The Life and Death of Classical Music (8 page)

Herbert von Karajan in 1962 quit his jobs at the Vienna Opera and Salzburg, having already relinquished La Scala and London. He had a better plan: rule by records. With the Berlin Philharmonic working full time in its custom-built ochre concert hall, he could control the world’s turntables from his own production centre.

Karajan found a kindred spirit in Glenn Gould, who abruptly gave up travelling and renounced public concerts, declaring that records were a superior musical form. ‘I was working with Glenn in 1964, when he decided to quit the concert stage,’ said Paul Myers. ‘He felt that people were waiting to pounce when he made a technical mistake (he rarely did). Probably the most important reason (which he rarely admitted) was that he was very self-conscious (from his conducting with a free hand to his curious groaning form of singing) and he felt that people came to watch him rather than listen to him.’
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Karajan, smitten by Gould’s leap of faith, offered to fly his Berliners to Toronto to make records together. The pianist was tempted but refused to yield editorial control. A prolonged stalemate set in.

Karajan plunged instead into DGG’s biggest undertaking, a project so costly that fans were asked to pay for it by advance subscription. He had recorded the Beethoven symphonies with the Philharmonia over several years. Now he approached them as an integral cycle, issued indivisibly as a boxed set, priced at a forbidding $40. The production cost was 1.5 million Deutschmarks (close to $400,000) and EMI’s David Bicknell gloated that DGG was heading for ‘a colossal financial catastrophe’.
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But Karajan had prepared his ground. Weeks ahead of release, he took his orchestra to play Beethoven in Paris, London and New York to high acclaim. The set, when it appeared, was elegantly presented and lavishly endorsed by weighty authorities. Stuckenschmidt, forsaking critical detachment, gushed:

Karajan’s aim is tonal perfection and rhythmic precision. Thanks to his wonderfully acute ear and his highly rationalised rehearsal work he is
the greatest living exponent
of the art of training an orchestra. His attitude to Beethoven … is totally different from that of Furtwängler. To him, transparency and luxuriant colour are of the utmost importance. However, with his rare sense of tone, he reveals as if by magic details in Beethoven’s symphonic textures, which come to us as new discoveries.
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A younger hagiolater, Karl Heinz Ruppel, wrote of Karajan as an epic hero in much the same terms as Bernstein had spoken of Mahler. Karajan, said Ruppel, aspired to

the creation of order between the diametrically opposed elements of his artistic nature; between glowing warmth and coldness, fervour and dispassionate distance, temperament and discipline, vitality and reflection, intuition and intellect, imagination and technique. It is an enormous achievement to keep up the high degree of tension between these forces … more, to direct them toward one goal-the representation of the musical work in its objective form, i.e. that intended by its creator.
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Such adulation had not been heard in post-war Germany and it was excesses like these that prompted Culshaw to warn that Karajan
‘filled the void left by the death of Hitler in that part of the German psyche which craves for a leader’.
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The conquest of Beethoven was Karajan’s moment of Hitlerian hubris. Apart from the Pastoral Symphony, which sounded leaden and inflexible, the interpretations were sleek, convincing and beautifully mastered, the sound balanced by a new engineer, Guünter Hermanns, who became a Karajan fixture. The set sold massively in Germany and emphatically around the world. Apart from Toscanini on RCA and EMI’s reboxed Karajan monos there was no competition to DGG’s Beethoven set, which became the cornerstone of stereo collections. It was a masterstroke of market anticipation, cementing Karajan’s grip on the record industry and inspiring me-too cycles from André Cluytens, Josef Krips, Klemperer, Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, Haitink and others.

At Deutsche Grammophon it marked a transition of power. On the last page of his Beethoven programme book, Karajan published an open letter to Elsa Schiller, praising her ‘unwearying energy’ in supporting his cycle. ‘Personally, I can tell you that these were among the most beautiful hours of my artistic activity. You know well how much love and effort the Philharmonic players and I have wrung into the seven years of our collaboration and, most importantly, into the Beethoven project.’ He signed off, ‘In deepest artistic attachment, Herbert von Karajan.’
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This was Schiller’s final act. She turned sixty-five in November 1962 and carried on for another year, signing the pianists Martha Argerich and Tamas Vasary and hammering down deals with other artists. ‘Our last meeting was not very happy,’ said Martin Lovett of the Amadeus. ‘We had just done the Beethoven quartets and she tried to persuade us to take a lump sum payment. She was retiring from DG and wanted to leave a good impression. We refused. It was a dirty trick. Those records earn us royalties to this day.’
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Fricsay’s death from cancer in February 1963 distressed Schiller greatly. Two years later she lost her brilliant protege, the harpsichordist and composer Peter Ronnefeld, who was chief conductor in Bonn when he was also struck by cancer, at the age of thirty.

