According to Mariss Jansons, ‘Everything he said or analysed was amazing. You could sit there breathlessly and just listen.’ Iván Fischer remembers him wanting to hear ‘the piece itself’ and nothing else: ‘He was a disciple of Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity] whose duty as he saw it above all was to serve the composer.’ For Zubin Mehta, quite simply: ‘He was my idol in so many ways. I admired him unreservedly, and I still consider him the greatest intellect I have ever encountered.’

It was hearing Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier waltzes conducted by Hans Swarowsky that inspired Jansons to uproot himself from Riga and travel to Vienna, where Swarowsky ran a conducting class at the Music Academy that can justly be called legendary. Look further down the roll call of his students and you see Abbado, Sinopoli, Mario Venzago, Manfred Huss, Adám Fischer, Bruno Weil … And, beyond those who went on to follow Swarowsky’s own calling, Martha Argerich, Plácido Domingo and the scholar Constantin Floros all passed through his class.

‘When I hear another Swarowsky pupil,’ says Iván Fischer, ‘I always hear his influence working within them, because he was so strong a personality, and so convincing a musician.’ Many conductors may have wished they could haul a singer over the coals for showboating, but few have followed through and done it, as Swarowsky reportedly did to Mariano Stabile in 1950 while recording ‘Là ci darem la mano’ from Don Giovanni: ‘Mozart has written no change of tempo and there will be no change of tempo!’

If these recollections leave the impression of a score-bound martinet, try those Rosenkavalier waltzes for yourself and you’ll find them as sly, tender and unsentimental as the composer’s own recordings. Freshly remastered, they feature within an 11-CD box of live, radio and commercial recordings compiled for Günter Hänssler’s Profil label to mark the 120th anniversary of the conductor’s birth. A 2018 exhibition at the Vienna State Opera displayed photos, scores and effects to tell the story of Swarowsky’s life.

And what a life it was, beginning in Vienna in September 1899 with his birth out of wedlock to the daughter of a Viennese police inspector, like a subplot of Der Rosenkavalier itself. He grew up in advantageous circumstances thanks to the Jewish banker who was most likely his father. Having fought on the Italian front in the First World War, Swarowsky was captured, escaped and fell in love with a local girl (‘I’ve never known a foreigner speak such perfect Italian,’ Sinopoli later said). Discharged from the army in 1919, he studied with Busoni and attended lectures given by Freud and Karl Kraus, the lion of pre-war literary Vienna. While he wavered between the callings of music and psychoanalysis, attending a performance of Mahler’s Third in 1920 settled the matter. The symphony took on emblematic significance for him; so did the music of Richard Strauss.

Swarowsky conducted at the Vienna Volksoper during the 1920s and into the ’30s, then took up more prestigious posts in Hamburg and Berlin. But his uncertain paternity told against him in the growing climate of anti-Semitism, his friendship with Strauss counted for naught, and he found temporary refuge as Music Director of the Zurich Opera, where he worked with Stravinsky and stage director Walter Felsenstein.

A picture begins to take shape of a reluctant romantic, a Viennese musician to his fingertips, in touch with all that city’s musical traditions (and the Profil set concludes with a delicious collection of Czech- and home-made waltzes and polkas) but too conscientious and curious-minded to work within their limits and take them for granted. An opera box of Swarowsky would no less persuasively present Tosca and Don Giovanni – and the shoestring Ring he recorded in Nuremberg during the weeks before the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague. Perhaps because of its release on sundry budget labels (an image problem afflicting most of Swarowsky’s studio recordings), the cycle received a dusty reception in the UK and US, but the makeshift casting and ‘characterful’ Czech scratch band create their own, powerfully spontaneous atmosphere, enhanced by conducting that presses at the heels of the drama, almost as if the Soviet tanks were at the door of the studio.

Further examples of his mercurial spirit survive in his partnership with one-off creative spirits such as Ivry Gitlis (a whirlwind Mendelssohn Violin Concerto) and Friedrich Gulda, the soloist on a footloose Piano Concerto K467 from 1962 where Mozart really sings the blues, decades before period-instrument musicians caught up with the idea that the music lies not only in, but in between, the notes. At least in theory, Swarowsky understood the humility required of a good conductor, ‘who only makes signs in the air,’ he wrote, ‘but whose hands are those of a “conjuror” (although the “magic” is carried out by others). He may well be grateful that his baton produces no sound!’

Defining moments

1912 – Premiere of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, Munich

Sings in children’s chorus under the direction of the composer.

1944 – Music director of the Polish PO, Krákow

Swarowsky (having in straitened circumstances assisted Clemens Krauss with the libretto of Capriccio at the request of the composer) is secured this post by Strauss, under governorship of Hans Frank, outside the diktats of the German Reich. Employs musicians from the Plaszów concentration camp – and gets by.

1946 – Return to Vienna

After denazification by a US tribunal, becomes Music Director of Vienna Symphony, and establishes his class at the Music Academy.

1947 – Becomes director of the Graz Opera

Marries for the third time, at the age of 48, to 17-year-old Doris Kreuz; Karl Böhm and violinist Wolfgang Schneiderhan serve as ushers; Doris bears the last two of his four children, Daniela and Gloria (the latter born while he attended rehearsals for Beethoven’s Missa solemnis led by Bernstein in Vienna).

1957 – Becomes chief conductor of Scottish National Orchestra

A brief post, which he left three years later, but which introduced UK audiences to the powerful sweep of his Beethoven and Strauss interpretations, some of which survive as broadcasts.

1975 – September 10: dies from cancer in Salzburg

Four years later his reflections on conducting are published as Wahrung der Gestalt (‘Holding Shape’), in which he outlines his principles of interpretation, with particular reference to tempo relationships. A published English translation is forthcoming.

This article originally appeared in the January 2020 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today!