The Life and Death of Classical Music (7 page)

Gould’s New York debut at Manhattan Town Hall on 11 January drew another meagre crowd-250, by Gould’s count-but among them were the rising pianists William Kapell, Gary Graffman and Eugene Istomin, along with Oppenheim, who kept looking round nervously for rival scouts. Next morning, he signed
Gould to a two-year contract, to start with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a cerebral suite never commercially recorded.
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The artist was twenty-two years old.

His sessions, over four days in June, turned into a media gawk fest. ‘There’s something happening in the studio on 30th Street,’ gushed publicist Deborah Ishlon. ‘We’ve got this nut and everybody’s talking how absolutely marvellous he is.’
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Sitting exactly fourteen inches above ground, Gould soaked his arms to the elbows in scalding water ‘to relax them’ and popped pills of untold provenance to cope with minute changes in air quality. He wore a headwrap and several sets of gloves-but no shoes, the better to pedal with his toes. He sang, hummed and howled while playing. Critics spotted that he played with his wrists below keyboard level, almost a physical impossibility. ‘I think he was totally aware of the fact that he probably created a strange personality, but that’s what he wanted to do,’ said his producer, Howard H. Scott. ‘He was a marvellous marketing executive … he marketed himself perfectly.’
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The Goldberg Variations appeared on Masterworks on 3 January 1956, priced $3.98, with a cover comprising thirty action photographs of Gould, one for each variation. The LP was an instant icon, its spine number-ML 5060-acquiring mystic resonance. It was the top-selling classical record of 1956, clearing 40,000 copies, and it pumped Gould’s reputation so high and wide that Khrushchev asked to hear him in Moscow and Karajan booked him for Salzburg and Berlin.

Gould took a minute interest in the recording process. ‘Recording him was unlike working with anyone else,’ said producer Paul Myers.

We made the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and he would record each Prelude and each Fugue anything up to ten or twelve times (nearly always note-perfect). Then, he liked to ‘edit’ the material (‘This section should sound more
pomposo;
I think that part is too subdued’). Most pianists edit to correct mistakes. Glenn rarely made mistakes (he also rarely practised, seemingly transferring his thoughts
to his fingers as a natural process) and he edited to change emphases and create his interpretations … He always insisted that he was not a pianist. He liked to describe himself as ‘a composer who expresses ideas through the keyboard’ … He was also quite modest, saying: ‘If you want Beethoven Sonatas as they should be played, buy Schnabel. I just like to experiment.’
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In concert, he scowled and winced at the conductor and sat cross-legged on his stool until a second before entry. When Leonard Bernstein took him home for dinner, his wife Felicia unwrapped the filthy turban and subjected his lank brown hair to a wash and trim. Lieberson took him to lunch. They discussed twelve-note rows in Berg’s opera Lulu (still unseen in America) and a contract that would bind Gould to CBS exclusively and for life. Lieberson told him to record whatever he liked. At a gala dinner years later, Gould sang out a Lieberson Madrigal, mocking CBS (‘We’re all uncommercial here, our sales get worse from year to year’) and lampooning the president’s irritation with his pet conductor (‘No, no Lennie, no you can’t, why must you be so damn avant, damn avant, damn avant garde?’).

Bernstein was Lieberson’s other carte-blanche artist, and biggest headache. As a fresh-faced kid he had erupted onto the
New York Times
front page in November 1943 when he took over a Bruno Walter broadcast at a few minutes’ notice. The next year he wrote a Broadway show, On the Town, followed by two symphonies, one based on the prophet Jeremiah, the other on a W. H. Auden theme, the Age of Anxiety. He gave lectures at Harvard. There was nothing, it seemed, that he could not do.

But Lennie spelled trouble. He was sexually rapacious with men and politically active in leftist and Zionist causes. As McCarthy paranoia gripped the US, Bernstein was spurned by his hometown Boston Symphony Orchestra and wound up unemployed in Manhattan, his passport seized by the State Department. He composed two more musicals – the satirical Candide, which flopped, and West Side Story, which dragged Broadway into urban ethnic conflict. Lieberson, who recorded both shows, regarded
Lennie more as a Broadway composer than a symphony conductor but he kept him on a small contract for contemporary music.

