The Life and Death of Classical Music (12 page)

A month before Athens, at the 1981 Salzburg Easter Festival,
Morita and Karajan demonstrated the Digital Audio Disc. ‘All else,’ growled the conductor, ‘is gaslight.’ Karajan was a man in a hurry. He had suffered a stroke, followed by spinal surgery, and was in constant pain. At home in Anif, he compulsively viewed and edited his concerts on a giant screen, preparing a video legacy. He put pressure on Polygram to invest 100 million Deutschmarks in a digital pressing plant in Hanover. Ohga spent $30 million of CBS-Sony dividends on a parallel plant in Shizuoka Prefecture. In the race to launch, Nobuyuki Idei, the Sony head of production, suffered a breakdown and watched the presentation from a hospital bed.

At Athens, the industry split between horsepower and nuclear. When Ohga played his prototype CD, label owners rioted, accusing equipment makers of killing the golden LP. ‘The truth is in the groove! The truth is in the groove!’ they chanted. ‘We barely escaped physical violence,’ recalled Jan Timmer, a burly Philips boss.
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EMI and RCA boycotted CD and purists declared it ‘sterile’. ‘It would not be the first time the Japanese have burnt their fingers,’
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gloated Raymond Cooke, president-elect of the International Audio Engineering Society.

But the LP, whatever its loyalists protested, was doomed. ‘Almost every record purchased nowadays has one defect or another and in a number of cases I have found so many bangs, pops, cracks and so on that it is impossible to listen with any semblance of enjoyment,’ ran a typical reader’s complaint in
Gramophone.
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The ritual of dusting a disc, laying it on the turntable, inspecting the needle and lowering the arm onto the surface felt antiquated in an automated age. Sales were collapsing. At EMI’s Classics for Pleasure label, an English-sung Ring cycle conducted by the venerable Reginald Goodall sold precisely eighty-six copies. The bleakness of such figures was seldom admitted but every now and then a grim truth shone through. In the summer of 1982 a Polygram executive was trying to wheedle a
Sunday Times
journalist into writing about two pretty French sisters, Katia and Marielle Labeque, who had a freak hit in France-100,000 sales of Gershwin’s four-hand version of Rhapsody in Blue.

‘How many outside France?’ said the writer.

‘Not released in the States, 3,000 UK.’

‘That’s not much …’

‘Are you kidding?’ exclaimed the salesman. ‘Three thousand classical in the UK is enormous. Most releases don’t sell a tenth of that …’

‘Are
you
kidding?’ echoed the writer, unable to believe the disparity of sales to hype.

Arranging to meet the sisters at the Westbury Hotel, near Oxford Street, where many musicians stayed, he saw two men scurry into a doorway at the end of the corridor as he approached the room. One he recognized as an EMI producer. The situation was surreal. Despite minuscule sales, the girls were being wooed by several labels.
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‘If compact disc had not come along when it did,’ said Archiv’s André as Holschneider, ‘we would all have been lost.’
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While waiting for digital, daisy labels flowered on English lawns. Brian Couzens, a freelance engineer, founded Chandos with his son Ralph in the Essex backwater of Colchester. They spotted two formidable conductors from the Soviet Baltic states and launched the prodigious careers of Neeme Jarvi and Mariss Jansons. Hyperion was the dreamchild of Ted Perry, who paid for his sessions by driving an ice-cream van by day and a minicab at night; his breakthrough was the monodic chant of the medieval Hildegard of Bingen. Two ex-Decca boys, Jack Boyce and Harley Usill, founded Academy Sound and Vision (ASV). Weirdest of daisies was Nimbus, run by a French-Russian called Numa Labinsky from a castle in Wales. Count Numa claimed to represent ‘the only surviving legacy of older schools of singing’,
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a noise that veered from growl to squeak; he also built the UK’s first CD plant, at Wyastone Leys, Monmouth.

