The Life and Death of Classical Music (5 page)

From a modest office on Zurich’s Badenerstrasse, Rosengarten
took command of Decca’s post-war output. All record plans were subject to his approval. ‘It was never a good idea to sound enthusiastic about a project,’ said one producer, ‘he would always shoot it down. You were best off seeming reluctant and letting him talk you into it.’
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His brother-in-law, Leon Felder, played yes-man at repertoire conferences, watching the boss closely to see which way he had to vote. Rosengarten followed some invisible instinct. ‘He was a frustrating man,’ said Decca administrator Nella Marcus. ‘You would go to Zurich and he’d keep you waiting for hours, often into the next day. Mr Felder would come out and say, “He’s so busy”. I must have shown my irritation because when Mr Rosengarten finally emerged, he announced, “Mr Felder, Miss Marcus is going shopping. When she comes back we will talk business.”

‘So they sent me off in a chauffeur-driven car to a fashion store. I came back with a lovely coat. Mr Rosengarten was so excited: “What did you buy? Is it leather? Mr Felder, do you think it’s leather?” So Mr Felder went around sniffing it, sniff-sniff … It was a funny way to run a record business.’
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Known as ‘Uncle Mo’, Rosengarten’s relations with Lewis verged on the symbiotic. ‘There wasn’t one day in all those years that they didn’t talk to each other,’ said Rosengarten’s daughter, Sarah.
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As demand picked up, Rosengarten signed a third orchestra, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Needing extra hands at the console, Decca hired a Swedish violinist who had put together Beecham’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, in opposition to Legge’s Philharmonia. Victor Olof Arlquist (he dropped the surname) was a highly competent musician, so competent that he once took over a concert in his street clothes when Beecham had to attend a sick wife.
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Known as ‘the Baron’, Olof would shout down mild conductors like the Dutchman Eduard Van Beinum and the Czech refugee Rafael Kubelik. He was much admired by George Szell, another Decca conductor, soon to become Cleveland’s rigorist chief.

Other maestros were less tolerant of Decca’s know-alls. Furtwängler refused to accept their microphone settings, rendering Brahms’ second symphony flabby and opaque. Sergiu Celibidache,
who deputized in Berlin during Furtwängler’s denazification, found Decca so uncongenial that, after a Tchaikovsky Fifth with the London Philharmonic, he refused to make another sound recording so long as he lived. Decca’s domestic crop was headed by a Blackburn telephonist, Kathleen Ferrier, whose organic contralto captivated Bruno Walter at the 1947 Edinburgh Festival. Their recording of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, with the Vienna Philharmonic, was one of the wonders of the age; her death of breast cancer, aged forty-two, in 1953 was universally mourned. Decca’s golden boy was Benjamin Britten, whose masterpiece Peter Grimes was staged seven weeks after the war. Britten recorded for no other label, giving Decca the gloss of genius that Stravinsky brought to Columbia. Confidence soared and there seemed no limits to Decca’s ambitions.

In 1951 a Decca team went to Bayreuth to record the Ring, only to find that there was no contract. The producer, John Culshaw, transfixed by what he heard, grew convinced that he could achieve a better Ring, less error-strewn, in studio. Culshaw, a wartime radar operator, had got his first job at Decca by means of a deep-voiced charm, subtle intelligence and serene good manners. ‘He was a generous person, not jealous of other people,’ said his sound engineer, Gordon Parry. ‘Even if you interrupted him, he was the one who stopped talking-he very politely waited for you to finish,’ said a producer, Erik Smith.
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When Culshaw started talking about casting a Ring, colleagues told him he was crazy: Rosengarten would never pay and no worthwhile Wagner conductor would take orders from Decca techies. Culshaw smiled. He was an unusual blend of patient visionary and restless activist who twice resigned from Decca, writing two novels and a Rachmaninov biography, while never losing sight of his goal: to bring the Ring into people’s homes. Even when out of Decca he flew often to Zurich to meet Rosengarten at a kosher restaurant. The Swiss introduced him to a young conductor, eager as himself. Georg Solti had lived out the war in Zurich as a visaless Hungarian refugee, living rent-free with a tenor in exchange for Tristan lessons. Rosengarten said ‘we must do something for the boy’
and booked him to accompany the German violinist Georg Kulenkampff. Solti said, ‘I don’t want to play the piano. I want to be a conductor.’ Rosengarten replied, ‘We shall see.’

