The Life and Death of Classical Music (6 page)

Berlin lacked high-quality concerts. The Philharmonic was in poor repair and the Russian sector had no orchestra at all. With most concert halls in rubble, Schiller booked a disused cinema, the Titania Palast. Solo recitals she recorded in the music room of the Siemens Villa on Gärtnerstrasse, seized by the Allies but still occupied by Ernst von Siemens who treated RIAS artists as his guests and welcomed Schiller to his home.

In February 1948 Stalin blockaded Berlin. German conductors stayed away and it was left to Fricsay to maintain morale during the Allied airlift. ‘It was cold, there was no heating, no water,’ he recalled. ‘Women and men were up half the night to use electricity when it came on. At ten the next morning, unslept, they came to rehearsal. Despite all that, it was a glorious time.’
⁴⁵

Critics marvelled at his Toscanini-like clarity. A pupil of Bartok’s (whose Bluebeard he conducted at the City Opera), Fricsay was soft-spoken, precise, ethereal. ‘I was too young to hold two such responsible jobs,’ he reflected. ‘I made mistakes … but I think I
did a great deal towards rebuilding musical life in Berlin. And I had partners at the RIAS orchestra with whom I worked happily and who became my friends.’
⁴⁵

Schiller, by then head of music at RIAS, was doing deals with Deutsche Grammophon. When they asked to record her dance band, she demanded new suits for her threadbare players. Siemens consulted her privately on artistic policy. She sold him Fricsay as repertoire builder. On 12 September 1949 Fricsay cut his debut disc in a suburban church in Dahlem, the Jesus-Christus-Kirche, with a trailblazing Tchaikovsky fifth symphony. It was the beginning of the new DGG. He went on to perform French music, unheard in Berlin for fifteen years. The elegant pianist Monique Haas and the conductor Igor Markevich, Diaghilev’s last protege, left town with DGG contracts. A repatriated prisoner-of-war, twenty-two years old, turned up for an RIAS audition. ‘Can you sing Winterreise?’ Schiller demanded. She sat with him until one in the morning, producing his broadcast. Schiller, recalled Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, was

the embodiment of… [an] artistic director who was in sole charge of such a company. She always spoke to the point. In fact, her candour could be cutting. She could not, would not, put up with sanctimoniousness and fawning. She put down a young conductor who had apologised once too often for his presence in front of an orchestra: ‘Please, not so much modesty. You’re not good enough for that.’
⁴⁶

At the 1950 Berlin press ball, Siemens asked Schiller formally to join Deutsche Grammophon as programme director. The label had undergone a radical redesign,
⁴⁷
separating genres by colour: Polydor pop was red, Archiv was silver and DGG was the Yellow Label-uncomfortably, the colour that once set Schiller apart from German society. Siemens was about to enter LP production. Schiller told him he needed nothing less than an industrial revolution. Label attitudes were patriarchal and production mostly manual; record sleeves were sewn by ladies at treadle machines. A new LP was a bespoke item costing 32 Deutschmarks, a fortnight’s
wages for a bank clerk, but the products were not intended for the working classes. Siemens aimed to accrue prestige and provide pleasure for his own kind. Elsa Schiller demurred and kept him waiting for months.

What finally swayed her was the opportunity to produce a cycle of Mozart operas, having argued that it would be a national disgrace if Mozart was sung only on English labels during his 1956 birth bicentennial. Die Entführung aus dem Serail, the first release, drew fire from Stuckenschmidt for its untimely frivolity. Fricsay replied: ‘Through Mozart, we become better people.’
⁴⁸
Schiller’s Wiedergutmachung – making good again-involved signing Jewish artists to the Yellow Label. When Fricsay left Berlin after the US Senate discovered it was spending tax money on a foreign orchestra (something it would never do at home), she lined up Lorin Maazel for RIAS and DGG. Hearing reports of a quartet of three Austro-German refugees and a British Jew, she invited the Amadeus to Berlin. ‘She was a very lively personality,’ said Siegmund Nissel, the second violinist. ‘We had just been offered a contract by EMI. Soon afterwards, Frau Schiller got in touch. I said, “I am terribly sorry, I have already agreed with EMI …” She said, “Would you allow me to come to London and talk to them?”

