The Life and Death of Classical Music (4 page)

Furtwängler’s death in 1954 closed a creative chapter in conducting history, but no sooner was he gone than his aesthetic influence redoubled. Conductors aimed to synthesize Furtwängler’s cerebral instinctuality on record with the metronomic exactitude of Toscanini. The resultant mongrel, known as ‘Toscwänglerism’, delighted the record industry, which thought it had achieved the best of both worlds.

It had taken half a century for record labels to grow an identity. Back in 1914 there were seventy-eight labels, from Aerophone to Zonophone. Mergers, liquidations and transatlantic alliances reduced the number but not the confusion. EMI shared its ‘dog and horn’ with RCA in the US. Decca was known in America as ‘London’. EMI issued US Columbia and Victor products in Europe. Both US labels were owned by major broadcasters. In Britain, EMI and Decca regarded radio as the enemy.
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US labels were run by Jews; in Britain there was hardly a Jew in studio or boardroom.

Over time, house style evolved into brand. RCA stood for big stars, big sound; CBS had a liberal, epicurean image: one was Middle America, the other Manhattan; one Republican, the other Democrat; one was market leader, the other tried harder. RCA inhabited the Rockefeller Center; CBS recorded downtown on 30th Street in a deconsecrated Greek Orthodox church. In Britain, EMI was conservative, Decca radical; one British bulldog, the other slinky Siamese. EMI occupied a mansion in St John’s Wood. Decca’s studios were eight bus stops north in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, an area thick with continental immigrants.

High-profile producers provided a finishing touch to label style. Goddard Lieberson, the face of CBS Masterworks, was a man about town, usually seen with Vera Zorina, movie-star wife of George Balanchine. ‘He worked very hard at it, putting himself about-it was not easy being on first-name terms with Noel [Coward] and Marlene [Dietrich],’
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said a colleague. Zorina married Lieberson in January 1946. The party was given by opera’s glamour pair Lily Pons and Andre Kostelanetz. As a wedding gift, Paley made Lieberson president of Masterworks.

His decisive act was to use the label as a newspaper, alighting
on the new Broadway shows and bringing them out on record just as the reviews hit the streets. Kismet went into studio three days after curtain-up and was on sale in a week. South Pacific, with Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin, ran 1,900 nights on Broadway, 2,700 in London, and sold a million records. Lieberson, ecstatic, plunged the profits into high art and core heritage. Voices from the American Civil War appeared on Masterworks, along with the forbidding atonalists Schoenberg and Webern. For the first time, a label took on the complete works of a living composer, its director’s best friend. ‘I am a Masterwork,’
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said Igor Stravinsky, cherishing the accolade.

CBS was young, hungry and punching above its weight. Its scientists came up with a record that played forty minutes a side, ten times as long as standard 78 rpms. Peter Goldmark, a nephew of the Hungarian composer, had been listening to the Toscanini Horowitz recording of the second Brahms piano concerto (CD 12, p. 173) when, irritated by disc changes (‘like having the phone ring at intervals while you’re making love’
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) he whipped out a ruler and, counting eighty grooves to the inch, calculated how many would contain a symphony and at what speed they would have to play. One-third of one hundred-thirty-three and one-third rotations per minute-was the answer.

Wallerstein warned that the long-playing record would damage pop singles, but Paley was keen to score points off Sarnoff and in April 1948 summoned his RCA rival to hear the new format. ‘Within a few bars of audition,’ said Goldmark, ‘Sarnoff leaped out of his chair. I played [the LP] for ten seconds and then switched back to seventy-eight. The effect was electrifying, as we knew it would be … Turning to Paley, Sarnoff said loudly and with some emotion “I want to congratulate you and your people, Bill. It is very good.”’
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No sooner was he back at Rockefeller Center than Sarnoff ordered his boffins to come up with a competing format, the 45 rpm extended-play EP. On 21 June 1948, at the Waldorf Astoria, CBS Masterworks launched the LP with 100 new albums, topped by Nathan Milstein in the Beethoven violin concerto and
a Frank Sinatra selection. Uptake was slow at $4.85 a disc and $30 a player, but Lieberson’s South Pacific hit the stacks ten months later and converted America to the LP. RCA’s format, useless for classical, proved perfect for pop. The schism sharpened: CBS went highbrow, RCA low.

Jazz masters, excited by the chance to play lengthy improvisations, flocked to the church on 30th Street. ‘After Columbia started LP, we became the hottest label in jazz,’ said producer George Avakian. ‘Miles [Davis] saw what was going on, so he kept after me because he knew that if he were successful on Columbia that would be far better for him than any other label.’
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Dave Brubeck, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk followed the sensitive producer John Hammond. The first Davis album was named Miles Ahead, for that was where the label now was.