The business was turning bizarre but the majors saw nothing, heard nothing, beyond their own glass walls. CBS needed a new head of Masterworks. Joseph P. Dash, vice-president for strategic planning, was promised the job-only to get pipped by a rank outsider from Israel. Simon Schmidt, founder of the CBS Israel subsidiary which had 80 per cent of national sales, wanted a break from Middle East tension. ‘He was a genius at business,’ said an underling,
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but out of his depth at headquarters. ‘Schmidt caused chaos,’ said Paul Myers. ‘He fired half the staff, [saying] that he intended to buy cheap records from Hungary and sell them for full price on the US market.’ ‘You want to know how he hired a head of A&R?’ demanded Dash. ‘This is the truth, I heard it from Zubin’s own lips.’
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Zubin Mehta, music director of the New York and Israel
Philharmonic orchestras, was asked by Schmidt to recommend an assistant. ‘Zubin thought Simon wanted a personal secretary and named a woman called Catherine Reed who had once worked at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Next thing we know, she is vice-president of artists and repertoire. Catherine came into my office as I was looking at a cover for Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet,’ recalled Myers, ‘and demanded to know who was singing the lead.’

An erotic presence, Catherine Reed formed a close friendship with the buttoned-up president of CBS Inc., Thomas Wyman. She told Wyman that Schmidt was useless and the Israeli was fired. Dash, the next head of Masterworks, delicately refrained from asking Reed about her relationship with Wyman. ‘She came into my office saying he wouldn’t leave her alone, but after that no one dared touch her.’ When the board sacked Wyman for mishandling a takeover, Dash reported, ‘In a matter of days, I kicked out Catherine Reed.’

Dash, inheriting a $20-million turnover and no profit, plunged into ‘crossover’ – a not yet pejorative term, which involved some gentle genre bending. If Frank Sinatra could sing Kurt Weill and Joan Baez the Bachianas Brasileiras of Villa-Lobos, why not twin the world’s best tenor with America’s number-one pop writer? The catalyst was Milt Okun, a millionaire folk mogul, producer of Harry Belafonte, Miriam Makeba, Peter, Paul and Mary and a guy called Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr, who topped the charts as John Denver. Milt was smitten with Placido Domingo, who introduced him to Dash in his Covent Garden green room. ‘We go out to dinner, with wives, without wives,’ said Dash. ‘I sign Placido Domingo on an exclusive crossover contract. My staff think I have lost my marbles. Then Milt delivers Placido and John Denver in Perhaps Love. It goes platinum, sells a hundred thousand. In a year, Masterworks is in profit.’

Glenn Gould called. He had decided to make his record with Karajan. While CBS wrangled with DG over which label went on the cover, Gould phoned Neville Marriner, now music director in Minnesota. ‘I want to make a record with orchestra,’ he said.

Marriner headed north to Toronto, heart in mouth. During a long night’s chat, Gould told him that, on a good day, he might get two minutes of music into the can. ‘That would be uneconomic,’ said Marriner. They agreed that Gould would play the solo part of a Beethoven concerto in his studio and send it to Marriner, who would wrap an orchestra around it.
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The conductor went away beaming, but heard nothing more. Days after his fiftieth birthday in September 1982, Gould suffered a fatal stroke and the piano lost an unfathomable legend. Dead, Gould began selling faster than alive. Each memorial release outstripped the last. The same was happening with Maria Callas on EMI, five years after her death. This was an alarming trend, the mark of a doomed civilization that worships its dead.

Gould’s producer, Paul Myers, had moved to Decca, hoping for a happier atmosphere but finding an office thick with intrigue. ‘Ray Minshull had trouble communicating sympathetically with staff,’ he discovered. ‘Ray was always secretive,’ said producer James Mallinson, ‘and the Polygram pressures just made it worse.’ Mallinson left the company shortly after the night he won thirteen Grammies, prompting rumours-unfounded, he insists-that Minshull fired him out of jealousy. Michael Haas, a young gay producer, was beset by office gossip that he was sleeping with the boss. He reported the story to Minshull, who gave him ‘years and years of artists on contracts not being renewed: Karl Muünchinger, Horst Stein, Geneva recordings. The official administration was very unfriendly towards me, but Christopher Raeburn remained a loyal supporter and so did Solti. He was generous and extremely kind, the most impressive “Mensch” I have worked with.’
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Decca, bottom of the pecking order in Polygram, fought with its sisters like cats in a sack. A clash-prevention system designed to stop the three labels covering the same repertoire was constantly breached. During one month all three issued Bruckner’s fifth symphony; another year each produced a Tristan und Isolde. Harried producers, trapped between corporate discipline and the insistent demands of Karajan, Haitink and Solti, hit the bottle. As drugs were to rock, booze became the classical companion. Several senior
men were sent to dry out at sanatoria; one D G producer committed suicide in a Black Forest clinic.

