The Life and Death of Classical Music (16 page)

Demoralization set in. Karsten Witt talked to headhunters, who found him an even trickier job at London’s South Bank Centre. Roger Wright joined the BBC as head of orchestras. ‘I wish we’d had the time to do what Peter Alward was doing at EMI,’ lamented Wright. Alward’s EMI was the only label to conduct its cull with dignity, halving annual output from eighty-five to forty without shedding artists. Alward had managed to persuade Rattle, Jansons and others that the cuts were temporary.

Decca underwent its next decimation on the morning of 3 March 1997. ‘All members of staff at the Chiswick site were called into the personnel office one at a time, at twenty-minute intervals, to be told their futures,’ reported the entertainment trade union, Bectu. ‘The twenty-nine staff who were sacked … were given no written confirmation of any details of their redundancy terms but were nevertheless escorted off the premises.’
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One survivor was asked to draw up budgets for the next five years. She handed them to Mirageas, who thanked, and fired her. His own head rolled months later. ‘It has been brutal and it has been bloody,’ reflected Roger Lewis, ‘but we had to go forward sensibly if we were to have a future.’
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At DG, instant dismissals were prohibited by German laws, which enforced a year’s consultation. The atmosphere curdled. Many of the personnel were related by blood or marriage, some were third generation with the company. Roberts announced that the head office was moving to Berlin. Hamburg politicians thwarted that plan. To speed up natural wastage, Roberts sent in a new head of A&R, an American ex-soldier who spoke no German, had served in the Israeli army and had a daughter on a West Bank settlement. Michael Fine, a free-ranging producer with 500 cottage-label recordings to his credit, ‘did not know a single DG artist’.
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That, he came to realize, was the reason he had been hired. Fine moved to Hamburg with his wife in April 1997, just as the downturn went into slalom.

In 1996 the electronics giant Philips suffered a profits collapse. Jan Timmer went into retirement and Polygram was sold for $10 billion to Seagram, a Canadian liquor firm. The Seagram heir, Edgar J. Bronfman, had bought Universal Studios and was looking to save on ‘synergies’ between music and movies. Analysts were sent in, finding excess and decay. Two hundred rock bands and 3,000 staff were cashiered. Bronfman, who had once co-written a hit for Celine Dion, thought he knew the entertainment business. Alain Levy disagreed, and departed.

Roberts, orphaned, went to ground. ‘Chris Roberts gave every
impression of leaving the company and was virtually silent for months,’ said Fine. ‘The interregnum gave the DG management the opportunity to be somewhat autonomous as we took advantage of the power vacuum above us to conclude several deals that would never have been approved by Roberts.’ The hiatus allowed Fine to form relationships with Abbado and Anne-Sophie Mutter, lining up projects of mutual interest.

Half a year later, the cardigan flounced back. Roberts, basking in Bronfman’s approval, ‘came to Hamburg with one subject on his agenda: restructuring, an American corporate euphemism for firing people … He noted darkly that the Universal corporate culture was “rougher” than Polygram’s and that as German labour law made it difficult to remove people, we should make those reluctant to go miserable.’
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Fine, alarmed that Roberts was centralizing control of the three labels, formed a resistance group and plotted a management buyout. ‘Somewhat indiscreetly I began to sound out colleagues … and with a small group of individuals began to look for money.’ D G was valued at $350 million. Fine reckoned he could raise the money. The only drawback was that he had not asked Bronfman if he was prepared to sell. Roberts had forbidden him on pain of dismissal ever to contact the supreme boss. Fine was trying to find a way to reach Bronfman when, on a Lufthansa flight to London to hear the Welshman Bryn Terfel sing at Glyndebourne, he found himself sitting next to an American who showed an interest in his work. Fine set out his plan. The man gave him a lift into town in a red Jaguar and they exchanged business cards. Michael Adams, his name was. Only it wasn’t. ‘Adams’ was a private detective, planted by Roberts with the collusion of a secretary in Fine’s office. Spies, lies and secret cameras were the new accessories of classical recording. Music was just background.

Fine knew he was living on borrowed time. He had talked Anne-Sophie Mutter into doing Four Seasons for DG, a sure-fire hit, and went off to supervise the recording. Half an hour after the last chord was in the can, the phone rang. ‘When I was called into Roberts’ office to be fired,’ wrote Fine, ‘Mr Adams’ dossier, an
apparent transcript of our discussions, was the primary “evidence” against me.’