Other technologies were unreeling. In a San Francisco garage, a demobbed GI called Jack Mullin was tinkering with a pair of Magnetophon tape machines that he had taken with an officer’s permission from a radio studio south of Frankfurt-am-Main. Mullin informed the crooner Bing Crosby, a nervous broadcaster, that he could pre-record parts of his radio show. Crosby appointed Mullin his producer and both CBS and NBC embraced magnetic tape. There would be no more cutting grooves into molten wax. Tape let musicians retake sections of a work and create a recording from multiple versions. The pace of change was picking up, and the next development was just round the corner.

In Britain, Decca was first to seize the future and EMI last. As Decca went over to LP, EMI announced it would ‘continue to produce standard (78-rpm) records in undiminished quantities’.
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It took four years for EMI to sack its managing director, Sir Ernest Fisk, in which time (the next chairman told Wallerstein) his procrastination had practically put them out of business.
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EMI, like many post-war British firms, was run by ‘captains of industry’, a term which denoted recent army service at modest rank. Executives wore pin-striped trousers and musicians were sent home if they turned up without suit and tie. War raged between constituent labels. David Bicknell took over Gaisberg’s HMV; Walter Legge
ran (British) Columbia; Oscar Preuss was head of Parlophone. If Preuss let slip that he was doing a concerto, Legge would sneer ‘awfully sorry, old chap-I did that last month,’
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and make off with the idea.

A natural musician, half-trained but with an ear for the extraordinary and a certainty of style, Legge was an egotistical intriguer with a sadistic streak. Rumpled and smoke-wreathed, he was a menace to lone women in dark corridors. ‘I was the first of what are called “producers” of records,’
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he bragged. ‘I was the Pope of recording.’
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During the war he had organized concerts for the forces and put together a band of London’s finest musicians for EMI. Unknown to EMI, the Philharmonia was wholly owned by Legge, who took a royalty on its records as a supplement to his salary.

He refashioned EMI around two conductors, both signed in Vienna in January 1946 at a time when they were under an Allied ban. Wilhelm Furtwängler had been Hitler’s favourite conductor and Herbert von Karajan a puppet of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels (until he married a half-Jewish woman in 1942 and took a career dive). Both were soon cleared by tribunal but Furtwängler could not forgive Karajan for having tried to usurp his position in Berlin. Legge, knowing their antipathy, played the conductors cruelly off against each other. While in Vienna he signed a dozen singers, among them the bombshell Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, whom he later married.
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They made an incongruous couple, the roly-poly Englishman and his curly-haired blonde, and together they posed as the creative face of EMI while Furtwängler and Karajan racked up the raves.

David Bicknell, Legge’s corporate antipode, was ‘a decent sort of chap, happiest at Hayes amid a pile of contracts’.
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He married a manly Italian violinist, Gioconda de Vito, with a faint moustache and variable intonation. Legge circulated ribaldries about their sexuality. Bicknell once laid a friendly hand on his shoulder. ‘Touch me again,’ snarled Legge, ‘and I’ll kill you.’
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Legge was always on the go, Bicknell stayed home. Legge lived high on expenses; Bicknell was frugal. A producer, called to his house in
the middle of the night to unravel a Legge crisis, was received by Bicknell in a simple iron bedstead, an army lamp on the table. Bicknell, a public school man, received regular promotions at EMI. He wound up as head of the International Artists Department, controlling Legge’s contracts. When Legge threatened that Karajan would quit unless he, Legge, was named sole producer, Bicknell delivered a masterly put-down. ‘The Company,’ he said, ‘has never accepted the stipulation that an artist’s contract should be dependent on the availability of one of its servants.’
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Legge, in his own mind, was nobody’s servant. He reduced artists to tears and drove the young Kathleen Ferrier to leave EMI and join Decca (CD 14, p. 176). His conduct after the Beethoven concert that reconsecrated the Bayreuth Festival in 1951 was recalled by Furtwängler’s appalled widow, Elisabeth:

