The Life and Death of Classical Music (10 page)

Foul-mouthed, sexually hyperactive and a serial substance abuser, Yetnikoff’s gross behaviour concealed a subtle, fertile mind. As a junior lawyer he had written the 1967 partnership deal by which CBS licensed its records to Sony in Japan. Sony’s founders were classical music buffs. Karajan would stay at Akio Morita’s home when visiting Japan, swimming naked in his pool. Other guests included Leonard Bernstein and Lorin Maazel. Morita’s next in line, Norio Ohga, had trained in Berlin as a classical baritone and gave up a burgeoning opera career on a promise that he would one day run Sony. Both men were imbued with Western civilization, but what they really coveted was youth culture. CBS rock stars would raise the Sony profile across Asia. Yetnikoff, appreciating the importance of the deal, delivered the contract in pouring rain to Morita’s home. The chairman was in bed with flu. Yetnikoff waited dripping in the lobby while fifty pages were read, digested and initialled.

Each company sank $1 million in the joint venture. By 1970 CBS-Sony was making $100 million a year. Ohga, tall and emotionally reserved, capable of intense concentration and extreme
rage, bonded with eager-beaver Yetnikoff. They shared long evenings talking about the meaning of life and slept over at each other’s homes. Yetnikoff, alert to the Asian bonanza, wanted CBS-Sony to pay back profits to the parent companies. Ohga prevaricated. Yetnikoff indulged him by having Masterworks record John Williams (CD 45, p. 211), Murray Perahia and Andrew Davis cheaply from its London office. ‘The company no longer cared about classics and almost resented any new project,’ said Paul Myers, head of international A&R. RCA, in me-too mode, shifted classical to London, where André Previn covered the Vaughan Williams symphonies and an Irish flute from Karajan’s orchestra, James Galway, became a solo star. The office was run by Ken Glancy, a former Lieberson aide; when he was purged, ‘the top management that followed was mostly either disinterested in or totally ignorant of classical music’.
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US labels had effectively given up recording American orchestras when, out of the blue, the Europeans swanned in. Boston, dropped by RCA in 1969, offered Arthur Fiedler and its million-selling Pops to Deutsche Grammophon, provided they took some symphonic repertoire with William Steinberg and Bernstein protege Michael Tilson Thomas. The Boston Symphony Orchestra was non-union and the costs manageable.

Decca landed months later in Chicago in the entourage of Georg Solti. Unsettled since Culshaw left, Solti apparently called Minshull ‘second-rate’
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and threatened to leave the label unless it recorded his new orchestras. To his surprise, Rosengarten agreed. Solti’s inaugural season in Chicago ended with an overseas tour; he stopped in Vienna to record Mahler’s eighth symphony with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the chorus of the Vienna Opera, a snub to the local Philharmonic. Solti went on to make a hundred recordings in Chicago, selling 5 million discs. ‘The English are not good at selling,’
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he grumbled, but the facts spoke otherwise-thanks largely to Decca’s New York bureau chief, Terry McEwen.

‘Terry was a man of gargantuan tastes with the biggest expense account I’ve ever seen,’ said the
New York Times
writer Stephen
Rubin, later a successful publisher. ‘He was one of those people who couldn’t stay at home nights. We’d have these incredible dinners with Regine Crespin, Tebaldi, Marilyn Horne, Bidu Sayao, and then back to his place to listen to a cassette he’d made of singers in weird roles and the wrong languages: we had to identify the artists. Terry had a ferocious passion for singers. A lot of his personal tastes fed into Decca Records, or London as it was known here. London was the singers’ label in Terry’s time, bar none.’
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Two world stars plopped into his lap. Joan Sutherland was queen of bel canto and Luciano Pavarotti, her fledgling partner, was potentially the tenor of the century. Culshaw had not liked him and Rosengarten had too many tenors on his books-Di Stefano, Corelli, McCracken-but Minshull signed the Italian and McEwen took to him on sight, one man-mountain to another, when Pavarotti came to New York in 1967 as cover for Carlo Bergonzi in a Karajan Verdi Requiem. McEwen took the tenor to be styled and snapped by fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo. ‘Luciano, you’re a nice guy,’ he said. ‘You need a real bastard to do your publicity.’
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Herbert Breslin, a hustler of hype, was hired to put Pavarotti everywhere, and all other singers in the shade. For Sutherland McEwen created an image as grande dame of the grand tradition.

