The Life and Death of Classical Music (25 page)

It may be the most perennial of operas but in the public mind there is only one Tosca. Never the sweetest of voices or natures, Maria Callas brought veracity to a grubby plot and ferocity to its apotheosis. Groped by the sleazebag Scarpia, who has arrested and tortured her artist husband, Tosca grabs a fruit knife and stabs him dead. Callas, on stage, would strike so hard with the plastic prop knife that she drew blood from Gobbi, her regular partner, and gasps from the audience, who thought she had really killed him.

Their recording, with Giuseppe di Stefano a heroic Cavaradossi and the La Scala team under its austere music director Victor de Sabata, was made early enough in her career for Callas to take guidance from a conductor. De Sabata drilled her for half an hour in the end aria of the second act, making her sing the final line thirty times until she emitted a low growl that lay far beneath her register, a sound so ominous it chills the marrow. The Te Deum scene took six hours before De Sabata expressed satisfaction. EMI’s Walter Legge sat back and let events take their course, selecting the best takes from miles of tape when the musicians had dispersed.

The Callas voice, never conventionally beautiful, possessed a theatrical dimension that was felt more on record than on stage. Her Vissi d’arte, on her knees before Scarpia, goes squally with stress but the listener is made to believe in her agony more than in the tonal perfection of other heroines. Callas on record always lives out her characters. The portrait may not be lovely, but it is brutally real.

Tosca was the last role that she sang on stage before retiring in 1965, hurt in pride and heart when the Greek shipowner Aristotle Onassis left her to marry Jacqueline Kennedy. No artist would ever match her recorded appeal. In the twenty-first century, three
decades after her death, Callas stills sells more records than any living soprano.

Beaten by CBS to the LP, RCA got in first with stereo. After experimental sessions in New York with the audio-aware Leopold Stokowski, the engineers went to Boston to tape a Berlioz Damnation of Faust with Charles Munch. The results were spacious but swoony beside good mono sound. The engineers moved on to Chicago, where the orchestra had a tough new music director in Fritz Reiner, and the label’s top-selling pianist, Arthur Rubinstein, was down to play the first Brahms concerto.

Conductor and soloist had a blazing row over Reiner’s casual remark that Chopin was an effeminate composer and probably gay, an insult that Rubinstein took personally and nationally, being Polish by birth. In a frigid atmosphere the two professionals set about performing the warmest of concertos, a richly coloured tapestry of romantic sound. Rubinstein reined in his usual exuberance and played with limpid precision, the piano set realistically centre-left, instead of far to the front as he preferred. Reiner summoned gorgeously lyrical playing from the orchestra, opening the Adagio with velvety strings and tartly spiced winds and maintaining the tightest imaginable control of line throughout three-quarters of a very short hour. Recordings by Curzon, Solomon, Brendel and Gilels will all have their advocates, but the tempering of a wilful soloist by a strong-minded conductor provides a taut backdrop for music of sublime beauty and awesome structure.

The producers Richard Mohr and Jack Pfeiffer, with engineers Lewis Layton and Leslie Chase (all legendary names to audiophiles), limited themselves to three microphones, each wired to a separate channel, giving a precise image of left and right and an overview of centre. This was stereo’s coming-of-age recording, the session
where it proved its worth, and the team returned jubilantly to base. Much to their dismay, the record was not issued for another four years, while labels wrangled over a unified stereo format and the public was persuaded to invest in new systems.

The Canadian pianist made his first major-label recording in a goldfish bowl of a studio, his every eccentricity gawked at by media. ‘Gould spurns the sandwiches sent in to the recording crew, subsisting instead on arrowroot biscuits washed down with his special spring water or skimmed milk,’ reported the
Herald Tribune.
Few legends have been observed so intently in the making.

Gould was a feature writer’s dream. In hot sunshine, he turned up in coat, beret, muffler and gloves, carrying his own piano stool. He soaked his arms in boiling water before playing and popped any number of pills for migraine, eczema or ennui. He sang as he played, in a grumbling basso, and insisted on as many retakes as it took-eighteen in the twelfth variation-before he signed off. ‘Let him sing,’ said producer Howard H. Scott. ‘He played like a god.’