Although Karajan lured her out to judge conducting competitions, Schiller faded from the scene long before her death in November 1974. Karajan assumed effective artistic control of the record label, dominating its central production. Ernst von Siemens, aware of the organizational vacuum, used Schiller’s withdrawal to reorganize the business. He called Frits Philips in Holland and agreed to merge sales forces. DGG became ‘the centre of a worldwide network of companies whose principal function is the creation of new products in the field of classical music.’
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Siemens had fulfilled his aim, restoring German music to world dominance, with Karajan at its helm.

In 1962 EMI posted a £4.4 million profit on sales of £82.5 million. Its chairman, known internally as Sir Joseph Tightwad for the low salaries he paid, was knighted ‘for services to industry’. Head office moved to Manchester Square in the West End, where Lockwood’s morning arrival froze employees to the spot. ‘Out!’ he barked at a young man who had entered the elevator ahead of him. Old hierarchies prevailed. No one imagined that sales were about to treble and profits quintuple by a force beyond all reckoning.

One April morning, Parlophone boss George Martin took a call from a colleague who was being hassled by a desperate provincial agent. ‘Send him along,’ said Martin. The man’s name was Brian Epstein. He was twenty-seven years old, loved classical music and worked in his parents’ Liverpool furniture store. He looked after a Cavern Club band which had auditioned twice at Decca without result. Other EMI labels were uninterested. Parlophone was his last hope.

George Martin listened to the tapes and liked what he heard. He brought the Beatles to Abbey Road, watched them play and suggested a change of drummer.
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He then signed the group to a slave contract that paid one pre-decimal penny in royalties per two-sided record and bound them to EMI for five years. The first Beatles single, Love Me Do, reached number seventeen in the charts. The second, Please Please Me, went to the top, unleashing a wave of Beatlemania. By the end of 1963 Beatles UK sales were £6.25 million and the boys shared a Royal Variety Show billing with Marlene Dietrich.

Then they went global. Capitol, EMI’s US subsidiary, passed on the first two Beatles singles, which came out on Vee Jay, a Chicago indy. Neither charted higher than 116. Vee Jay turned down She Loves You, which appeared on Swan, a New York
minnow. Epstein flew to New York in November 1963 with I Want To Hold Your Hand and played it to Brown Meggs, Capitol’s East Coast Director. Meggs, a classical producer, saw its potential. Six weeks after the Kennedy assassination, I Want to Hold Your Hand became the first-ever British number one in the US charts.

Seventy-three million Americans watched the Beatles on the CBS
Ed Sullivan Show
on 9 February 1964, a third of the population. John Lennon, in an interview with the London
Evening Standard
, said ‘We’re more popular than Jesus Christ now.’
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Each successive LP-Beatles for Sale … Rubber Soul … Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band-was more sophisticated than the last. George Martin drew upon classical resources, hiring a string quartet as backing for Yesterday and the RPO horn player Alan Civil for McCartney’s song, For No One. That synthesis set the Beatles apart from the pop universe. Martin introduced four-track recording at Abbey Road and spent three days working on a single Beatles track, as long as it would take other groups to cut a whole album. The second album of 1969 was provisionally titled Everest, the summit of their achievement. In the end, they named it Abbey Road, for the studios.

George Martin, on a £3,000 salary, put in for a raise. Tightwad turned him down, so he quit. The Beatles refused to work with anyone else. Martin, now a freelance, demanded a producer’s royalty-the first in music history. The Beatles were rewriting the rulebook, and the financial parameters. Their revenues were phenomenal, then and for all time. Thirty years after their breakup, the group were making $20 million a year in royalties; two anthologies compiled in 1996 netted close to $1 billion from new listeners.
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Nothing in the music industry would ever be the same again.

EMI soared and Decca drooped. In the US, Capitol vied with Elvis on RCA while CBS had Mitch Miller and his singalongs. Lieberson, too late, fired Miller in 1965 and replaced him with Clive Davis, a contract lawyer. Davis was a new type of record man, neither creative nor intuitive-‘I had no A&R training, no
claim to having “ears”’.
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What he knew was how to handle money. A middle-class boy from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, prematurely bald, Davis had no time for classical music which, in the Beatles boom, fell from one-fifth of label turnover to just 5 per cent. Heads were bound to roll.