His achievements were not wholeheartedly appreciated. ‘Ray Minshull was always rather uptight about him,’ said Paul Myers, ‘but most of us suspected that Terry had a strong influence.’ ‘The artists loved him,’ said Breslin, ‘in part, because he was extremely generous: who’s not going to love a generous record promoter? He always hosted after-performance dinners, and parties, and promotions-all, of course, with Decca’s money.’
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McEwen put Solti on the cover of
Time
magazine in May 1973 as The Fastest Baton in the West, the maestro for Middle America. Other labels, landing with lesser podium stars, found the fame game sewn up.

Philips started in San Francisco with the young Seiji Ozawa, in a bid to penetrate the over-protected Japanese record market. Ozawa-mop-topped, polo-necked and matey with the Sony
bosses Morita and Ohga-was the first Japanese to head a Western orchestra. Photogenic, energetic and slightly off-centre in his musical tastes (CD 65, p. 235), Ozawa moved up from San Francisco to Boston. Philips took over the Boston contract from DGG without difficulty, since the labels were moving to the next stage of union. Frits Philips, nearing retirement, agreed with Ernst von Siemens to pool their labels in PolyGram International. DG (the ‘Gesellschaft’ was dropped) and Philips were allowed to maintain separate identities for the time being but the Dutch, in any clash, were expected to submit to the Germans.

DG turned its American operation into a Karajan support system. The maestro was appearing seasonally at the Met and his influence on its young music director, James Levine, was considerable-a ‘phenomenal inspiration’,
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said Levine. ‘Karajan will never rest until he is deified in the United States,’ said a record official,
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and DG’s New York chief Guenter Hensler thrust K rations aggressively into stores. Karajan’s progress, however, was constrained by his Nazi past and DG decided that it needed an American counterweight. When Bernstein was dropped by CBS, DG picked up a Met recording of Carmen, with Marilyn Horne in the title role. It won a 1973 Grammy but unsold sets cluttered record-store dump bins. DG re-signed Bernstein to record Liszt’s unmarketable Faust symphony, followed by his own three symphonies. The clincher was getting Karajan to waive his veto and, in the interests of DG America, invite Lennie to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic at the 1975 Salzburg Festival.

Low farce ensued. Hearing that Lenny was heading for Salzburg, the CBS London office plastered Bernstein posters on every vacant shop window. A mischievous forest of posters sprang up on the route that Karajan took each morning into work. The maestro was not amused, even less so when Lennie staged a triumphal last-minute entry along the front row of Festspielhaus seats, leaning over a balustrade to greet his many pals in the Vienna Philharmonic while Karajan was waiting in the pit to start Verdi’s Don Carlos. The Austrian Chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, gave a state party for
Bernstein’s fifty-seventh birthday. Bernstein’s Mahler Eighth was hailed in the Austrian press as ‘an incomparable event’. Karajan turned puce, but DG got its man. Bernstein signed exclusively to the Yellow Label in 1981.

These realignments left three labels holding sway over America’s Big Five orchestras. Cleveland lined up with Decca, Philadelphia with Philips, New York with DG. Chicago’s musicians refused to enter wage talks without a Decca man present. By 1980, the British label with Solti, Pavarotti and Sutherland had almost one-third of US classical sales. The Decca Sound settled on America like an army blanket, minimizing the differences between orchestras, but demand was waning as war vets grew old. Solti, for all his vigour, never matched Toscanini’s fame and, when Ozawa lost his Beatles looks, Boston began along slide into ennui. Levine, Tilson Thomas and Leonard Slatkin maintained their profile but orchestras looked to the European labels for their next music director.

EMI, out of the US running, was mired in a British decade of oil crisis and labour stoppages. Lockwood retired, handing over to John Read, an accountant from Ford Motors, who looked at the Beatles profits, rising year on year, and said ‘the music business can run itself. Read went looking for external money spinners. CAT body scanners were the hot item in medical diagnostics and Read spent a mint on buying marketing rights. Record producers, hauled out of studios, were despatched to hospitals. ‘I was appointed head of the East European business,’ related Peter Andry. ‘I remember flying off with John Read to Russia to sell CAT machines, but we couldn’t get the Russian women into the things. Their thighs were too big.’
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Read splurged further on buying defunct film studios with a view to revitalizing British cinema. He lost touch with music, so much so that when the Sex Pistols punk band expleted four-letter words on family-time television, he sacked them. ‘Our view within EMI,’ intoned Read, ‘is that we should seek to discourage records that are likely to give offence to the majority of people … EMI should not set itself up as a public censor, but it does seek to
encourage restraint.’
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Restraint never sold a record and EMI’s youth-cred went down the drain.