Thirty-two years old when the war ended, Solti made his way to Munich, where a Hungarian contact got him the job of music director at the crucible of National Socialism. ‘It was only after several years that Munich began to discover I was conducting everything for the first time,’ he laughed.
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Rosengarten gave him a conducting contract, dated 21 November 1950, for fourteen sessions over two years, £50 a session (against royalties of 4 per cent), with a £50 travel allowance ‘for any recordings outside Munich’.
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Solti had the contract framed and hung it gratefully above his desk to the end of his life.

Culshaw heard him conduct Walku¨re in May 1950 and decided he had found his Ring master. Solti was raw, energetic and open to suggestion. He saw in Culshaw an ego-free partner who wished him no harm. Culshaw recognized in Solti a furiously hardworking talent. Theirs was the opposite of a Faustian pact: both were in it for the ends, not the means, and both went in with eyes wide open. There was no male rivalry between them, since Culshaw was gay and Solti aggressively heterosexual. Over dinner, they shyly agreed that they rather liked one another.

Olof dismissed Solti as ‘uncontrollably brash’ but Rosengarten favoured Culshaw’s verdict. In 1954 Culshaw left to work for Capitol in America. He had been gone a few months when Olof, after a falling out with Frank Lee, head of the Artists Department, defected to EMI, taking with him all of Decca’s secrets and his personal assistant Peter Andry, an Australian flautist. ‘I was working happily in Vienna,’ said Andry, ‘when one day Victor said to me: I’ve had enough, and we’re going. I was being paid about five hundred pounds a year. He got me fifteen hundred. So we went. He’d been having trouble with Rosengarten, who never wanted to pay artists properly, and there were people at Decca of the greatest incompetence-Frank Lee, a man in a green suit. It all got too much for Victor.’
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Panic ensued. Lewis called Culshaw in New York and urged
him to return, warning that Capitol was about to be bought by EMI. Rosengarten, next on the line, ordered him to Vienna to take over Olof’s session. ‘There was a tremendous row,’ said Gordon Parry, who was recording Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder. ‘Victor was summoned to Zurich and told to quit Vienna because of his EMI contract. Culshaw came out and I got threatening words from Mr Haddy, who was my direct boss, to say that I must cooperate with Culshaw, I must be very strict about this.’
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Culshaw had never been to Vienna, nor dealt with its duplicitous player-managers. It was a leap into the deep but it took him one large step closer to the grail. There was no better orchestra for his Ring than the Vienna Philharmonic, no better venue than the Sofiensaal, a disused imperial steambath. He was in Rosengarten’s good books and his friendship with Solti was almost familial. Culshaw’s mother would look after Solti’s dog while he went on holiday. A letter from Solti to Culshaw, opening with threats of resignation, culminated in fond salutation: ‘love to you and the boys’.
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‘The boys’ is how musicians talked about Decca-whether for its practical mechanics, its puerile idealism, or its preponderance of homosexual men at a time when gay love dared not speak its name. Discretion was the norm for gay men in the arts, but Decca was a safe house, as out as it was possible to be. Gordon Parry, pink-blond and perpetually on the prowl, was flagrantly bisexual. In the Decca apartment above the Sofiensaal, he went pounding on bedroom doors at night crying, ‘Come on beau! It’s only a bit of mutual masturbation!’ ‘Gordon did everything to excess,’ said Andry. ‘He was flamboyant, extrovert and manipulative,’ said another colleague. ‘He could turn nasty if thwarted.’ ‘There were some very aggressive gay people at Decca,’ said a vulnerable young producer. ‘Nowadays they’d be charged with sexual harassment.’
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Culshaw himself showed little interest in sex. ‘As far as sex was concerned with John,’ said one of his team, ‘it was either nothing or a great enigma. I never sensed anything going on.’
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Although some Decca boys were straight, the ethos was distinctly gay. ‘Decca was pink, where EMI was blue, or grey,’ said a gay
Decca producer. ‘It’s what made interesting people want to work for us.’
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Decca’s composers of choice were Britten, Michael Tippett and Peter Maxwell Davies, a different sexual aesthetic from EMI’s straight flush of Elgar, Delius, Vaughan Williams and Walton. Nevertheless, when green-suited Frank Lee was caught with a catamite in Zurich on a company trip, he was sacked on the spot. The Decca brand was a delicate balance of Culshaw’s gay culture and the biblical values of Lewis and Rosengarten, together forging a proselytic sense of mission. ‘Decca was more than a job, it was a family,’ said Andry. ‘You wouldn’t find that camaraderie anywhere else. At EMI, they clocked off at six and went home.’
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Germans, in the rubble of defeat, went groping for a grasp on civilization. Deutsche Grammophon, bombed out of Berlin, moved back to Emil Berliner’s Hanover. The war was not to be mentioned. ‘This chapter of its history does not reflect well on Deutsche Grammophon,’ states the official record. ‘The company’s business policies [were] heavily influenced by the Third Reich, as is apparent from the recordings the company was required to make by the ruling regime, which do not correspond to Deutsche Grammophon’s usually high standards.’
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Tapes of Goebbels speeches and Hitlerite hymns littered the vaults. And there was worse in the boardroom.

