The Life and Death of Classical Music (9 page)

The early music revival had been around for a while. It arose during the arts-and-crafts movement in England but found no convincing interpreters until after the Second World War, when a countertenor, Alfred Deller, caught the ear on a BBC broadcast
and a chorus leader of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in New York, Noah Greenberg, took up singing Purcell in period style. In the summer of 1948 a Dutch harpsichordist, Gustav Leonhardt, ended his studies in Basle and took a train to Vienna to study conducting. ‘We met in a corridor of the Academy and started talking about his thesis on The Art of the Fugue [by Bach],’ related his fellow-student, Nikolaus Harnoncourt. ‘We decided to perform it, after about 200 rehearsals, with a quartet of [viola da] gambas – myself, my wife [Alice Hoffelner], Eduard Melkus and Alfred Altenburger who was later Vorstand [player-chairman] of the Vienna Philharmonic. We met, and we struggled.’
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That was the start of the revolution in Europe.

Leonhardt, with his wife, Marie, formed an eponymous Baroque Ensemble; the Harnoncourts, with Melkus, created Concentus Musicus Wien. Both groups joined up in 1954 to record Bach cantatas with Deller. There was something of the Singing Family Trapp about these groups, the more so when sons and daughters joined in, but the ethos was high-minded: a search, note by note, for musical truth. Harnoncourt, a descendant of Habsburg emperors, earned his daily living as a cellist in the Vienna Symphony Orchestra under Herbert von Karajan. ‘In those days, musicians were slaves,’ he reported. ‘Conductors used to order a musician to play his part alone, and I have never seen anything less than terror when this happened. Two players, friends of mine, suffered a complete nervous breakdown and were dragged away to mental hospitals for electric-shock therapy.’
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Resentful and bored, Harnoncourt hung around antique shops, fingering ornate viols. He bought a 1558 Cremona bass fiddle for a pittance. ‘For me, an instrument was a tool, not a cult,’ he said. In 1960 he persuaded Telefunken, a German branch of Decca, to record Bach on early instruments and Hickmann, ‘a terrible musician’, to take on music from the court of Maximilian. Both labels offered long-term contracts. ‘So I went to Hamburg. In the morning I had a discussion with Hickmann and his group and in the afternoon I had a session with Telefunken. The Deutsche Grammophon people said, “You’re the absolute best for any kind
of dance music, from medieval to Johann Strauss.” The Telefunken people said, “We like your way of working.” So we said goodbye to Deutsche Grammophon.
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Karajan, hearing that one of his cellists had conducted a Bach record, banned Harnoncourt from his empire. ‘I don’t understand why our relations went bad,’ said Harnoncourt. ‘Karajan loved to perform Bach, but every time he produced a choral recording it would be compared to mine, not always favourably. I wrote to him once, and got a very nice reply, but it remained impossible for me to work in Salzburg.’ After a trailblazing US tour in 1969, Harnoncourt quit the day job and became a missionary for early music. Holschneider tried again to lure him to Archiv. ‘You’re the best man for church music,’
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he said. Harnoncourt declined, sticking to small-time Telefunken. Leonhardt, similarly, shunned Philips. Baroque musicians lived on boutique labels-Deller on Harmonia Mundi, the Catalan Jordi Savall on Astree, Dutchman Ton Koopman on Erato, often crossing over to collaborate. Leonhardt’s Brandenburg concertos on Telefunken, taped in Haarlem churches in 1976, brought together his best pupils: Sigiswald Kuijken on violin, Anner Bylsma (cello), Wieland Kuijken (viola da gamba), Frans Bruüggen (recorder) and Bob van Asperen (harpsichord). ‘If one strives to be authentic,’ warned Leonhardt, ‘one will never be convincing … The crucial point … is the question of artistic quality.’
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Bruüggen pursued cleanliness of tone, obliging students to play scales for half an hour while he read a newspaper.

The more organic performers hung around Reinhard Goebel, a Melkus pupil who got himself sacked by Cologne University in 1973 for sneaking an unregistered gamba player onto campus. Goebel formed Musica Antiqua Koln, a group which made such a fetish of raw text and literal fidelity that critics called him the Ayatollah. Holschneider signed him for Archiv (‘I learned many things from him,’ said Goebel, ‘above all, good taste’), but balanced his harsh provocations with user-friendly Englishmen Trevor Pinnock and John Eliot Gardiner, the latter married to violinist Elizabeth Wilcock, a Harnoncourt pupil.