‘Some time later she called: “I didn’t get you, but at least I got you the same conditions from EMI that you would have got from us”.’
⁴⁹
Nissel, embarrassed, asked EMI to split the contract with DGG. Six years later, Schiller won exclusive rights. ‘She was a very shrewd Jewish lady,’ said Martin Lovett, the cellist. ‘She would look through you and weigh you up in a way I only ever experienced from Margaret Thatcher. I was a bit uncomfortable recording for the Germans, but Sigi’s father had been in Dachau. Who was I to object?’
⁵⁰

‘In Germany I always wondered who I was shaking hands with,’ said Siegmund Nissel. ‘You had to put it out of your mind. Deutsche Grammophon was the best firm for us. They made records of marvellous quality and gave us enormous time to make them.’ It took less than a decade for Schiller to rehabilitate the German label.

To the west, another giant stirred. Philips of Holland was famous for close-shaving men’s razors and women’s depilators; it also made light bulbs, radios and record players. Frits Philips, the family’s rising star, was anxious to secure a flow of good LPs for his turntables. He bought the local Decca dealership, HDD, and proposed a global merger to Edward Lewis. When that offer was rebuffed, he snatched CBS sales away from EMI and founded his own label.

Early releases were feeble. Philips poured forth light music of unfathomable triviality, fronted by the bandleader Geraldo. Classics, based in sleepy Baarn, wore a muddy-brown sleeve colour-milk-chocolate, in polite parlance-and unfamiliar faces, but the somnolence was deceptive. Amsterdam, lacking an opera house, had an intense concert life. Eduard van Beinum, the Concertgebouw music director, gesturally inelegant and unhealthily overweight, was a refined Francophile who attracted rare and unusual artists. Clara Haskil, a Romanian refugee in Switzerland, melted Dutch hearts in Mozart, recorded for Philips and earned, at the age of 57, enough money for the first time in her life to buy a piano. Claudio Arrau, the silken Chilean, recorded Beethoven sonatas. Arthur Grumiaux and Henryk Szeryng were the key violinists, Maurice Gendron the label cellist. These quiet musicians were no match for RCA’s ‘million dollar trio’ of Rubinstein, Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky, but the Dutch, deploring tall tulips, were building a label without stars, a label where music came first. Philips was the sixth and last of the great classical labels, completing a set of so-called ‘majors’ that controlled the distribution game-the networks, the discounts, the deals-and colluded at times over prices (for which they were fined) and programming. No start-up ever succeeded in breaking up their cosy colloquy.

Which is not to say that others did not try. George Mendelssohn, a Hungarian in Los Angeles, lit upon a diaspora of talent-the pianists Shura Cherkassky, the violinist Ruggiero Ricci and the brothers Jakob and Bronislaw Gimpel. No relation to the great Felix, the would-be music mogul styled himself George de Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and named his label Vox. He grabbed
hold of Otto Klemperer, who had wrecked his American career with manic-depressive escapades and was heading off to conduct the state opera in Hungary, a rash move in the gathering Cold War. Mendelssohn got Klemperer to record a few symphonies in Paris and Vienna. Back in LA, the pair entered a record store and asked for Beethoven’s Fifth, conducted by Klemperer.

‘Sorry,’ said the assistant, ‘we’ve only got Toscanini and Walter

‘But we want Klemperer.’

‘These are the best recordings,’ said the sales guy. ‘Why do you want anyone else?’

‘Because I am Klemperer,’ growled the conductor.

‘And I guess your pal’s Beethoven,’ grinned the assistant.

‘No, he’s Mendelssohn,’ roared Klemperer.

‘Wow,’ exclaimed the clerk. ‘You know, I’ve always loved your Wedding March.’

Another ex-Hungarian named his New York label Remington after a phonograph company that went bust in 1921. Don Gabor, cousin of glamour-puss Zsa Zsa, recorded Bartok at the piano and, working as a packer at RCA, picked up a few distribution tricks. He launched Remington in 1946 on a red label, mistakable for Victor’s Red Seal. Laszlo Halasz, chief conductor at New York City Opera, was his musical adviser and Marcel Prawy, lawyer to the movie actors Jan Kiepura and Marta Eggerth, his Vienna fixer. Prawy got Vienna Philharmonic players (under exclusive contract to Decca) to record for Remington under such pseudonyms as Pro Musica and Vienna State Opera Orchestra.