Tensions eased when André as Holschneider became chairman of the clash committee. ‘Coming from Archiv, the smallest label, and from an academic background, I was seen as relatively neutral,’ he said. ‘I did the job for some years. In the view of my bosses I did it quite well. In the end, I was asked to become head of Deutsche Grammophon.’
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His timing was immaculate: there had never been a better moment to take charge of a classical enterprise.

The rainbow dawn broke on 31 August 1982 with an announcement from Tokyo that a four-walled consortium of Sony, CBS-Sony, Philips and Polygram had perfected Compact Disc. On 1 October Sony’s CDP-101 player went into Japanese shops, its name representing the binary numerals, one and zero, that encoded digital sound. Fifty CBS-Sony CDs were available, topped by Billy Joel’s 52nd Street. ‘There has never been an example as strong as the CD of how effective the combined power of the Sony Group can be,’ exulted Ohga. Sony’s CDP-101 cost $700 and CDs were twice the price of LPs. Aimed at the high end of the hi-fi hobby, the release sheet was geared to wealthy, middle-aged audiophiles. One fifth of the batch was classical.

Japanese stores ran out of stock in a week and supply was running nine months behind demand,
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but the European launch went ahead in March 1983, with 100 Polygram releases, equally over-represented in classics. In Britain, 30,000 CDs sold in a month, and the reception was repeated in France, West Germany and Holland. In May, when CD reached Australia, EMI joined the format. ‘We will do whatever the consumer wants,’ grouched company spokesman Brian Southall. ‘We’ll press music on vinyl, tape or even banana leaves if that’s what they will buy.’
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By the time of the US launch in September, CD was the new world order. An in-car player arrived, followed in September 1984 by Walkman CD. Players fell to generally affordable prices but discs stayed high, fattening label profits. By 1986 CDs outsold LPs. US
sales rose from a million in 1983 to 334 million by 1990, 943 million by 2000.

The desperate decade was over. Classical had a double-figure market share for the first time since before the Beatles. What’s more, anything sold. Labels put out short-measure CDs. Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony, running forty minutes, occupied a whole disc on every label except Telarc. Customers who wanted the Bach cello suites paid for three discs on DG and EMI, but for only two on CBS and Decca.

Digital sound was stunningly transparent. A press demo of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture extruded carpentry noises from the Chicago cellos. On a third hearing, the sawing was traced to a microphone placed too close to the cellos. Early stereo and even mono recordings sounded more natural on CD than multi-miked modernities. Furtwängler, Ferrier, Beecham, Kreisler and Casals (though not harsh Toscanini) were outselling their successors. Worse still, the CD was indestructible. Once a consumer had bought a basic classical library he need never buy another record.