The record was issued in a cover consisting of thirty tiny photographs of the pianist in action, one for each variation. ‘We couldn’t agree which was best,’ said Scott, ‘so we compromised and used them all.’ The playing was like nothing on earth. It brought a delirious freshness to an austere work, playing excitable riffs on music that had never been made to smile. Unbothered by the occasional wrong note, Gould searched for mood and metre. This, he said, was music that ‘rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind’.

His personal sound is flinty, slightly brittle, but from the opening phrases he does for the Goldbergs what Casals did for the cello
suites, diverting them from Bach’s intended purpose-to lull an insomniac count to sleep-into a realm of rapt spirituality. Gould’s touch commands attention, evoking a numinous parallel world into which he alone possesses the password. From start to finish, the playing is unexpected, sometimes helter-skelter (second variation), sometimes so slow and quiet (twenty-sixth) that one wonders whether his mind has not drifted momentarily elsewhere until the sheer concentrated effort of communication surges through. No one on record had ever treated a piano, or a piece of music, in any comparable way. Gould burst onto the scene like a fiery angel, a comet from another constellation.

Nine years later he gave up public appearances to spend the rest of his working life in a record studio, usually at night, working obsessively over an eclectic range of music that embraced Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss and several Canadians of no great merit. The Goldbergs were central to his artistic make-up. In 1981 he had a second stab at the set, more comprehensively but less revealingly. A year later, he was dead, aged 50.

This was fantasy casting. Vienna, in the decade after the Second World War, had an unmatchable Mozart ensemble with the likes of Hilde Gueden (Countess), Lisa della Casa (Susanna) and Alfred Poell (Count Almaviva) on the payroll of the bombed-out State Opera, which was being rebuilt from rubble by public subscription. For the bicentenary of Mozart’s birth, the British company Decca (which had the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra on exclusive contract) set about recording the three Da Ponte operas with idiomatic Austrians-Don Giovanni under Josef Krips, Cosí fan Tutte with Karl Bohm and Figaro in the most experienced of hands, conducted by a man who had fled Hitler’s Europe to South America and was now back as the continent’s most sought-after guest conductor.

Erich Kleiber, as a boy, had heard Mahler conduct Mozart in Vienna. He went on to lead the Berlin State Opera into the modern era, giving the world premiere of Berg’s Wozzeck after more than 120 sectional rehearsals. After the war he lifted Covent Garden onto a higher plane of performance and confined himself in late middle age to conducting the pieces he felt really mattered. Before approaching Figaro he spent months in Vienna scouring early manuscripts and texts. At his insistence, all recitatives (or spoken parts) were to be recorded for the first time.

The working habits of the Vienna Philharmonic were perpetually chaotic, with players coming and going to better-paid gigs. But Kleiber stamped his authority on the opening of the overture with a tempo that felt so organically correct that musicians and singers were riveted to his baton through more than a fortnight of sessions. Much as Kleiber consulted Mozart’s ur-texts, the drama plays out at a contemporary, convincing twentieth-century pace.

The singing is unobtrusively beautiful. Two Italians, Cesare Siepi and Fernando Corena, were brought in to sing Figaro and Bartolo while a Belgian, Suzanne Danco, was Cherubino. But the atmosphere is indubitably Viennese and the mischief stems from Mozart himself. One aria after another-Porgi amor, Voi che sapete, Venite-rolls out from Della Casa, Danco and Gueden like a string of pearls, not a flaw to be heard under the recording microscope. This, felt junior producer Peter Andry, had to be as good as it gets.
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The release was timed for November 1955 to coincide with the reopening of the Vienna Opera. Bohm resigned as director before the opening and Herbert von Karajan was waiting in the wings. Kleiber was invited to participate in the reconsecration with a Verdi Requiem but, amid Viennese intrigue, was landed with inferior soloists. Hurt and depressed, he resumed his wanderings. On 27 January 1956, 200 years to the day after Mozart’s birth, he was found dead in a bath in a Swiss hotel.