Subterfuge was the lifeblood of little labels. Vox issued Beethoven’s first symphony under ‘Conductor X’ after Artur Rodzinski refused to put his name to it. It recorded the conductor George Ludwig Jochum, brother of DGG’s Eugen, and violinist Walter Schneiderhan, not to be mistaken for the Vienna concertmaster, Wolfgang. Gabor was run out of stores by ruinous reviews, but not before he had tapped such promising talents as the pianists Jorge Bolet and Jorg Demus. Vox discovered Ingrid Haebler
and Alfred Brendel who, after voluminous activity in Vienna, transferred to Philips.

Some of the upstarts had taste, others good ears. Mercury, founded in New York in 1945, was driven by C. Robert Fine, a sound engineer, and his fiancee Wilma Cozart, sometime secretary to Antal Dorati, music director in Dallas and Minneapolis. They got Rafael Kubelik to conduct Ravel’s score of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in Chicago in a sound so distinctive that the
New York Times
reviewer said it felt like the orchestra’s ‘living presence’, a term the Fines swiftly trademarked. ‘We wanted the performance to seem so lifelike that the listener could “see” it before his eyes,’ explained Cozart in a press release.

Knowing how US orchestras worked, Cozart could usually get round union barriers and overtime premia. When these proved insurmountable, Mercury came to England. ‘One August,’ said Neville Marriner, leader of the London Symphony Orchestra’s second violins, ‘we worked thirty days on the trot, three sessions a day, alternating from Dorati to Pierre Monteux. You couldn’t have bought a better education.’
⁵¹
So large did Mercury loom for a while that its director of music, Harold Lawrence, became the LSO’s next general manager.

Westminster, another New York indy,
⁵²
hooked up with a UK independent, Pye-Nixa, one of whose labels was set up by the father of child star Petula Clark, who was still recording half a century later.
⁵³
Westminster issued the world premiere recording of Mahler’s seventh symphony with Hermann Scherchen. Frustratingly it appeared in 1953, just weeks before Hans Rosbaud’s performance appeared on Urania, a shadowy outlet for German radio tapes, often conducted by ex-Nazis.

In France, Bernard Coutaz got into his Citroën 2CV and drove an engineer and organist from one cathedral to the next, recording baroque sonatas. Based in Arles, where Vincent Van Gogh lost his ear, Coutaz and his Harmonia Mundi opened untapped realms of early music. In London an Australian heiress, Louise Hanson-Dyer, launched L’Oiseau Lyre (the lyre bird) as a baroque niche but could not resist supporting her struggling compatriots. She gave a
gawky soprano at Covent Garden a recital LP. Later, on Decca, Joan Sutherland became the top-selling soprano on record, after Callas.

Klemperer’s life on Vox ended rancorously when another baton finished off Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony in his absence-‘a gross public deception,’ he called it.
⁵⁴
The formidable giant joined EMI, where Legge tended his temperamental swings with unexpected sensitivity. Klemperer loudly scorned records, which, he said, were a poor substitute for live music. ‘Listening to a recording,’ he sonorously proclaimed, ‘is like going to bed with a photograph of Marilyn Monroe.’
⁵⁵

Halfway through its century, classical recording reached a set of turning points. EMI set the ball rolling with a $3 million bid for US Capitol. Decca formed a counter-alliance with RCA. CBS tied up with Philips. Old enemies became Orwellian allies. EMI’s new chairman, Joseph Lockwood, was a miller’s son from Nottingham who had organized national animal-feed supplies during the war. He took one look at the music business and decided the classical tail could not continue to wag the popular dog. ‘It was a conscious decision of mine to support pop music and play down the importance of the classical people a bit,’ he explained, ‘not to discourage them, but not to let them think they owned the bloody place.’
¹

In future, Lockwood decreed, no record could be made without approval from an International Classical Recording Committee (ICRC) comprising the heads of the largest regions. Unless a majority agreed that a project would show profit in their territories in three years, the record would not be made. The fiat was received with horror by the classical sector. ‘What will I tell Karajan?’ wailed Legge, but the clamp stayed until executives got round it in backroom deals. At international conferences, Paris would submit an inflated sales projection for a Beecham LP in exchange for London’s reciprocal overestimation of Georges Pretre.
²
The figures were pure fiction.