Walter Legge came in and, like a child, my husband looked at him and just said ‘Nah?’ He wanted Legge’s reaction, as he thought a lot of him. ‘I have heard much better Ninths from you,’ was his reply … You can’t know how this affected him! Immediately he thought: ‘Something must have happened, there must have been something that was no good.’ He did not sleep at all right through the night and then the next morning we had to go to Bayreuth again, and he asked Wieland Wagner: ‘Please tell me, how was the Ninth Symphony yesterday?’ and he said: ‘It was just marvellous.’ But Furtwängler was still distressed and uncertain. As I was driving him home to Salzburg, suddenly he said: ‘Stop.’ He got out of the car and walked away-for almost 30 minutes he was gone and I started to be afraid. Then he was back and he said: ‘Right, we can go on now, that is all finished.’ He was a big walker, he walked to make himself free.
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Furtwängler accused Legge of ‘an outrageous personal breach of trust’
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; Sir Thomas Beecham referred to him as ‘a mass of egregious fatuity’.
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But rival producers conceded that ‘over and over again he made records that were the envy of all of us’.
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His artists included the pianists Dinu Lipatti, Solomon and Claudio Arrau, the young conductors Guido Cantelli, Carlo-Maria Giulini and
Wolfgang Sawallisch. In July 1952 Legge threatened to resign unless he got the go-ahead to sign a fat Greek soprano at La Scala. His first recording with Maria Callas was Tosca (CD 23, p. 186). It became the biggest selling opera of all time and Callas never worked with any other producer.

Legge launched in America under the sign of the Recording Angel-‘a small, well-fed cherub who seems to be doodling with a long quill’.
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Angel, run by opera enthusiasts Dario and Dorle Soria, had the opera racks to itself since Lieberson insisted that Americans ‘don’t like opera-they like singers and are content to hear them over and over in the same arias’.
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Angel was in no position to wrestle with American giants but it carved a distinct market share, albeit of a conservative tint. Legge was averse to modern music and living composers, looking resolutely backwards. It was the other British label that waved the banner of progress.

Decca was democracy incarnate. Having survived the choppy 1930s by the narrowest of margins, its engineers joined the war with gusto, inventing all manner of radar and navigation devices and exploring the outer rim of sonic science and the bottoms of the world’s oceans. Back from the depths, Decca in June 1945 launched full frequency range recordings – ffrr, for short, ‘the first time anyone could hear the full range of frequencies the ear could detect’.
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Decca’s navigator department, which continued to develop marine systems for Nato, was the most profitable in the company for years ahead, a hedge against classical losses.

Limitlessly inventive, engineers were the driving force at Decca and a legend across the industry. ‘Producers with other labels tended to dictate to the engineers exactly what they wanted and what [equipment] should be used, all without any explanation of context. At Decca, engineers and producers listened to operas and recordings ages before the first session of a project. It was a real team, and in terms of pay they were treated equally,’
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noted a leading producer. Where Legge expected his engineers to lug all the equipment, at Decca everyone pitched in.

Exceptionally in class-ridden Britain, Decca demolished social
barriers. Arthur Haddy, the chief sound engineer, spoke in a thick Essex Estuary accent and called everybody ‘boy’. His number two, Kenneth Wilkinson, would sit at the console, eyes shut, a Player’s cigarette drooping from his lips, his fingers touching the buttons of the mixers like a clinical diagnostician’s. In rehearsal breaks Wilkie would walk around the studio adjusting musicians’ chairs. If he disliked the tempo he would mutter ‘my daughter couldn’t dance to that’,
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and a prudent producer would take heed. Dress at Decca was casual. In studio, everyone wore squeak-proof tennis shoes.

The chairman, Edward Lewis, was an aloof, abrupt Welshman. His passion was the summer game of cricket-he would hire county players to perform odd jobs in the company during the English winter-but his reactions had been sharpened in the Depression and he rose swiftly to a challenge. When Legge formed his Philharmonia Orchestra, Lewis understood that he had to compete. Lacking foreign currency, he got his Swiss distributor to line up the best orchestra in Europe in exchange for artistic control and a seat on the board. Maurice Rosengarten did not need asking twice.

Moshe-Aron Rosengarten was a strictly orthodox Jew who did no business after lunchtime on Friday, refusing to answer telephone or doorbell until Saturday night. A self-made wheeler-dealer, born in a Polish village, he owned a Swiss concession to a range of household goods, including gramophones, radios and televisions, and set up a string of yodel labels to service the local market. ‘He knew nothing about music, but he had a tremendous nose for what might sell,’ said Decca producers. He was, they agreed, ‘something of a genius’.
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Rosengarten signed two ensembles for Decca-the matchless Vienna Philharmonic, and the Suisse Romande. Some found it odd that so devout a Jew should work with unreformed Viennese Nazis and the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet, an avowed anti-Semite. To Rosengarten, it was just business. The Viennese were the best, the Suisse Romande dirt cheap. Their politics were irrelevant.