Roberts replaced Fine with Martin Engstroem, a Swedish agent who was once Sinopoli’s manager. Engstroem ran a summer festival with SBS bank subsidy at the Swiss resort of Verbier which he promised to convert into a DG showcase. His artist signings were weak, however, and he was fired inside three years.

Roger Lewis, too, departed Decca after just twenty months, less successful than his PRs made out. ‘He had Charlotte Church dancing on his coffee table at home and he couldn’t see the point of her,’ gloated a rival.
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While negotiating his payoff, Lewis pitched for the BBC’s Radio 3, missed out to Roger Wright and settled for a better-paid post as head of Classic FM. Costa Pilavachi succeeded him as head of Decca-Philips, under Chris Roberts’ overlordship.

Higher up the food chain, Universal fell into the hands of Jean-Marie Messier, a media Napoleon who had turned a French water and sewage utility into the Vivendi entertainment empire. Chris Roberts went to ground again at the change, re-emerging at Messier’s side at the 2001 Salzburg Festival, where the emperor went around telling people that music would soon be played through mobile phones. Messier met his Waterloo in a set of accounts that failed to add up. He was fired in June 2002. Colin Southgate flew to Hollywood to sell EMI to Warner, but Warner, after its AOL merger and the dotcom crash, was in freefall. Edgar Bronfman bought a stake in Warner and set about rebuilding his empire. Jim Fifield quit EMI, taking a $22 million payoff. His successor, Ken Berry, was soon paid $9 million to leave. ‘EMI Chuck Berry’ sang the headlines as the doors revolved once more-and back came Alain Levy, hey presto, as head of EMI in a game of musical chairs that was milking the music to death-for all but the little men in suits.

Classical recording continued to be condensed. DG, Decca and Philips made fewer records combined in 2001 than any single one of them had produced a decade before. The new ‘classical’ stars were triumphs of triviality. EMI put out a busty violinist from the
Helsinki opera orchestra who had appeared nude as Linda Brava in a
Playboy
centrefold. Decca countered with Bond, a girlie string quartet in skin-tight bodysuits. When sex failed, labels went for story-a pianist who raised wolves in Canada, another who wore electric-red socks. A sex-change prostitute, Jackie McAuliffe, who played the piano on a BBC docusoap, was signed by Decca. The blind pop singer André a Bocelli was redesignated classical and foisted on Valery Gergiev as a soloist in the Verdi Requiem, which he vocally murdered (see p. 294). The quality of music was strained along with the credulity of customers. Buying a classical CD was more a lottery than a mark of civilized taste. Universal issued an album of Classic Cuts, ‘all the boring bits cut out’. BMG brought out a double disc, ‘The Only Classical Album You’ll Ever Need’. The record business was writing its obituary on the covers of its own products.

Technology, the source of recording, became its destroyer. With computers on every desktop and connectivity through the internet, information flowed with dangerous immediacy. Sales figures were no longer surmised in vague and wishful fashion: they were accessible hour by hour. In March 1991
Billboard
changed the way it tracked the weekly charts. Instead of relying on label output, it switched to data provided by Nielsen Soundscan, which monitored 85 per cent of all US tills where records were sold. ‘Before Soundscan,’ said Robert Hurwitz, head of esoteric Nonesuch, ‘you spent $100,000 recording a Brahms symphony, you spent $25,000 mounting a promotional campaign and you shipped ten thousand copies. Two years later, seven thousand come back. But… you’ve released another two hundred records since the Brahms, so you really don’t notice. Today … you look at Soundscan and you see: Week One, a hundred ten copies, Week Two, eighty-six … We’re hit with hard, cold facts.’
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Soundscan responded cheerfully to press inquiries, revealing that Abbado’s inaugural Brahms first symphony sold just 3,000 copies in five years. With Berlin recording rates necessitating 50,000 sales, it would not break even this side of the Second Coming. A DG
Abbado Edition shifted just sixty copies. Muti, Abbado’s antipode, fared no better. Two of his Verdi operas on Sony failed to reach four figures. Simon Rattle’s Sibelius on EMI managed 2,000 for the Second and Fifth, a few hundred for the rest. Haitink’s Mahler Seventh trickled 400 in eighteen months. Barenboim scored 600 on a Bruckner Third. These were just US statistics, to be sure, and sales were healthier in Europe and Japan. But the pattern was consistent and the scale of disaster incontrovertible. America was by far the biggest classical market and its rejection of classics was an embarrassment that could no longer be concealed. ‘This is not a transitory downturn,’ said Gelb in one of his more lucid assessments, ‘it’s a disaster.’
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Retreat accelerated into rout. EMI axed plans for Jansons in Pittsburgh and Franz Welser-Möst in Cleveland. Warner quit the New York Philharmonic and Chicago. Concert attendances fell to record lows. In 1995–6 31 million Americans bought tickets to orchestral events; by 2004, one in ten had vanished.
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Maestros were reduced to hitting the phone and begging for work. Abbado lunched total strangers in an effort to drum up business in Berlin, where players derived half their income from recording. The best offer he got was to accompany a pair of troublesome EMI singers, Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu. Times were tough, so he took it.