In 1943 the wealthy Boston conductor Serge Koussevitsky gave Bartok $1,000 for an orchestral piece at a time when the self-exiled Hungarian was sick with leukaemia and struggling to pay medical bills (‘We live from half-year to half-year,’ he told friends). Few were aware that the commission had been discreetly stimulated by Fritz Reiner, the Pittsburgh music director, who had known the great composer since college days in Budapest. It had been Reiner who signed the affidavit that gained Bartok and his wife entry to the United States.

The result of the commission exceeded all expectations-not just a new work but an entirely original form, a score in which every instrument of the orchestra gets a chance to shine, within a vigorous Socractic dialogue that served as a working model for the United Nations, a forum in which every country, no matter how small, would have its right to a say.

Koussevitsky conducted a celebrated premiere in December 1944, nationally broadcast and gaining the work instant masterpiece status. Reiner directed the second performance soon after in Pittsburgh. Over the next decade the Concerto for Orchestra was played 200 times, more than any other contemporary orchestral work. On record, though, it remained elusive. Koussevitsky gave a literal rendition on RCA, colourful and bombastic; Eduard van Beinum traversed the score in Amsterdam with an excess of elegance; others over-enthused.

It took Reiner to bring out the waspish wit, the scurrilous parody on Shostakovich’s seventh symphony (seen as a Soviet triumph) and the yearning for a Hungary that neither man would see again. With a superior orchestra in Chicago, Reiner went for precision at wild speed-the Pesante section of the finale leaves a mere listener breathless-but also for tenderness and towering
emotion. In Reiner’s hands the work comes together as a structural unity rather than a run of cameos. You hardly need to know that Bartok is paying respectful tribute to the instruments of the orchestra. The music is simply monumental.

Under communism, the world was denied the sight and sound of Russia’s top ensembles. When the travel ban was slightly eased in the year that Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes, Vienna received a visit from the Leningrad Philharmonic under its gaunt chief conductor, Evgeny Mravinsky, and his German-exile deputy, Kurt Sanderling.

Undernourished, shadowed by spies and fearful for their families back home, the players had no unmonitored contact with Viennese musicians or audiences and dared not smile at concertgoers in the lobby for fear of being hauled in and interrogated by the organs of state. Their only means of communication was music, and that was blazingly expressive. The plangent edge to the woodwind confirmed a tradition stretching back to Tchaikovsky, whose major works this orchestra had premiered. Its swagger of ownership was unmistakable in these performances, turning the corners in the score without needing to mind the kerb.

Sanderling opened with an imposing Fourth, unfolded with reduced bombast and skilled story-telling. Mravinsky, previously unheard in western Europe, directed the ominous Fifth and mournful Pathetique symphonies with grave humanity, hinting at a suffering that was shared by all on earth. The bassoon solos in the Fifth underlined the cultural difference between Russian and Viennese sorrow; the finale of the Pathetique was wrenchingly tragic. Nothing of this sort had been heard on record and Deutsche Grammophon’s Elsa Schiller took a flight to Moscow to negotiate
a licence for release in the gently thawing international climate. But the thaw was short-lived, and so was the release. Four months later Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian uprising and the Cold War froze over once more.

Four years passed before the Kremlin allowed Mravinsky and the Leningraders to fly to London and re-record the symphonies in stereo. The sessions were held at Wembley Town Hall, away from the heart of the city, and the playing lacked the same urgency. The Vienna concerts had the thrill of revelation.

Early in the LP era, some bright spark in a pin-striped suit noticed that Grieg and Schumann each wrote one piano concerto and that both were in the same key, A minor, and of similar length. The enterprising fellow slapped them on either side of a black disc and they have been inseparable ever since, despite their uneven temperament. The Grieg is a splashy song of Norway with lots of noise and little emotional subtlety while the Schumann plumbs depths of torment and madness. Few artists succeed in balancing these discrepancies. Solomon achieved a coherent fusion.