The label had a new owner. A 1941 share-swap between electrical giants AEG and Siemens & Halske resulted in AEG owning Telefunken and Siemens taking DGG. The label was assigned to Ernst von Siemens’ electro-acoustical division. A grandson of the founder, club-footed from birth, Ernst led a privileged existence in a lakeside villa, surrounded by great art. A regular concertgoer, he met Herbert von Karajan and funded him to record Brahms’ first symphony in occupied Amsterdam. Karajan asked if Siemens had any Mendelssohn in his library. ‘Of course,’ said Siemens. Karajan requested a particular score.
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In Nazi Germany this transaction amounted to a bond of trust, for a word from either man would have landed the other in a Gestapo cell. For Siemens, music was a pleasant diversion from the grim realities of running a business
in a genocidal state that his family, an early financial supporter of the Nazis,
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had helped to create.

In the year it took over Deutsche Grammophon, Siemens & Halske began to buy slave labour from the SS. Starting with 2,000 Jewish women from Ravensbrück concentration camp, the atrocities intensified as the war went on, using inmates from occupied countries in some of the most murderous camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, which Siemens & Halske helped to build. A Siemens board memorandum of 23 February 1943 notes that 60,000 bunk beds were being used by its forced labourers and more were urgently required.
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Ernst von Siemens was an attending member of that board, complicit in the crime. After Hitler’s defeat, his chairman (and cousin) Hermann von Siemens was arrested by the Americans and briefly interned, but he was never charged and, on release, was allowed to resume his place at the head of West German industry. The company expressed no regret for its crimes against humanity and offered no reparations until, in 1998, the belated threat of a US boycott prompted Siemens to set up a Holocaust compensation fund. In all, 100,000 men, women and children were dragged from their homes across the continent of Europe and pressed into servitude, under threat of death, brutality and bombardment, in the factories and laboratories of Siemens, where they made anything from V-2 rockets to classical records.

This morally soiled organization took the lead in restoring German music to former glories. Ernst von Siemens founded an Archiv label in 1945 to record organ music in baroque churches that had escaped bombing. Helmut Walcha, a blind organist from Leipzig, played Bach at the Jakobkirche in Lübeck. Few copies were pressed but the act was symbolic. Germany was repossessing its rightful legacy and the recordings were made on magnetic tape, a German invention. The soundman, Erich Thienhaus, would go on to train, in a Tonmeister course at Detmold, the producers and engineers of Germany’s recording future.

The task of cultural reconstruction was daunting. Since no foreign artist would record for a label called ‘Deutsche’, Siemens needed an impeccable go-between. He did not have to wait long
before she appeared in his salon. Elsa Schiller had survived two years in Theresienstadt, the ‘model’ Czech concentration camp where cultural events were staged to fool the Red Cross. Schiller kept a low profile and, in October 1944, evaded a mass transport to Auschwitz. Born in Vienna, raised in Budapest, she had been a professor at the Liszt Academy before a lust for life took her to 1920s Berlin, where she conducted a chamber orchestra. Harried by the Nazis, she moved from one female lover’s flat to the next until a threat of betrayal landed her in Gestapo hands.

After liberation, she crawled cadaverously home to Berlin. The music critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Schoenberg’s biographer, spotted her in the street and got her work as a pianist on the American radio station, RIAS. Like many whose careers had been frozen by Hitler, Schiller resumed work with pent-up fervour. She told the Americans they needed an orchestra and hired a Hungarian to conduct it. Ferenc Fricsay, thirty-three years old, had given the 1947 Salzburg premiere of Gottfried von Einem’s Death of Danton and was about to become chief at Berlin’s City Opera. His radio orchestra, he promised, would outshine Toscanini’s.