Walter Legge was first to go. Lockwood ordered him to give up his Philharmonia royalties, worth £75,000 a year. Legge regarded the back catalogue as his pension, and in June 1963 resigned. He flew off to see Karajan in Salzburg, looking for a job. Peter Andry found him sitting in the waiting room. ‘Ich bin drei Tage antechambriert’ (I’ve been waiting here three days), said Legge.
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‘I thought every company in the world would be at my doorstep,’ he told an assistant, ‘but there has been nothing-nothing at all.’
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The rest of his life was spent as his wife’s shadow. John Culshaw’s was the next departure. His Ring complete, he joined BBC television as head of opera and classical music in 1967 and instantly regretted it. ‘We used to meet for lunch once a month,’ said Paul Myers of CBS, ‘and he proposed [making] recordings, including some live concerts at Aldeburgh. Despite the BBC job, he still wanted to do freelance recording work.’
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Loneliness set in. His friends-his family-were at Decca and he felt cruelly cut off. After leaving the BBC in 1975 he contracted a wasting virus on a trip to Australia and died in March 1980, at the age of fifty-five. Culshaw left behind an explosive canister, a memoir that exposed classical recording to objective scrutiny and exposed human chinks in Fortress Karajan. For many, John Culshaw was the supreme classical producer, a man inspired by the absence of audience and the thrill of technology. ‘For Culshaw, the red light was a liberator, not a stifler,’ said one of his trainees, ‘the medium an art form in itself.’
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Critically, at CBS, Lieberson yielded to pressure and handed over to Davis in 1967. Earnings were stagnant at $5 million (pre-tax) and Broadway was dead. ‘Goddard hated doing the cut-outs: deleting records that sold fewer than 400 a year,’ recalled Peter Munves, head of Masterworks marketing. ‘He’d do it, but he made horrible faces.’
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Although CBS, RCA and Capitol
were on level pegging with a 12 per cent market share, CBS was losing the rock war. Lieberson’s consolation was that his classical label was still the best in America. RCA poached Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. They also made some fine operas in Europe-‘the best Tosca in twenty years-Placido Domingo and Leontyne Price,’ reported Munves, who switched labels, ‘but the deal with Rosengarten was that RCA had ten years, then the rights went to Decca. RCA was losing its opera catalogue. It was only a matter of time before they stopped classical recording altogether.’
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Clive Davis experienced an awakening at the Monterey Pop Festival in the Summer of Love, returning to the office in a flowered shirt. In the last quarter of 1969 he cancelled all classical releases, killing the Christmas market and sending a negative signal across the industry. At sales conventions he would schmooze through classical presentations. Janis Joplin, Blood Sweat and Tears, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel were his personal signings, joining Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel and the Byrds at the summit of the charts. In the six years that Davis ruled, CBS market share leaped from 12 to 22 per cent and classics went down the drain. The writing was becoming visible on the wall.

It was not just pop that squeezed classical pips. The formula itself was failing for want of strong successors to the Schillers, the Culshaws, the Liebersons and the Legges. In 1956 Arthur Rubinstein sold 350,000 copies of Rachmaninov’s second concerto, with Fritz Reiner. Fifteen years later, his retake with Ormandy sold just 20,000. Heifetz was falling well short of his $65,000 RCA guarantee and Horowitz could not earn out his $50,000 advance on CBS. Big names no longer spelled paydirt. Music lovers balked at buying the same old stuff all over again.

Labels, lacking imagination, relied on a hard core of habitual buyers, overwhelmingly male, who hung around record stores on the first of the month waiting to sample the new releases. They also congregated in record clubs and around the village pump of a monthly publication, the
Gramophone.
Founded in 1923 by
the Scottish novelist Compton Mackenzie,
Gramophone
attracted 80,000 subscribers at peak and could make the difference between profit and loss for major labels. The
American Record Guide
(est. 1935) aimed to avoid ‘stuffy British sentences or academic circumlocutions’; there were also
FonoForum
(Germany),
Diapason
(France),
Scherzo
(Spain) and others.
Gramophone
, though, was the industry’s international journal of record and its regressive tastes confined labels to a corridor of safety.

Reviews were relentlessly polite, if not downright deferential. ‘I don’t like saying bad things,’ admitted Edward Greenfield, the chief
Gramophone
critic who was reputed to sell more records than any man alive, bar Karajan.
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Reviews were routinely shown to record bosses before publication and, in some instances, modified. It was a very cosy relationship, veering on the promotional.

