of the recording studio as an instrument in and of itself had already been thriving among the practitioners of a genre from which they drew much inspiration. By the time the Eisenhower era ended in the United States, listeners of classical music were familiar with the electronically enhanced strings of Bruno Walter’s late Columbia recordings, the shifting colors and reverb of Leopold Stokowski’s Capitol discs, and the first installment of the “theatre of the mind” that Decca promised in their epochal Ring cycle. In 1964 Glenn Gould famously and permanently forsook live performance, which he regarded as a relic of a bygone time, in favor of “acoustic orchestrations” which were realizable only via the “autocracy” of the recording studio.

It would be tempting to view the success of George Szell as merely another product of this era. Not entirely uncoincidentally, the zenith of his career happened to overlap with that of hi-fi sound recording and reproduction. The fastidious perfection he drew from the ensemble he led for the last 24 years of his life, however, was no feat of electronic sleight-of-hand.

“The Cleveland Orchestra was a fine orchestra when I first heard it,” he recalled during his tenth anniversary as its music director. “When I took over, some of the best members had left and I made it my business to get them back. . . The orchestra today is an instrument of artistic expression ranking with the best in the world, and with certain special qualities I do not find in any other orchestra at the present moment.”

Crisp, transparent, and immaculately precise, the Szell touch proved to be rewardingly phonogenic for a growing audience of listeners, to say nothing for the record labels which profited from his art. While some conductors seemed to lose their footing before the presence of microphones, Szell came alive, understanding early on that the invention of the gramophone signified the greatest paradigm shift in musical performance and reception in history. As he would with any matter musical (and often beyond its purview), Szell was deeply involved in the recording process: From the control room right down to dictating choices for album covers. His players had become accustomed to (if not necessarily enamored with) the obsessive control of their “Papa Szell,” an appellation which not only denoted his attentiveness and even warmth for his musicians, but also the paternalistic unto quasi-omnipotent power he wielded over the Cleveland Orchestra.

“If God wills it, I accept,” Danny Majeske responded to Szell’s offer to succeed Rafael Druian as the orchestra’s concertmaster. “God has nothing to do with it—I will it!,” the conductor shot back.

As his eleventh season into his Cleveland tenure drew to a close, Szell prepared to show off his orchestra’s prowess to European audiences, eager to demonstrate to them the unanimity and polish which had left American critics grasping for superlatives.

“What has developed [since Szell took over the orchestra] was a kind of empathy, an ability on the part of the players to identify so completely with the style and purpose of the music that it might almost appear as though they themselves had taken part in the composing of it,” remarked Herbert Elwell shortly before the Cleveland Orchestra’s embarked on their 1957 tour of Europe. “[They] have learned in a remarkable way to listen to one another as chamber music players do. . . The result is an enormous increase in refinement and flexibility.”

In a letter to Charlotte Flatow penned two years prior, Szell was more direct.

“[The] Cleveland Orchestra, although a comparatively young one, is in every respect fully the equal of American orchestras heard up to now in Europe and, in some respects, even superior to them.”

Nonetheless, as the tour neared and then was underway, the conductor grew increasingly anxious. “The trip was hard on all of us but hardest on Szell,” Anshel Brusilow remembered. “In Berlin he went looking for places he remembered from his youth, when he had worked with Richard Strauss at the Berlin Opera. He found nothing he could recognize. Not just the buildings but the streets themselves were obliterated. Then he knew what World War II had done to Berlin.” His return to the continent which had nursed and developed his talents was a personally emotional experience. More importantly, however, he worried about how European audiences would judge his orchestra. With his typical sense of care and detail, he arranged for programs that highlighted the Cleveland Orchestra’s finest qualities, as well as accounting for variety. No two programs would be exactly alike. His worries would ultimately be unfounded: The European reception of the Clevelanders was rapturous.

“Ovations without end,” reported the Spandauer Volksblatt of the orchestra’s Berlin stop. “It turned into a festival.” The New Statesman and Nation in London wrote: “It is one of the prime virtues of the Cleveland Orchestra. . . that their brilliance is entirely subordinated to musical considerations. They play with the loving spontaneity of a fine European orchestra, as well as with the discipline, blend, and unanimity characteristic of America.”

Switzerland was the tour’s pivot. From there the Cleveland Orchestra would venture to neutral Austria, then to Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland. His final Swiss concert in Lugano, preserved here on this set, is marked by a nervous tension unique in his discography. The evocative mists of Debussy’s La mer are dispelled in favor of a scrupulous clarity which properly contextualized this score as a cornerstone of musical modernity, its play of sounds sounding as if they still were freshly scored. Schumann’s Symphony No. 2—a Szell favorite—has an air of nervy energy that at moments (especially in the Scherzo) strikes the listener as an unlikely foretaste of Shostakovich.

An anonymous critic for the Tribune de Lausanne who had attended the Lugano concert wrote that Szell “sometimes allow[ed] himself to be caught up in a frenzy of tempi which transcend the golden mean,” and had chided his selection of a work by Paul Creston (not included here). Despite that, he compared him favorably to Leopold Stokowski and Serge Koussevitzky. “What [the Lugano concert] revealed to us was that [the Cleveland Orchestra] is indisputably one of the premiere orchestras of our time,” he concluded.

Another reviewer, this time for the Journal de Genève, added: “The technical and artistic qualities [of the orchestra] are simply extraordinary. Unnecessary to add that this judgment is partially in respect to the conductor. Extremely dynamic and colorful, animated by a fire and an irresistible pulsation, the interpretations are coordinated by a master’s hand. Szell has the gift to inflame his musicians, who are individually and collectively admirable.”

On these recordings, the careful listener will find a George Szell wholly unlike the cold and clinical stereotype that has remained stubbornly persistent among record collectors. Instead, these performances are marked by a possibly surprising sense of adventure and risk. Here is evidence, as if any more were needed, that this vertiginously daring musical high wire act, which eschewed empty virtuosic display, could thrive without the safety net of the studio; further testament of a remarkable collective partnership between orchestra and conductor whose legend seems to only burn brighter with every passing year.

(This essay will be included as liner notes in a forthcoming reissue of this concert by ATS in Japan.

George Szell going plane crazy with friends in Prague (1930s).