The Life and Death of Classical Music (28 page)

After two tense and unpleasant sessions, with half the work in
the can, Jackie asked to be excused and popped out to a Holborn pharmacy for headache pills. When she returned, she found the studio packed with onlookers. Word had whizzed round musical London that there was a phenomenon in the making and every musician within reach of a Tube station came crowding into the Kingsway dungeon to witness the finale. Few studio sessions have ever played to so live and large an audience.

Where Casals was masterful and possessive, du Pre entered the concerto gently and reflectively, becoming more expansive by degree until passion took over, arching high and low in search of catharsis. Elgar had infused the concerto, written at the end of the First War, with regret for a world destroyed. Du Pre found younger dimensions-pangs of love, fears of death-and swept all before her in a score that gives the soloist little more than five bars’ rest from start to finish. If ever there was a definitive performance, this was it. Rostropovich, on hearing this record, erased the concerto from his repertory. The next generation of cellists made it their role model.

Du Pre went on to double stardom-in her own right as a soloist and as the wife of Daniel Barenboim, whom she married in Israel directly after the 1967 war. They went on to record the cello concerto together in Philadelphia in 1970, but presentiments of a terrible disease-she retired with multiple sclerosis in 1973 and died of it in 1987-marred the second performance. The 1965 disc (paired with Janet Baker’s soaring account of Sea Pictures) was Jacqueline du Pre’s finest hour. On hearing the playback, she burst into tears and said, ‘This is not at all what I meant.’

Sung over four evenings for fifteen hours, Wagner’s Ring cycle was untenable on record before the LP, unprojectable before stereo and unaffordable on the kind of budgets labels allocated in the
1950s and consumers set aside for record spending. The Decca project began as a vision of a young producer, John Culshaw, who visited Bayreuth and was appalled at the amount of stage noise picked up by his microphones. If the Ring was to be done on record, he argued, it had to be done in studio. It took him six years to get the green light for a tentative Rheingold, the shortest of the pack.

Culshaw set up stall in a disused Viennese bathhouse with Europe’s best orchestra a short bus-ride away. Such was the rarity of the Ring in English-speaking countries that Culshaw was the only member of the recording team who had seen a complete cycle on stage. His conductor was a prematurely bald Hungarian Jew who was based in Frankfurt and incurred the scorn of Vienna Philharmonic master-players. The risks were inordinately high but Georg Solti had an imposing grasp of the Ring, which Culshaw had reconceived as a purely aural concept, free of visual distraction. Sound engineer Gordon Parry was under instruction to simulate the effects of horses and anvils, where required, without supernumerary neighs and bangs. Everything was organized with the naked ear in mind.

The singers spanned three generations. Kirsten Flagstad, lured out of fjord retirement, sang Fricka in Rheingold; Bruünnhilde was the soaring Swede Birgit Nilsson. Rhinemaidens included the young Lucia Popp and Gwyneth Jones; Christa Ludwig was Waltraute, Joan Sutherland sang the Woodbird. Wolfgang Windgassen was Siegfried, George London and Hans Hotter sang Wotan and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was Gunther in Götterdämmerung. Solti asserted a superhuman span over sessions that lasted seven years, never as subtle as Knappertsbusch or Furtwängler but more accurate throughout. The Decca Ring made his name internationally and made a case for a perfectionism of opera on record that could never be replicated on stage.

In an enterprise of such scope detail can be distortive, but such is the consistency of the dual control exercised by Culshaw and Solti that the smallest of parts reflects the greatness of the whole. The orchestral introduction to Götterdämmerung, followed by
the singing of three Norns – Helen Watts, Grace Hoffman, Anita Välkki – is one of the most gripping sequences on record, not just as prelude but as autonomous drama, an act in its own right. Followed by a self-contained Nilsson at sunrise, saving her furies for last, the music exerts a trance-like effect, irresistible and ineluctable.