Classics were becalmed under Peter Andry who, aseptically patrician, hitched his hopes to André Previn, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, a man once married to a pop singer (Dory Previn) and now to a film star (Mia Farrow). In strikebound, power-cut Britain, such secondhand celebrity passed for sex appeal and Previn, nicknamed Andrew Preview, was a fixture on three-channel television, whether as a musician or as a salesman for EMI household goods. He was regarded as ‘a first-rate conductor of second-rate music’, outstanding in showpieces like Carmina Burana and Rachmaninov’s The Bells. Some LSO players, craving profundity, tried to oust him for Eugen Jochum, but Previn clung on for eleven years, inflicting a breezy superficiality on London’s musical ecology.

Peter Andry, alert to his shortcomings, had a secret weapon up his sleeve. ‘I had always kept in touch with Karajan,’ said Andry. ‘His secretary, André von Mattoni, would let me know when he was passing through, and I’d be there at the airport to have a few words, talk music, say how wonderful he was.’ Karajan was having a falling-out with DG, which paid him a flat fee per LP at his request, in order to keep royalties out of the grasp of his second wife, Anita, whom he had replaced with a French model, Eliette. But the records sold immensely and Karajan worked out that the alimony dodge had cost him 6 million Deutschmarks. He asked DG to make good. The Germans, unwilling to accede to an unjustified demand, dithered. The Berlin Philharmonic, sensing discord, chipped in with demands for an increased session fee of 65 Deutschmarks per player hour, as much as Decca were paying in Chicago. Not viable, said D G. The atmosphere was turning acrid when Andry, with exquisite timing, offered to take over one-third of the next DG contract, fifteen sessions a year, meaning more money for maestro and musicians. Karajan, pleased to have made his point, signed for both labels. He then punished the Berlin players by diverting several EMI sessions to the Orchestre de Paris.

‘My policy,’ reflected Andry, ‘was to keep the English-speaking
world happy with Previn, and Europe and Japan with Karajan. My achievement was to keep classical business going within the milieu of a greatly expanding pop business. It obliged me to sit in dreary meetings and click my fingers to their noisy stuff. But Karajan and Previn made a wonderful team.’ So wonderful, in fact, that Ernst von Siemens secretly approached Andry to become president of DG and Philips. Unwilling to move his family to Germany, Andry declined. Siemens returned with a bigger offer. ‘Each time, I managed to improve my position at EMI,’ laughed Andry, a dealmaker to his bones.

Where Legge loathed all rivals, Andry was eager to trade. He let DG record Carlo-Maria Giulini ‘since he wasn’t selling much on EMI’, as well as Placido Domingo who misjudged his record career by appearing on too many outlets, none of which promoted him as Decca did Pavarotti. Exclusivity was the coinage by which labels did their deals. Typically, two executives would meet for lunch at a blushingly expensive restaurant in London or Salzburg where, after a liberal imbibing of rare vintages, the talent was laid out over coffee. ‘I’ll give you an Arrau and two Brendels for Previn to play Rhapsody in Blue with Haitink,’ Philips might say to EMI, like two kids with cigarette cards in a playground.

‘We want the Vienna Phil for Previn’s Tchaikovsky,’ EMI would reply.

‘Tricky, D G have got Vienna tied up for the next Tchaikovsky. Still, DG want Elly Ameling from us, so I might get a deal. You wouldn’t take a Dutch fiddler off my hands in the Brahms concerto?’

‘Not unless you borrow our English cellist for the Delius.’

Callous as this may sound, these exchanges often worked in an artist’s best interest. A soloist failing twice on Philips might have better luck with a third shot on EMI. If Ashkenazy (Decca) insisted that only Previn (EMI) understood him in the Rachmaninov concertos, Minshull and Andry would cut a deal that kept both artists happy. These swaps reassured the majors that their artists were an elite and that they were protecting the consumer from a flood of charlatans.

Talent was trawled nightly at recital halls, opera rehearsals and conservatoire graduations. Producers pooled new names at monthly meetings, making their decisions on the basis of passionate conviction. ‘Andry said we were going to do Italian operas and it was a choice between Riccardo Muti and James Levine,’ said producer John Mordler. ‘I was sent to Vienna and heard Muti conduct Aida at the Staatsoper – it was electrifying. After that, there was no more talk of Levine.’
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