The Life and Death of Classical Music (3 page)

It was the dawning of the age of mass entertainment and shared experience. Commentary to a world heavyweight fight between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey, relayed on radio, was released on five discs. The aviator Charles Lindbergh was recorded on landing after the maiden transatlantic flight. Fifteen glee clubs sang Adeste Fideles at the Met, a swelling of 4,850 voices. Church bells
were recorded in English hamlets, birds singing in the Auvergne. The composers Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninov, refugees from the Russian revolution, found a new home on records. Bela Bartok, who had roamed Balkan villages with a recording machine, worked the folklore he had collected into his string quartets-the first masterpieces to owe their existence to the act of recording. In Germany Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill and Stefan Wolpe introduced disc playing in live recitals. Weill went so far as to compose a gramophone aria for his 1927 opera, The Tsar Has Himself Photographed.

Symphonies and string quartets continued to resist the medium. Discs could carry only four minutes of music and musicians had to plan side breaks. When Edward Elgar conducted his own works for Gaisberg, the set carried a health warning: ‘The tempi on these records do not necessarily represent the intentions of the composer.’ Richard Strauss, though, had no such qualms and professional conductors took to the studio, some reluctantly but almost without exception. A music industry photograph of 1929 traps five glowering maestros at a celebratory dinner in Berlin-Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Erich Kleiber; all were famed far beyond their cities as a result of making records.

Toscanini, artistic director at La Scala, premiered a work by Ottorino Respighi, The Pines of Rome, which interpolated a nightingale’s song-the first recording to be incorporated within a concert work. In America, Leopold Stokowski arrayed his orchestra in a ‘Philadelphia Sound’, a benchmark for luxuriant precision. The repertoire grew more adventurous. Columbia, back in business for the 1928 centenary of Schubert’s death, launched an international competition for composers to finish off the Unfinished Symphony, the result to be recorded. This was a medium ravenous for novelty, indiscriminate of taste. A label might put out jazz one day, a symphony the next. It was the era of anything goes.

And then it crashed. In the Wall Street aftershock, record sales in the US dropped from 104 million in 1929 to just 6 million the
following year. In the UK, HMV and Columbia sales dropped from 30 million to 4.5 and the labels were forced into a merger as Electrical and Music Industries, Ltd. It was thirty years before EMI recovered its 1929 sales volume. Decca, a new record label, was taken over by a resourceful young Welshman called Edward R. Lewis, who bought part of US Brunswick and kept Decca afloat on Bing Crosby and Al Jolson imports.

In America, classical recording ceased and stars were fired by the dozen. ‘I remember coming back to my office after lunch to find a cable reading “Dropping De Luca and Horowitz. Any interest?”’ recalled Gaisberg’s assistant, David Bicknell. ‘And not only cables-the artists started to arrive in person. [Jascha] Heifetz was one of the first. Fred invited him to lunch.’
¹²
Gaisberg, in his circumspect way, rose above the panic. Nearing sixty, he held no executive title and earned less than the EMI directors, but he understood better than any man alive the dynamics of the industry. Gaisberg repeated his warning that recording could come to an end at any time. Its best hope was to preserve the best art of its time. ‘He had wonderful instincts regarding the direction in which the whole gramophone industry was moving,’ said Bicknell. ‘And one of the decisions he took was to switch from recording small pieces-which had been the lifeblood of the record business since it started: that is, operatic arias, single piano pieces and so on-to building a library.’
¹³

For Gaisberg, Schnabel’s Beethoven cycle (CD 7, p. 167) was the cornerstone of a strategy that would remove classical recording from relative triviality to a plane of curatorial responsibility and economic tranquillity. Flimsy showpieces might sell well in times of plenty, but when the going got tough the world needed Beethoven as never before. By 1939, when the world again went to war, the Schnabel cycle had raked in profits of half a million dollars and Gaisberg was revered as a latter-day saint. To the Victorian mansion that EMI had bought on Abbey Road, in residential St John’s Wood, Gaisberg brought the great and the good to inscribe an immortal legacy. Elgar conducted the teenaged Yehudi Menuhin in his violin concerto; Jascha Heifetz introduced the
Sibelius concerto (CD 9, p. 170); Pablo Casals recorded Bach (CD 11, p. 172); Gigli, Supervia and Chaliapin sang their hearts out; and Paderewski, lion of Poland, inscribed his final testament. Gaisberg treated all artists with deference, yet without him few would have passed into history. Although British by acculturation, he embodied, in the view of his assistant Bicknell, ‘many of the greatest American virtues, namely: first: his fearless interest in dealing with difficult, celebrated and formidable people, never hesitating to tell the truth whenever it was necessary, however unwelcome it might be. Second, his approachability. Finally, his youthful outlook which he retained right into old age.’
¹⁴
Gaisberg, who died, aged seventy-eight, in September 1951, had accompanied the industry of recording from toolshed beginnings to corporate establishment, shifting its centre of operations from inventor’s America to investor’s Britain. It would take a second world war and a brutal dictator to reverse the trend, placing classical records in the heart of a mass consumer market and the home of the brave.