There were fifty-three gramophone societies in London and 250 more around the UK.
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Their members, seen at annual conventions, were white, middle-class, middle-aged. Some bought as many as a hundred LPs a year, a harmless hobby. Catering to this constituency, producers stuck to the familiar. When Lorin Maazel covered the Tchaikovsky symphonies for Decca-‘technically and musically the most brilliant on record’, said
Gramophone-
CBS followed with a Bernstein set and DGG with a Karajan. Maazel’s Sibelius was matched by Ormandy on CBS and Colin Davis on Philips. Karl Bohm’s DGG Schubert symphonies went head to head with Istvan Kertesz on Decca, Eugen Jochum’s Bruckner cycle on DGG did battle with Karajan. A
Penguin Guide
, compiled by Greenfield and two Gramophonistas, became an essential guide to the perplexed in many record stores.

Over time, the boxes grew bigger. For Beethoven’s bicentenary in 1970, DGG issued the complete works, in twelve sets, on seventy-six LPs. Antal Dorati recorded the 104 symphonies of Haydn on fifty LPs in nine boxes for Decca (CD 55, p. 224). Bohm conducted the forty-one Mozart symphonies on fifteen discs for DGG. While these magnificent enterprises did justice to the lesser works of great composers, they were hardly a nursery for new audiences.

Attempts were made to chase the campus dollar. Young Daniel Barenboim played the twenty-seven Mozart piano concertos on EMI (against Geza Anda on DGG, Alfred Brendel on Vox and Vladimir Ashkenazy on Decca). His cellist wife, Jacqueline du Pre, breathed life into Edward Elgar’s world-weary concerto. Their friends Zubin Mehta, Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman, Ashkenazy and the guitarist John Williams wore trendy clothes and giggled a lot in Christopher Nupen’s TV films. The new kids talked cool but played in strict discipline, respecting tradition even as much of their generation rejected it. Luchino Visconti’s film of Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice
drove up sales of the Adagietto from Mahler’s fifth symphony, but campus nights throbbed to the violent rock of Vietnam. Pop flowered in psychedelic LP sleeves. While naked girls smiled innocently on Blind Faith and Jimi Hendrix covers, classics stuck to studio portraits of artists, dressed up in tie and tails.

Composers who grooved with the times received short shrift on classical labels. John Tavener, an English etherealist, got his break on Apple, the Beatles’ label. Arvo Part, the Estonian dissident, found a home at ECM, a 1969 Munich indy where jazz and classics interconnected. There were isolated exceptions. Deutsche Grammophon flew over Steve Reich for a three-LP set of Drumming, Six Pianos and Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (CD 60, p. 229). In December 1967 CBS released Music of Our Time. ‘Can you imagine?’ said Reich. ‘Twenty simultaneous releases of people like myself, Gordon Mumma, John Cage, Milton Babbitt, Stockhausen – I mean, forget it!’
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Two thousand copies were pressed of each LP and most were reprinted. Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air top-scored with 12,000. John McClure, the chief producer, was ecstatic but Clive Davis sneered at such small beer and, after the conservative upswing of Richard Nixon’s election, plans for radical albums by LaMonte Young and Philip Glass were quashed. Major labels, flummoxed by the unfamiliar, treated living composers like benefit seekers. The pop revolution never crossed classical thresholds. At Abbey Road, where George Martin gave the Beatles a string quartet, a corporate firewall
stopped any counterflow. Classics were living in a fast-receding past.

The times, as Bob Dylan droned, were a-changing. Peace and love gave way to riots, war protests and strikes. ‘It was a horrible period,’ said André as Holschneider, professor of musicology at the University of Hamburg. ‘I was spending all my time after ’68 being hauled to student political meetings.’ A faculty colleague, Hans Hickmann, offered him a production job at DGG’s Archiv. Hickmann, ‘always in a cloud of tobacco smoke’,
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died soon after of a heart attack, leaving the reticent Mozartian in charge of Archiv, reporting to one of Germany’s biggest industrialists. ‘Ernst von Siemens said to me, “If ever you have an item for which you cannot enthuse your colleagues or get company approval, come to me,”’ Holschneider recalled. ‘We would meet five or six times a year to discuss music, and every year I would get half a million Deutschmarks for a project.’
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Prudently at first, Holschneider turned Archiv from a retro label, recording baroque pops for the Christmas market, to a leader in the exciting new field of period practice, making music sound as it did when it was written. The transformation was not easily achieved. Archiv’s top seller was the Munich conductor Karl Richter, who, as former organist at St Thomas’s, Leipzig, claimed irrefutable authority in the music of Bach. Richter was the kind of musician who made Germans comfortable with their past, employing moderate speeds, minimum fuss and limited intellect. He pooh-poohed the authenticist movement. ‘Who says that Bach wouldn’t have used modern instruments if he’d had them?’ he blustered. ‘It might be informative and revealing to play Bach on historical instruments, but for me, it’s only a modish phenomenon that will fade away.’
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Richter died in February 1981, having comprehensively lost the argument.