Lockwood fumed and tightened his scrutiny. ‘He once visited our department at Hayes’ (EMI Records, Export Dept, Branch Supplies), said a junior clerk. ‘I was about twenty-two. He was introduced to me at my desk and asked me two very pertinent and detailed questions about my work. I never worked out how a chairman could possibly know so much.’
³
A crusty bachelor, the chairman had an eye for sharp young men. He appointed George
Martin, twenty-eight, as EMI’s youngest-ever director, head of Parlophone. An oboist by training, it took Martin little more than a couple of years to overturn the musical economy.

That same midpoint moment brought Goddard Lieberson in 1955 to the presidency of CBS Records, in place of Edward Wallerstein. Signing his letters ‘God’, Lieberson was the last classical man to head a major label. He gave the pop side to Mitch Miller, an ex-classmate of his at Eastman Musical School and oboist in the school band. Miller meant business. He fired Frank Sinatra (years later, meeting him on the street, Miller said ‘Hi, Frank’; Sinatra said, ‘Just keep on walking’) and became overnight the mightiest man in pop. Piratically opportunistic – he put Frankie Laine’s cover version of High Noon in the shops three weeks ahead of the official soundtrack-Miller won his own singalong show on CBS television, selling 20 million records. ‘He had too much power and not enough taste,’ wrote the pop historian Donald Clarke.
⁴
Miller liked Johnny Mathis-style smooch and the sepia sound of a fading America, untouched by social discord. To kids on street corners, CBS looked old and out of touch.

Lieberson went searching for another South Pacific. ‘Goddard backed My Fair Lady when everyone else turned it down at backers’ auditions,’ said a producer, ‘and he was respected enough to go on the road and make suggestions for cuts and improvements. At recording sessions, he was the real star.’
⁵
In studio, observed CBS photographer Don Hunstein, ‘he would sit in Savile Row suits, keeping the atmosphere friendly with little jokes. The president of the company was the working producer of these show records.’
⁶
With the president at the console and the A&R boss singing along, CBS Records was a hands-on cottage industry operating out of five floors at 799 Seventh Avenue. In the southern US, its LPs were sold by Philips (or Philco) reps, along with personal grooming products. Total sales amounted to $277 million, and one in five records sold was classical.

Down on the mean streets, a storm was gathering. On 12 April 1954 a southern bandleader, Bill Haley, and his group, the Comets, rattled the world’s vertebrae with Rock Around the Clock, which
inaugurated rock ’n’ roll. A gritty movie,
The Blackboard Jungle
, used the song as its soundtrack. The idea came not from the star, Glenn Ford, but from his nine-year-old son, Peter. Kids were calling the shots in music, and Mitch Miller did not like that one little bit. In a caustic address to a convention of radio disc jockeys, he laid into rock merchants for pandering to the under-age. ‘You abdicated your programming to the corner record shop, to the eight-to fourteen-year-olds, to the pre-shave crowds that make up 12 per cent of the country’s population and zero per cent of its buying power,’ he raged. But Mitch was wrong. Teens were rolling in prosperity pocket money. They bought music that was loud, rhythmic, melancholic, sexually assertive. Kids, from here on, were the driving force, responding to a beat that was set on the streets, not in media towers.

Rhythm and blues brayed forth from independent labels in Chicago, Cincinnati and Detroit, getting heavy radio play through deejay bribes, known as payola. Listeners couldn’t care less so long as the music rocked. The major labels, terrified, could not tell a hit from the whooping cough. A hip-swiggling crooner who drove girls wild left Mitch Miller stone cold. In November 1955 his RCA rivals paid Sun Records thirty-five grand for Elvis Presley, plus five thousand to his personal manager. Six weeks later, two days after his twenty-first birthday, Elvis sauntered into a Nashville studio and delivered himself of Heartbreak Hotel. It would sell 300,000 in three weeks, a million by springtime. By the end of 1956 Elvis had sold $22 million worth of discs and merchandise in the US, half as much as the whole of the classical market.