The rise of fascism brought Italy’s new Duce, Benito Mussolini, and its most important musician, Arturo Toscanini, into instant conflict. A totemic figure since he conducted the Requiem at Verdi’s funeral, Toscanini was a fanatical precisionist in a land of lazy sunshine, a fundamentalist interpreter who preached fidelity to the letter of the score while making textual adjustments as he saw fit. Irresistibly propulsive, his performances of Italian opera and German symphonies were imbued with revivalist fervour. Trim, short and coal-eyed, Toscanini joined the 1919 fascist parliamentary list out of patriotic zeal but grew disillusioned with black-shirt violence. On the eve of Mussolini’s March on Rome in October 1922, Toscanini said there was no man he would rather murder. He refused to let the Fascist Hymn be sung, or the Duce’s portrait hung, in La Scala. A tyrant to musicians, physically assaulting those who failed to meet his exacting expectations, Toscanini was resolute in defending his opera house from political indoctrination and from any authority greater than his own.

In April 1923 Mussolini visited La Scala and had his picture
taken with its glowering music director. An uneasy truce ensued until, in 1929, Toscanini left La Scala to head the New York Philharmonic. Returning home in summer, he was roughed up by Party thugs and confined to house arrest. His anti-fascism crossed borders when Hitler came to power in Germany. Toscanini walked out on Bayreuth over a ban on Jewish artists and, at no small personal risk, sailed to Palestine to conduct an orchestra of refugees. Dismayed at the state of the world, he told his mistress in January 1935 that ‘I would like to end my career next year, once I have finished my fiftieth year of conducting.’
¹⁵
He advised the New York Philharmonic to replace him with the Berlin conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who was having a rough ride with the Nazis. When Furtwängler decided to stay in Germany, Toscanini never spoke to him again.

Word of Toscanini’s frustration reached David Sarnoff, founder of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which owned the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and Victor Records. Sarnoff, a Russian-born cigar-chomper with a reverence for high culture, sniffed an opportunity. He despatched Samuel Chotzinoff, brother-in-law of the violinist Jascha Heifetz, to offer Toscanini an NBC orchestra comprising the best musicians in America. His fee would be $40,000, tax free, for twelve concerts-four times Philharmonic rates. Record royalties would provide a welcome nest-egg for the grandchildren. Toscanini signed on the line.

His return to America was heralded with a hyperbole worthy of the second coming (it was, in fact, his third). An opinion poll in
Fortune
magazine showed that two out of five Americans knew his name. Sarnoff introduced him on air as ‘the world’s greatest conductor‘. Twenty million tuned in on Christmas night 1937 to his inaugural concert, comprising Vivaldi’s Concerto Grosso in D Minor, Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor and the first symphony of Brahms. Toscanini was called back seven times to take his bows. The reviewers were awestruck. The
New York Times
called him ‘predominant in his art’. The
Tribune
acclaimed ‘a peak of unexampled popular success’. Chotzinoff informed
Cosmopolitan
readers that, for each nation, Toscanini was the ‘supreme’
interpreter of its music: for Germans in Beethoven and Wagner, for Austrians in Haydn, Mozart and Schubert, for the Italians in everything, the French in Debussy, the English in Elgar. He was the only conductor anyone would want to hear, which is exactly what Sarnoff wanted everyone to read.

When Pearl Harbor brought America into the war, Toscanini’s anti-fascism made him a national hero. ‘Your baton,’ said President Roosevelt, ‘has spoken with unmatched eloquence on behalf of the afflicted and the oppressed.’ Everybody called him ‘The Maestro’ as if there were no other. ‘He quite candidly believes that he is not merely the greatest conductor in the world, but the only good one,’
¹⁶
observed RCA Victor’s musical director, Charles O’Connell, himself a part-time conductor.