The Germanic world, fearing loss of heritage, responded with recorded Rings by Karajan in Berlin and Bohm in Bayreuth. An all-French centenary Ring, directed by Patrice Chereau and conducted by Pierre Boulez, was filmed in thirteen television episodes at Bayreuth in 1976. More Rings followed from Sawallisch, Haitink, Janowsky and Levine. None matched Solti for coherence, clarity or numinous wonderment at the world’s creation and destruction.

No producer, either, emulated Culshaw’s democratic mission. ‘The sickness of opera,’ wrote Culshaw, ‘is that it is a very expensive and exclusive closed shop. Richard Wagner abhorred this attitude a hundred years ago and we are only now beginning to make the slightest progress towards a change. If, by as much as a fraction, the Ring on records has contributed to that change then I believe that all of us connected with it have reason to be pleased.’
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His artistic ideal was vindicated by the biggest sales ever achieved for a classical performance (see p. 136), a result which meant that more people got to hear Wagner’s Ring on record than ever saw it on stage.

The century’s most popular concerto, after Rachmaninov’s second, was written by a blind man in a fascist tyranny and set in the courtly, escapist splendour of an eighteenth-century Bourbon
garden. The outer movements are nothing much but the central Adagio swoons with unattainable yearnings. Four strums of the guitar, and the cor anglais takes offon its biggest solo since Dvorák’s New World; much of the magic that follows lies in the dialogue between these two instruments. Rodrigo’s heartstring theme inspired Miles Davis in Sketches of Spain (1960) and was fitted to the words ‘mon amour’ by French crooner Richard Anthony. Its attraction, said the composer, was rooted in ‘a synthesis of classical and popular, in both form and emotion’. It was not so much unity, though, as hints of fragility and fragmentation that gave the theme its universal appeal.

Rodrigo, rendered sightless by diphtheria at the age of three, was living in poverty and no little fear (his wife was foreign and Jewish) in 1940 when he wrote Aranjuez for the national instrument, the guitar, and became an icon overnight. A capable pianist, he denied ever having tried to play the guitar and was not greatly offended when Spain’s grand master, Andrés Segovia, rejected Aranjuez on the grounds that several passages were in the wrong key and some of the music made his guitar plink like a mandolin. (Rodrigo compensated him years later with a more ingratiating Fantasia para un Gentilhombre.)

For want of a Spanish star, the concerto was up for grabs. The Englishman Julian Bream made the early running on record with interpretations that stayed just the right side of schmaltz. But the man who set the stores on fire was a young Australian, John Williams, who had obtained Segovia’s blessing on his way to London and his debut recording from the sharp-eared niece of Fred Gaisberg, Isabella Wallich. Williams, signed by CBS, epitomized Sixties cool in long dark hair and loose shirts. The label, for reasons unfathomable, put him together with the staid Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy, who was never seen out of suit and tie and knew all about classical pops from working with Rachmaninov. Whether by accident or design, the pairing produced a lasting hit, an attraction of opposites.

Igor Stravinsky was the first composer to have his complete works recorded while he was still alive. Not just alive, but in the process of exchanging the styles that made him famous-Russian ballet and neo-classicism-for the uncommercial outer fringes of acrid atonality. ‘As he himself has pointed out, Igor Stravinsky has survived his own popularity,’ wrote his friend Goddard Lieberson, president of Columbia Records, in 1962. ‘He has neither succumbed to it… nor did he allow himself to be frozen in a popular period of his own music … he continues to be a vigorous young creator.’
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Stravinsky paid reciprocal tribute. Lieberson, he said, ‘has almost single-handedly championed the modern composer rather than the established mediocrities amongst performers’. The recording project of his entire output, which began in 1947 and continued until his death in 1971, gave Stravinsky sole artistic control. He either conducted himself or, as he grew infirm, supervised the interpretation of his works under the direction of his skilled assistant, Robert Craft. His chief concern was textual fidelity. ‘I love my music-excuse me,’ he would say to any musician who deviated. ‘Stravinsky had a relentless ear for nuance of performance and never gave his approval until he was completely satisfied,’ reported Lieberson’s wife, Vera Zorina. The performances are not always the most exhilarating or rhythmically consistent, especially in the furious dances of the composer’s youth, but the authority is incontrovertible and, in the later works, indispensable for its connective thread between expressive lyricism and analytical modernism. The volume of sacred works contains some of his least-known pieces, which are also the most heartfelt.

