If Georg Solti carried the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to international glory, it was another larger-than-life Hungarian, Fritz Reiner, who gave it the power on which that glory continues to reside.
There is no better time for all who treasure the CSO, its music and its history to reflect on Reiner’s many achievements during his decade in Chicago, 1953-63. The orchestra’s sixth music director died 50 years ago this Friday, a month before his 75th birthday and a week before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. What’s more, Dec. 19 will mark the 125th anniversary of his birth.
If the CSO management were as keen on honoring those bygone podium figures who contributed to the orchestra’s greatness as it is on promoting its present-day wizards of the baton, Reiner’s dour visage would by rights be adorning banners up and down Michigan Avenue.
Although Reiner was infamous for his abrasive treatment of orchestral musicians, his almost fanatical dedication to making music at the highest level made him one of the supreme practitioners of the art of conducting in the 20th century.
As it turned out, the appointment of the fabled maestro and martinet to the CSO in 1953 would not only crown the final decade of his career but would prove of incalculable value to an orchestra that needed a strong leader to pull it out of the demoralized funk into which it had fallen prior to his arrival.
The period following the sudden death of longtime music director Frederick Stock in 1942 had seen two music directors, Desire Defauw and Rafael Kubelik, run out of town by the Tribune’s all-powerful critic, Claudia Cassidy. Another music director, Artur Rodzinski, got embroiled in a fierce power struggle with the CSO board and was out the door after a single season.
From their first rehearsal on Oct. 9, 1953, Reiner had raised the orchestra players’ spirits, instilled new discipline and given the players their pride back. He transformed an orchestra whose abilities were barely known outside the Midwest into a world-class virtuoso ensemble whose quality would soon be widely appreciated, thanks in large measure to the many benchmark recordings they made together.
Had Reiner not backed out of a planned, U.S. State Department-sponsored tour of Europe and the Middle East in 1959, historians would now be crediting him, rather than Solti, with putting the CSO on the world map.
Reiner was famous for being tough, impatient, sarcastic, even sadistic in the demands he made on orchestral musicians. He was one of the podium’s great perfectionists, a man who got the results he wanted by the indomitable force of his will, a baton technique that was second to none and a personality that bullied music out of his players.
The squat, perpetually scowling maestro had hooded eyes like a falcon’s, and one look could paralyze an errant musician. Players who did not meet his exacting professional standards were mercilessly humiliated in front of their colleagues. “People say I hate musicians,” Reiner once remarked. “That is not true. I only hate bad musicians.”
The late Arnold Jacobs, a legendary brass man who served 44 years as the CSO’s principal tuba, spoke perceptively of how Reiner operated in front of an orchestra:
“As a conductor, he was magnificent,” Jacobs recalled in a 1988 interview with the Tribune. “With him, communication was never a simple thing. It was in the facial expression, the eyes, the hand, in that precise, small beat that forced you to look at him. If you did something he didn’t like, he’d mete out a punishment much greater than the crime. But if you did something he liked, boy, he’d respect and acknowledge it, because that meant he had really taught you something.”
Reiner was a conductor’s conductor whose renown was based on his superior abilities as an orchestra builder, as a technician of orchestral sound and as an interpreter of a wide symphonic and operatic repertory. The iron control he exerted through an exemplary stick technique made 100 symphony musicians respond as one.
His objective always was to create a thorough realization of the music that lay behind the notes on the page. This presumed on his part a complete, detailed knowledge of a given piece of music. His famous “vest pocket” beat was so clear, even in the most complex passages of a difficult 20th century score, that musicians knew exactly what he wanted. His baton moved in tiny arcs that carried infinite nuance and packed amazing energy into a small physical space. It’s one of the reasons so many Reiner performances sound so alert.
His conducting style was influenced by the cooler, more detached aesthetic favored by Arturo Toscanini and other podium titans of the mid-20th century. Reiner never milked a melody the way more romantically inclined conductors such as Bruno Walter did. Which is not to say his interpretations lacked heart. The late Janos Starker, who served as CSO principal cello early in Reiner’s tenure, observed that “Reiner was not a sentimental musician (but) he was an emotional musician.”
Despite attempts to stereotype Reiner as an exponent of the Austro-German repertory, his repertory was vast, extending from Bach to the modern music of his day. He varied his approach according to the stylistic character of each score. When conducting contemporary music, he elucidated complex rhythms and textures with astonishing precision. Nobody could balance orchestral sound like he could. He paid scrupulous attention to detail but never allowed himself to get bogged down in detail to the detriment of architectural integrity.
The Chicago Symphony public has Reiner to thank for bringing about the American debut of Carlo Maria Giulini, for many years one of the CSO’s most beloved guest conductors. Reiner also deserves credit for pushing for the formation of the Chicago Symphony Chorus. He believed the CSO deserved to have a resident professional chorus comparable in quality to that of the parent orchestra. Naming Margaret Hillis as the first chorus master, he ensured that this would indeed be the case.
So let’s raise a glass to Fritz Reiner, a man who cared deeply about the making of music, without whose knowledge, dedication and galvanic powers on the podium the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the city’s cultural life, would be much the poorer.
Album of the week
Fritz Reiner, Chicago Symphony Orchestra: The Complete RCA Album Collection (Sony Classical/RCA Red Seal, 63 CDs).
The heart of Reiner’s artistic legacy is the legendary series of recordings he made with the CSO for RCA Victor, the vast majority of them dating from the infancy of stereo. Many of those “Living Stereo” recordings have never been surpassed in musical or technical excellence. Sony has gathered every piece Reiner recorded during his decade at the CSO and issued them in a sturdy boxed set that retails for around $140, which comes out to little more than $2 a disc, an incredible bargain.
This is an absolute trove of vintage CSO recordings, many of them definitive, such as the Richard Strauss and Bela Bartok items, along with the Mussorgsky-Ravel “Pictures at an Exhibition,” Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade,” Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” and “Fountains of Rome,” and many, many more. In nearly every case, the remasterings of the original analog tapes are so good that you might well believe them to be brand-new digital recordings.
Even if you already own much, if not all, this material in various LP and CD formats, the low price and splendid transfers, along with the 156-page, hardcover book that includes an illuminating essay by scholar Kenneth Morgan, make this a Christmas present CSO devotees and Reiner fanciers alike will want to give themselves.
Twitter @jvonrhein