Then, in 1957, the New York Philharmonic ousted its socially awkward music director, Dmitri Mitropoulos, in favour of the 38-year-old Bernstein, who had ostentatiously married. Lennie took the orchestra on an inaugural trip to Russia and warned CBS he was getting offers from RCA. ‘I want to be free to record whatever I wish. I don’t want anyone to tell me such-and-such cannot be done,’
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he announced. Bernstein’s lawyer spelled it out: ‘a twenty-year contract with minimum guarantees against maximum royalties and the right to record anything he pleased, any time he desired’.
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Masterworks boss Schuyler Chapin went to Lieberson, who okayed the deal. Bernstein then tore up the twenty-page contract and sent back a single-sheet letter of agreement. ‘You tell me what you need, I’ll tell you what I’d like to do, and together we’ll develop a good catalogue,’ he told Chapin.

Where do we start? said Chapin. Mahler, said the maestro. ‘I plan to play all of the symphonies over the next few seasons and I want to record them all. The public is ready to respond to Mahler. His time has come.’
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That line, ‘my time will come!’, was Mahler’s own. With a centenary approaching in 1960, it was reasonable for the New York Philharmonic to put on a symphonic cycle, selling 2,000 seats a concert over several years. But a record label needed to shift many times more LPs to break even and Mahler was a man on the margins, adored by European emigres and few others. There were ten symphonies to sell and Bruno Walter, Mahler’s acolyte, was already recording the First and Ninth with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. CBS was on the point of putting out competing versions of unsaleable symphonies.

Bernstein set out the case for Mahler with blazing conviction. ‘Mahler’s music is about Mahler,’ he postulated, ‘which means simply that it is about conflict. Think of it: Mahler the Creator vs Mahler the Performer; the Jew vs the Christian; the Believer vs the Doubter; the Naif vs the Sophisticate; the provincial Bohemian vs the Viennese homme du monde; the Faustian philosopher vs
the oriental mystic; the operatic symphonist who never wrote an opera … Out of this opposition proceeds the endless list of antitheses-the whole roster of Ying and Yang-that inhabit Mahler’s music.’
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In the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, he presented Mahler as all things to all men-and it seemed to work.

If Bernstein’s verbal advocacy was glib, the sweep of his argument and the passion of his performances won the day. Using every media opportunity-most popularly his Young People’s Concerts on CBS TV-Bernstein made Mahler the composer for modern times. While Rafael Kubelik issued a parallel set on DGG, lyrical and serene, it was Bernstein who set Mahler at the centre of world attention.

He applied the same proselytic gifts promiscuously and sometimes ill-advisedly to a raft of American contemporaries: Copland, Barber, Diamond, Fine, Rorem and Schuman. His enthusiasms embraced the underpowered Nielsen and Milhaud and his commissions included Luciano Berio’s gigantic Sinfonia, a musical commentary on Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. Remarkably, the public trusted his flights of fantasy, despite withering criticism from Harold Schonberg in the
New York Times
and the routine Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov that Eugene Ormandy offered on regular Philadelphia visits. Bernstein, over eleven years, set New York afire and the hall was filled nightly with eager young faces, some contorted in perplexity.

Yet, for all his appeal, Bernstein was a disaster on record, outsold by Ormandy and Philadelphia
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and seldom among the CBS top sellers except with Rhapsody in Blue (coupled with An American in Paris) and Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid and Rodeo suites.
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The costs were often self-annihilating. Under union rules, unless the Philharmonic recorded within two days of a concert, players were entitled to a full session fee every fifteen minutes.
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Recording Bernstein’s score for Elia Kazan’s film On the Waterfront, coupled with the West Side Story suite, cost fifty grand. The shocked maestro offered to forgo royalties until it broke even (to general surprise, it did), but few other ventures covered their costs. Mahler apart, his classical and romantic records were poorly received on
both technical and analytical grounds. CBS sound erred on the side of murk and Bernstein’s interpretations lacked the warmth of Walter or the icy perfectionism of sharp-eared Georg Szell. Nevertheless, despite financial losses and critical assaults, Bernstein gave CBS what it needed – a youthful, brash and trendy image. In the classical racks it leaped a whole generation ahead of RCA, whose boss, George Marek, still considered Toscanini ‘the greatest musician that ever existed’.
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RCA went in for big signings, grabbing the pianist Van Cliburn after he won the 1958 Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition, but its stars were ageing and unable to match Bernstein and Gould on Lieberson’s glamour label.