Rock took longer to conquer Germany, where the Cold War was hotting up and billions were being pumped into rebuilding West Berlin as a showcase for capitalist plenty against communism’s empty windows. Office blocks soared on bombsites and cultural life was fuelled by Bonn government subsidy and secret CIA payments. Elvis was unheard of in Berlin until he joined the US Army and served, from October 1958 to March 1960, in a tank
battalion at Friedberg, dating the granddaughter of Olga Chekhova, a notorious Soviet spy.

Musical life in Berlin centred on the Philharmonic Orchestra and its new music director, Herbert von Karajan. On its first US tour in February 1955 the orchestra faced an anti-Nazi demonstration at Carnegie Hall. Back home, Karajan was awarded a Liberty Bell by the Mayor of West Berlin. The symbolism was explicit. Karajan was not just music director but a moral leader in the fight for freedom.

A photograph taken on 27 April shows him at lunch in a rooftop restaurant with the influential critic Stuckenschmidt and the orchestra’s grey-faced manager, Gerhart von Westermann. Karajan, suntanned chin resting on upturned left hand, looks neither man in the eye yet commands rapt attention. A satisfied smile flickers on his lips. This is a cat that has collared the cream, a conductor who can do as he pleases, the most powerful maestro on earth. In addition to Berlin, he had taken command of the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival, and held positions at La Scala Milan and the Philharmonia in London. The one area where his writ fell short was the record industry, but there too the wind was blowing his way.

Vienna Philharmonic players, employed at the State Opera, urged Decca to make records with him. Karajan was keen, believing Decca had a sonic advantage and its new RCA partnership could get him access to the valuable US market. Also beckoning was Deutsche Grammophon. Ernst von Siemens invited him, as a personal favour, to an audio demonstration. ‘They made an experiment for him in the studio-“Look, maestro, this is what we can do with a crescendo.”’
⁷
Karajan, impressed, held discussions with Elsa Schiller. ‘She understood this business better than anyone, apart from Legge,’ he discovered.
⁸

When his EMI contract expired in August 1957, he invited competing bids. Decca came top, DGG second, EMI bottom, with a pittance (Bicknell put his money on Barbirolli against Karajan). Legge was mortified, fatally disempowered. Months later, Karajan marched into the Sofiensaal to open his Decca account.

He handed his coat to Gordon Parry, who let it drop to the floor. At Decca there were no flunkeys. ‘Don’t stand up,’ said Karajan. It had not crossed anyone’s mind, but they saw his point: the Decca boys towered above the maestro, who was sensitive about his five-foot four. Karajan proceeded to whip up a spectacular Holst Planets for Decca, along with Strauss waltzes and a memorable Madam Butterfly and Aida. But he never warmed to Culshaw and the contract ended in six years, leaving Karajan with a grasp of Decca’s advanced techniques which he duly took to Deutsche Grammophon.

Among the Germans he was met with much bowing and scraping. Karajan led off with Richard Strauss’s A Hero’s Life. ‘The sessions took place on three consecutive March mornings in 1959 in the Jesus-Christus Church,’ wrote producer Hans Ritter. ‘I had been warned that Karajan’s signing of a contract depended on whether he was satisfied with our trial recording. When I took the tapes to him in Vienna, he admitted that he had been anxious to make a good impression on us, as he badly wanted the contract. Unfortunately, I made only two more recordings with him.’
⁹
The record, with melting solos by concertmaster Michel Schwalbe, was beautifully engineered but it failed to sell and Karajan demanded the producer’s head.