Although business boomed through the 1980s, the countdown to meltdown had begun. Not everyone liked digital. Nigel Kennedy, a quaintly counter-cultural British violinist with a 2 million-selling Four Seasons, had EMI record him on analogue machines. ‘A lot of my favourite records were made on acetate,’ he wrote, ‘and I think that there would be far many more beautiful performances if more performers could drag themselves away from the clinical and sterile technical standards provided for and expected by today’s musical fashion.’
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Unknown to Kennedy, as he played the Beethoven concerto with Klaus Tennstedt in Kiel, northern Germany, producers ran a digital tape as backup.
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‘Anyone who cannot hear that CDs are incomparably superior to records, 9.7 to a perfect 10, has a tin ear and no business listening to music,’ thundered Norio Ohga.
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Karajan, equally emphatic, had 200 CDs out by his eightieth birthday, some of them in a ‘special edition’ with pastel covers by his wife, Eliette, who had taken up painting as a hobby. That year, Karajan accounted for a third of DG sales.
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His influence, wrote
Gramophone
, was ‘almost
incalculable … There can be few record collectors who are without at least one of his discs.’
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But Karajan was in torment. His health was broken and an unexpectedly objective biography by an American sailing writer, Roger Vaughan, exposed an ugly supremacism. ‘I was born to command,’ said Karajan.
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When Berlin players vetoed a female clarinettist, Sabine Mayer, whose sound jarred against the rest of the section, Karajan sulked in his tent for months before severing ties with Berlin. Switching to Vienna, he demanded ever-higher royalties to fund his video legacy. Within DG, his favourite producer Gunther Breest wanted to release the videodiscs but Holschneider argued they would be ‘an expensive mistake’.
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Karajan’s fourth recording of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique and Dvorák’s New World symphonies were mannered and insipid beside the controlled rigour of his prime; the cameras dwelled on his tightly shut eyes and his fixed, face-lifted expression. CDs, meanwhile, continued to grow and DG, said its rivals, ‘was where we all wanted to be’.
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Philips was the chief loser in the CD boom. Devastated by the sudden death of disco, its Polygram subsidiary was $200 million in debt by 1983. The Bee Gees launched a lawsuit, draining another $70 million. Jan Timmer, a classically trained singer, took the helm, moving Polygram HQ from sleepy Baarn to London and New York, where he negotiated a merger with Warner. Yetnikoff, terrified of competition, invoked anti-monopoly procedures and stalled the deal at the Federal Trade Commission. Thwarted, Timmer bought out Siemens’ share, taking the whole of the music and movie combine under Dutch control. In 1989 he floated Polygram on the Amsterdam stock exchange with a valuation of $5.6 billion.

The classical consequences were savage. Three autonomous labels were geared to shareholder expectations and ordered to obtain head office approval for all major outlays. Timmer meddled in musical decisions. When he rose in 1990 to executive chairman of the parent Philips group, his successor, Alain Levy, was ‘the
kind of man who has to be in your face all the time or he’s not doing his job’.
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A thickset, square-spectacled, frizzy-haired executive of North African descent, Levy called himself ‘a businessman, not a music man: I don’t trust my ears’.
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Classical chiefs quaked on his white carpet but found his ignorance easier to bear than Timmer’s half-knowledge. ‘For us, it was better with Levy,’ said Holschneider, who was plotting the post-Karajan cartography.

Holschneider’s model for the new DG was an Italian designer label, built around Claudio Abbado, once of La Scala and now of the Vienna Opera. In contrast to the reactionary Karajan, Abbado, intellectually chic and sexually charismatic, favoured living composers, left-wing causes and lean cuisine. Carlo-Maria Giulini would join him as elder statesman while Giuseppe Sinopoli, a physician and archaeologist who conducted the Philharmonia, would add an alternative dimension. Leonard Bernstein would be the label’s international icon, guaranteed ‘absolute star treatment’,
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his every whim fulfilled. ‘I took a personal interest in the Abbado and Bernstein contracts,’ said Holschneider. ‘I had to make sure that if anything happened to Karajan we weren’t left naked.’
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Sony, however, had ulterior plans. While Morita lectured Western leaders on how to run their economies, Ohga was circling CBS like an eagle at noon. ‘I never knew when Ohga was going to be in New York, but he always came by,’ said Joseph Dash. ‘One day he says to me “Joe, I think Daniel Barenboim is going to be the next Karajan. You should sign him to do the Bruckner symphonies.” I said, “Thanks very much, we’ll look into it.”’ James T. Wolfensohn, a CBS board director and future World Bank president who was Barenboim’s close friend, had made a similar pitch. Dash was doubtful. ‘I liked Barenboim, but I didn’t think he’d sell enough records to support the kind of deal he wanted from us.’