In the hiatus between mono and stereo, John Culshaw seized his moment. Stereo, he told Maurice Rosengarten, would vindicate his vision of opera for the home. The Ring would bring wide-open spaces to suburban sitting rooms. Gordon Parry had brilliant ideas for simulating anvils, horses and clashing swords. Culshaw had enticed Kirsten Flagstad out of retirement to sing Fricka in Das Rheingold. Others pencilled in were George London and Hans Hotter as Wotan, Birgit Nilsson as Brünnhilde, Wolfgang Windgassen as Siegfried and Fischer-Dieskau as Gunther. Late in 1957 Rosengarten and Lewis gave Culshaw the green light for Rheingold. ‘You had to fight for what you believed in at Decca,’ said Nella Marcus, Culshaw’s assistant, ‘but then they would stand by you.’
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Culshaw assembled two full teams, stereo and mono, taking on a pair of Mozart scholars, Christopher Raeburn and Erik Smith, as junior producers. Parry rigged up Decca’s stereo ‘tree’-‘a central trio of microphones, plus left and right outriggers, with extra spot-mikes as necessary’.
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Positions were chalked on the floor. Every last Norn knew exactly where she had to stand and sing.

There was one last-ditch hitch. Rosengarten, hearing an LP of Flagstad in the third act of Die Walkure, decided to drop Solti and complete the opera under the Augustan Hans Knappertsbusch. Culshaw was conflicted, but did his best: ‘We tried to drag [Kna] kicking and screaming into the twentieth century of the gramophone
record, the era of the listener-at-home who hears without any visual aid and without the community of the theatre. It was an alien world for him. He was a nineteenth-century professional, and to the end of his life the gramophone was a new-fangled toy.’
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With a huge heave of relief, Culshaw told Solti he had been reinstated.

The night before recording began the pair were going over the score in the bar of the Imperial Hotel in Vienna, where Wagner had once stayed, when Walter Legge sauntered in.

‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded mock-innocently.

‘Recording Rheingold,’ said Solti.

‘Very nice,’ snorted Legge, ‘but you won’t sell fifty copies.’

On the afternoon of 24 September 1958 the Decca Ring began with a Flagstad piano rehearsal. Culshaw, in his vivid account of the adventure,
Ring Resounding
, failed to convey its extreme precariousness. The Vienna Philharmonic simmered with spite at Solti, the brash Hungarian Jew, no match for their wonder-Karajan. RCA kept poaching Culshaw’s best studio men and Rosengarten constantly prevaricated. All hinged on the launch of Rheingold. In May 1959, the set shot into the
Billboard
charts one slot below Elvis Presley. The next opera was safe, but no sooner had Rosengarten given the go-ahead for Siegfried than Solti agreed to conduct an RCA Otello in Rome on the designated dates. ‘I really am angry about the Otello business,’ said Culshaw, urging his friend to reconsider ‘in your best interests’ (but adding courteously that ‘if you decide against Otello, you should notify RCA quickly, in fairness to them’).
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Culshaw followed up with an ultimatum: ‘Very unlikely able delay confirmation Ring dates … cannot guarantee to prevent another conductor taking over.’
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Faced with loss of Ring, Solti gave Otello a miss.

Siegfried, the second in the cycle, came out on five LPs against Rheingold’s three. It was a much tougher sell but Culshaw took on a Canadian publicist, Terry McEwen, whose encyclopaedic knowledge of vocal lore roused US critics to untold heights of hyperbole. Götterdämmerung was comparably acclaimed in 1964, Die Walkuüre the following year. Solti and Culshaw played extracts
of the complete cycle to packed public meetings in London, Manchester and Cambridge. A radio station in upstate New York played the whole set in a day.
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More than any other record, Decca’s Ring made stereo a domestic necessity.

Solti, now an international celebrity, was treated by Rosengarten as if he were still a refugee boy on the streets of Zurich. ‘How did it go?’ asked Nella Marcus as he came out of a meeting. ‘It was like this,’ said Solti. ‘Mr Rosengarten put an ashtray on the coffee table. He said: “When the ashtray is on your side, you talk; when it’s on my side, I talk.” Not once, did he push the ashtray to my side of the table.’
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Solti held the flagship role at Decca, as Bernstein did at CBS and Bernard Haitink, the Concertgebouw conductor, at Philips. They were hardworking studio all-rounders. Bernstein was at his best in contemporary music, Solti had the edge in opera and Haitink was a solid symphonist. The leader of the fleet, however, was racing ahead on Deutsche Grammophon.