His next LP was a set of Brahms and Dvorák dances, Hungarian and Slavonic; it sold 55,000 in a year and went on selling. He went on to make 330 recordings on DGG, powering the label to world leadership and turning the public-funded Berlin Philharmonic into his private recording machine, its rehearsals and concerts routinely taped and edited for release. Each summer near Salzburg, DGG would throw a party at Schloss Fuüschl where Karajan mingled with his ‘family’, but behind the happy smiles no one felt secure in his approbation. After Ritter, Karajan was produced by Otto Gerdes, a part-time conductor with several DGG recordings to his credit. One morning, having given a concert the night before, Gerdes greeted Karajan jovially as ‘Herr Kollege’. He was sacked on the spot.

The Next Big Thing was nearly ready. ‘General’ Sarnoff, smarting from LP defeat, ordered full speed ahead on stereo. Two-channel recording had been around since 1932 when Stokowski got Bell Labs to record a Skryabin symphony and, in London, EMI’s Alan Blumlein recorded Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony with Beecham. Stokowski gave a stereo demonstration at Carnegie Hall in April 1940, described by the
New York Times
as ‘the loudest sound ever created’, but the public was unready to invest and interest faded until, in 1954, the advent of FM radio demanded a record response. If automobiles had two speakers, record systems would have to match up, or die.

Jack Pfeiffer, a new RCA recruit, went to Boston in March 1954 to try out stereo in Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust with the Frenchman Charles Munch. He went on to Chicago, where Fritz Reiner was conducting A Hero’s Life, and decided to risk the session on just two microphones. ‘The clarity and definition that we got-of course, a lot of it had to do with the acoustics of the hall, the quality of the musicians, Reiner’s balances, and so forth-were so dramatic. It was completely different from anything we had ever heard before.’
¹⁰
In the Brahms D-minor concerto with Arthur Rubinstein (CD24, p. 187), Pfeiffer added a third pick-up microphone for zoning in on solo passages. By trial and error, he had established standard stereo recording technique.

Pfeiffer’s results were trademarked as RCA Living Stereo and sold to audiophiles at a prohibitive $18.95 a disc. It took four years for RCA and CBS, eager to avoid another ‘war of speeds’, to agree a joint format. In the meantime, every session was recorded in duplicate, mono and stereo, just in case.

Post-production was undergoing a parallel revolution. Jascha Heifetz, said Pfeiffer, ‘loved to work with his hands. He liked automobiles, firearms, all sorts of things. He had every tool in the world there in his workshop in California. Never used any of them, of course. Because of his feel for tinkering, when he discovered tape editing he became fascinated. Not that he wanted to edit for the sake of editing, but it gave him an ability to put things together in
a way he never could before. He was never totally satisfied with his recordings.’

Tape editing provided an illusion of perfection that detached recording from concert humanity. Some musicians objected. The Olympian Otto Klemperer entered an Abbey Road suite where an editor, spools of tape around his neck, was replacing a broken horn note in a Mozart concerto. Mount Klemperer erupted. ‘Lotte,’ he barked at his faithful daughter, ‘ein Schwindel!’
¹¹
(it’s a fraud!).

On the second day of 1955 a Canadian pianist made his US debut on the tiny stage of a modern art museum, the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, with a recital that bordered on the bizarre. Instead of Mozart, Schubert and Chopin, Glenn Gould opened with a pavane by the remote Elizabethan composer Orlando Gibbons and a fantasia by his Dutch contemporary Jan Peterszoon Sweelinck. There followed five works of J. S. Bach, the Beethoven Hammerklavier sonata, and, after intermission, the modernist sonata of Alban Berg, succeeded by the abstruse opus 27 Variations by Anton von Webern. By way of encore, he repeated the forbidding Webern.

So soon after Christmas, attendance was sparse, but the
Washington Post’s
critic Paul Hume was on the edge of his seat. Hume hailed ‘a pianist with rare gifts for the world … we know of no pianist anything like him, of any age.’ Among the listeners was Alexander Schneider, second violinist of the Budapest String Quartet, who rushed back to New York to tell David Oppenheim, head of Columbia Masterworks. ‘We listened to a recording by Dinu Lipatti,’ recalled Oppenheim, ‘and I said, “Why can’t we find another one like that?” And Sasha said there was one, a person in Toronto named Glenn Gould, who was, alas, a little crazy, but had a remarkable, hypnotic effect at the piano.’
¹²