Coping with the downturn deepened Abbado’s millennial angst. Berlin players had been grumbling about his small-print rehearsals, so different from Karajan’s broad sweep. New players were recruited from all over the globe except, slightingly, from the former East Germany and the eastern sector of Berlin. Abbado refused to play politics at auditions. In February 1998, after conducting a numinous Parsifal at the German National Opera, he refused a contract renewal, walking away from the world’s finest orchestra. He had stomach cancer and was fighting adverse odds, but modern surgery worked wonders and he bounced back after a year’s convalescence, directing youth orchestras in festival venues.

The Berlin players put two candidates on the ballot paper. In a close contest, the players chose forty-something Simon Rattle over
Daniel Barenboim, skipping a generation in a quest for renewal. Rattle’s frizzy head plastered public hoardings in the German capital and EMI broke out the champagne. But the British Blairite – for all his social initiatives, which included chats with Turkish piece-workers and a Rite of Spring in deprived schools-failed to resolve the industrial crisis. Unable to make as many recordings in a year as Karajan would make in a month, he squeezed the city, billions in debt, to compensate his players for the earnings they had lost when the century of recording came to an end.

The coup de grace was delivered by the rapid advance of the internet. BMG’s James Glicker, back from Australia in 1997, ‘went around the heads of all the labels and said what are you doing about the internet? They said: nothing, we’ve put the lawyers onto it.’ There was no strategy for coping with illegal downloads except prosecution. Labels set about suing teenaged customers, earning disaffection and derision. The next wave of pop groups, led by Arctic Monkeys, were label-free artists. The men in suits hardly knew which way to turn. Classical music was scarcely affected by Napster-style file sharing but a mortal threat arose from live radio, springing up across the web, ever ready and often cleared for download.

Their only label remedy was classics-lite, led by Decca teen Hayley Westenra (a soundalike of Sixties sweetheart Mary Hop-kin), Sony’s Il Divo and Warner’s Josh Groban, any of whom might have been mistaken for Mitch Miller’s pop smoothies on 1950s Columbia. Beneath the setting yellow sun of Deutsche Grammophon, Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter crossed over with pop writer Elvis Costello. EMI Classics put out an oratorio by ex-Beatle Paul McCartney and a requiem by Karl Jenkins, a writer of advertising jingles. McCartney’s opus was aptly described in the
Los Angeles Times
as ‘a padded, vapid, recycled, cross-dressed, sentimental, pretty-pretty oratorio-the sort of thing that gives saccharine a bad name’.

Classics-lite created an illusion of vitality-19 million US classical sales in 1997 jumped to 22 million in 2001
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-but in 2004 when the novelty wore off the numbers slumped to 18.5 million
and labels were left up slush creek without a paddle. ‘We’re still making records,’ smiled bosses as they toasted one another at black-tie Brits and Grammy nights. Privately, they said, ‘We keep busy, looking at artists, discussing them, and then not signing anyone.’ A marketing man, newly sacked, said, ‘I’d spend my whole day in meetings and come home at night wondering, what have I achieved?’ Howard Stringer, the first Western head of Sony, told investors that he could not, with the best will in the world, justify the continuance of classical recordings in a field where all the best pieces had been recorded too many times and there were no new tunes on the block.

Peter Gelb, anticipating the chop, hit the social circuit with the look of a fortyish spinster at a debutantes’ ball. Calling in his uptown connections, Gelb landed a plum job as head of the Metropolitan Opera after misogynists on the board rejected Deborah Borda of the Los Angeles Philharmonic on grounds of her femininity. ‘My philosophy,’ Gelb told the
New York Times
, swagger returning with every syllable, ‘is that art can be both commercially successful and artistically successful.’
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Had his assertion been put to the test it would have shown that his commercial successes at Sony were inartistic and his artistic successes invisible. ‘Peter was very down about everything,’ said an ally. ‘He always said there was no money to be made in classical.’
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