In 1969 principal conductor George Szell was not feeling well. During a performance in Anchorage, Alaska, he had to stop in the middle of the concert. He just couldn’t do it anymore. A shiver went through the orchestra: is something wrong? That would be his last time conducting his orchestra. He had ruled the orchestra with an iron fist since 1947.
This is the Cleveland at that pinnacle of their power. Conductor Pierre Boulez was a guest, maybe to replace the weak Szell. Boulez was a specialist in modern repertoire. He admired Stravinsky and knew him personally. He had also come to hate his musical thinking in later life. Stravinsky had gone the way of neo-classicism, trying to relive the glory years of classical music by recreating it in new compositions.
The younger Boulez felt this as betrayal to modern music. Music should not look back, and if anything, Boulez was a cultural iconoclast: all the art of the past must be destroyed, he said in 1971.