Threni, though astringently atonal, could take its place unnoticed in the liturgy of any great Orthodox cathedral, so emphatic is the shape that Stravinsky the conductor imparts to its arching structure. The Canticum Sacrum, written for St Mark’s in Venice, a city the composer had chosen for his burial, applies a quirky, tangential reverence to Catholic ritual, straining for relevance in a modern age that would soon outlaw Latin as a language of prayer. An Introitus in memory of his friend T. S. Eliot inhabits a metaphoric wasteland, though in colours much deeper than the poet’s pastels. Variations on a Bach Christmas chorale might easily have been pitched at the seasonal gift market, though maiden aunts would be startled by some of the sonorities. The freshness of Stravinsky’s invention in these largely unsung works is little short of astonishing and the courage of CBS in fostering their recorded completion was an act of faith that drew scant attention in the mid-century but was soon to be extinguished by corporate dictatorships.

Alfred Brendel was a struggling pianist in 1950s Vienna who got his break from an American fringe label. Vox, owned by ‘George de h. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’, was a two-bit outfit that employed the Vienna Philharmonic under false names to get around legal restraints and trawled the halls for hungry talent, of which there was plenty. Brendel was put to work on Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Balakirev’s Islamey, a laughable pairing for an artist of light, precise, Germanic touch, a pupil of the severe Edwin Fischer. He followed that release with Liszt transcriptions of popular opera tunes, a kind of Liberace hit parade. When both of these records sold better than expected, Brendel was allowed to tackle Schubert and Beethoven in substantial cycles.

The records that made his fame, though, were Mozart piano
concertos, played so light and fast that they rivalled newly-voguish ‘authentic’ performances. The conductor was Paul Angerer, a local composer. Brendel added a laconic angularity that treated the music with respect but also, at times, with a broad, infectious grin and, in the Allegro of the E-flat concerto, a barely suppressed giggle. The cockiness of Mozart, his contempt for lesser composers, comes through best in Brendel’s playing. Without false reverence or flashy virtuosity, he brings forth a living, breathing Mozart who churns out new works as a tidal assault on prevailing mediocrity. The Vienna Philharmonic (by another name) responds intuitively to this empathetic approach and the interactive dialogue is consistently interesting-even more so in these relatively marginal concertos than in the more hackneyed works.

Brendel, along with another Vox pianist, Ingrid Haebler, was snapped up by a major label, Philips, for which he recorded the Mozart concertos all over again, some of them twice, with superior conductors, sound and the full panoply of record industry hype. He inherited Artur Schnabel’s mantle as the philosopher-pianist, a pillar of the musical establishment and a published poet. His early Mozarts in garish Vox covers look puerile beside subsequent splendours, but Brendel allowed them to remain in circulation, a clue to his integral self.

Mahler never lived to hear The Song of the Earth. ‘Is it perform-able?’ he asked Bruno Walter. ‘Won’t people want to do away with themselves on hearing it?’ It was a work of anguish, triggered by the death of an infant daughter, the loss of his job in Vienna and the collapse of his health. Walter gave the 1912 premiere, a year after Mahler’s death, and made the first two recordings, in
Vienna in 1936 (when no Austrian singer would take part for fear of Nazi sanction) and again in 1952 with the Austrian tenor Julius Patzak and the British mezzo-soprano Kathleen Ferrier, a recording that marked the beginning of the post-war Mahler revival. More than any other conductor, Walter exuded authority and serenity in this work, an assurance that all was not lost.

Klemperer, the composer’s other acolyte, took an antipodal approach. Confrontational where Walter was compliant, averse to any ingratiatory urge, he let a dozen years slip by until he found the right pair of singers and an appropriately rigorist interpretation. His performance shocked the London critics, one of whom, John Amis, declared it to be ‘so determinedly anti-Walter as to avoid practically any sentiment’. That, however, was Klemperer’s point: a great work had to be open to contradiction and there was always more to Mahler than any mortal musician could monopolize.