‘Sitting as close to Toscanini as I did,’ wrote principal viola player William Primrose, ‘… I believed without qualification that everything he did was incontestable. After I left the orchestra and listened to him as a member of the audience I was no longer as certain.’
¹⁷
‘Toscanini did not really like to make records,’ wrote a fellow violist, Milton Katims. ‘He took no apparent interest in the problems involved and rarely, if ever, went into the control room to check the results of a take. But he was aware of the difference in the quality of sound of his records and those of other conductors.’
¹⁸

Paramount as he was, his records were marred by the cramped acoustic of NBC’s Studio 8H, fracturing filigree timbres and exacerbating what Furtwängler would cruelly characterize as the ‘uncomfortable brilliance’ of American orchestral sound. ‘Excitement,’ wrote the composer Virgil Thomson, a lone sceptic in the critical claque, ‘is of the essence in Toscanini’s concept of musical performance.’ Even Thomson, though, admitted that ‘one gets hypnotised’.
¹⁹

Sarnoff decreed that ‘all Toscanini records, regardless of any commitment to any other artist or any consideration of the necessities imposed by announcement, advertising, distribution and the like, must be put on the market within thirty days.’
²⁰
The entire company was geared to magnify Toscanini’s indomitable image. O’Connell, a garrulous fellow who irked the Maestro with underpraise,
was fired on his orders, never to work again. Sarnoff himself felt the lash when Toscanini, hearing that his orchestra was being used for classical pops concerts, refused to conduct again at NBC. Sarnoff talked him into making records with the splendid Philadelphia Orchestra at vast expense. Toscanini agreed, then vetoed the release. When Stokowski won hotly contested rights to the US premiere of Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony, Toscanini got Sarnoff to wrest the piece off him and hand it over to the network’s number one maestro. Absolutism was never quite enough for him. At Carnegie Hall, in concert with his son-in-law Vladimir Horowitz, he raised $10 million in war bond sales and a million more in the interval by auctioning off his score of The Star-Spangled Banner. On VE-Day he conducted the nation’s Victory Symphony. On 18 March 1948 Toscanini gave America’s first televised symphony concert.

His predominance reordered the hierarchies of recording. An industry that had waxed rich on singers and soloists now hinged upon the myth of a Mosaic leader who waved a stick in the desert air and produced an outpouring of sound. The maestro was to become the figurehead of classical labels. RCA signed Serge Koussevitsky in Boston and Philadelphia’s Eugene Ormandy, along with the prolific Stokowski. Columbia surged back into contention, bought in a 1938 poker game by William Paley, son of a Russian-Jewish cigar manufacturer and founder of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). Paley snatched RCA’s ‘best record salesman’, a deceptive aesthete called Edward Wallerstein, who renamed Columbia records ‘Masterworks’ and boosted classical sales from just over $1 million in 1939 to $12 million in 1945.

The source of this prosperity was an English-born composer, Goddard Lieberson, whom Wallerstein hired as a maestro magnet. Tall, expertly manicured and witty in several languages, Lieberson at twenty-eight was a founder of the American Composers Alliance and a friend of Igor Stravinsky’s. He had written a romantic novel,
Three for Bedroom C
, that became a Gloria Swanson B-movie, and had a finger in many pies. Lieberson went on the road with an open chequebook. In Cleveland he signed the Christian militant
Artur Rodzinski, in Minneapolis the high-octane Greek, Dmitri Mitropoulos. Both would be promoted by the label to the New York Philharmonic. In a flagrant turf war, Lieberson then poached Ormandy from RCA, which grabbed Pierre Monteux in San Francisco and Eugene Goossens in Cincinnati. Both labels financed continental tours by their conductors, spreading symphonic gospels. Orchestral concerts became a central feature of urban life, sustained by returning servicemen, educated on the GI Bill. The brow of Middle America rose by several furrows.

Toscanini, who had sparked this cultural revolution, was too frail to savour its fulfilment. On 4 April 1954, after a memory lapse on air in Wagner’s Tannhauser overture, he laid down his baton. At his death in 1957, just short of his ninetieth birthday, he left 160 recordings, a legacy of relentless tempi, rigid structures and febrile sonorities. His rivals in the iconic Berlin photograph came into the rewards. Bruno Walter enjoyed an Indian summer on CBS Masterworks while Kleiber and Klemperer served Decca and Vox. Furtwängler bit his lip and signed for EMI. ‘When I heard my first recording, I actually felt ill,’ he said. His approach to conducting, the antithesis of Toscanini’s ‘ruthless clarity’,
²¹
was conditioned by mood and moment. The Beethoven violin concerto, recorded in 1944 Berlin, was so darkly coloured it sounded like Götterdämmerung. The same work, recorded with Menuhin in 1947, was bathed in romantic regret. Furtwängler was a conductor for all seasons. In 1950s Vienna, two music students, Claudio Abbado and Zubin Mehta, joined the Philharmonic chorus in order to observe his mesmeric rehearsals. A ten-year-old Israeli kid, Daniel Barenboim, came by to seek his blessing. There was a priestly aura to this willowy, self-contradictory intellectual.