The English had stood, on the whole, aloof from the European
movement, keeping their own period currency. ‘When we first played in England,’ said Harnoncourt, ‘we did not find one musician who understood what we were doing.’
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The English revolution was sparked by David Munrow, a bassoonist at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, who lit up sombre halls with his quaint enthusiasms. Munrow’s Early Music Consort recorded for a gamut of labels, large and small. In 1971, on a soundtrack he composed for the BBC’s
Six Wives of Henry VIII
, Munrow played shawm, chalumeau, racket and recorder. He, more than anyone, turned early music in Britain from a knot of sandalled zealots to a popular interest, and the players from second rate to first. Reckless of his energies and troubled in his love life, Munrow committed suicide in May 1976 at the age of thirty-three, leaving a legacy of expert period singers, among them James Bowman, Nigel Rogers, David Thomas and Emma Kirkby.

In the hard-bitten world of London orchestras a keyboard player called Thurston Dart used coffee breaks at EMI sessions to demonstrate how much better Bach sounded at lower pitch and faster speeds. ‘We called him the Liberace of the harpsichord,’ said EMI’s Peter Andry. ‘He was a large jolly fellow, very camp,’ said the flautist Richard Adeney. Dart took over Boyd Neel’s chamber orchestra and made it a period band, the Philomusica. ‘He’d ring up and say, “We’re doing the Brandenburgs, are you free?”’ said Adeney. ‘He was very opinionated. There was no discussion, or anything like that. His speeds were quick but the pitch was modern.’
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He made a pioneering period record of the Brandenburgs in 1959 and re-edited the scores once more for Neville Marriner, whose recording he accompanied in 1970, shortly before his early death (others in that epic session were Munrow, Barry Tuckwell (horn), Philip Ledger (organ) and Raymond Leppard (alternate continuo)).

Marriner served as blotting paper for Dart’s ideas when they first met, in a military hospital in 1944, recovering from pre-D-Day wounds. Marriner had been playing the violin in orchestras since he was sixteen. He formed a baroque trio with Dart and Peter Gibbs, a Philharmonia violinist, expanding it to a chamber ensemble,
the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. The Academy played baroque style on modern instruments. Louise Dyer, owner of L’Oiseau Lyre, came to their first concert in the Trafalgar Square church and offered a contract. ‘We immediately recorded all those Italian ice-cream merchants – Manfredini, Corelli, and so on,’ said Marriner. ‘So in one leap we had gone from being a friendly society to something almost professional.’
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Every player in the Academy was an expert in period practice and every voice had to be heard in rehearsals that became, said Decca producer Erik Smith, ‘like a session of Parliament’.
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‘We were immensely democratic,’ sighed Marriner. ‘Everybody talked at the same time during rehearsals. In a way I would wish it had never been so successful. I think the spirit of the music and the personalities involved were much more vivid when we were heading for the top.’
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A set of Rossini string sonatas, orchestrated by Marriner, was the Academy’s first hit. Then they recorded Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, still a baroque curiosity. ‘I have never before enjoyed Vivaldi so much,’
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exclaimed
Gramophone’s
Edward Greenfield, and bookings rolled in from all five continents. ‘I got very tired of jumping through the same hoop over and over again,’ said Marriner, well on his way to becoming Decca’s busiest baton.

Marriner was the least imperious of maestros. ‘He tolerates a great deal,’ wrote Smith. ‘Once, impatient with a record producer, he stomped off and slammed the door. Promptly fell downstairs. Decided this kind of behaviour was not for him.’
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The Academy became something of a training school for conductors as Leppard, Andrew Davis and Christopher Hogwood graduated from its keyboard to careers of their own. Hogwood was a thorn in Marriner’s flesh. ‘He suffered a great deal when he worked with us,’ said Marriner. ‘Chris and I don’t agree much about style. I cannot accept imperfections of intonation and articulation.’ Hogwood formed a rival Academy of Ancient Music, working on period instruments and hoping to emulate Karajan with complete cycles of Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn. There was not much call yet for that sort of thing, but Hogwood got lucky when Decca fell into a serious rift.

Culshaw had left a vacuum. ‘Nobody knew who would succeed [as musical director],’ said Christopher Raeburn. ‘There were three producers, roughly at the same level-myself, Erik Smith and Ray Minshull. I never wanted the job, and I don’t think Ray did, either. He wanted to remain a studio producer. But Culshaw had landed him with an enormous amount of head office responsibility and he was the obvious choice.’ Culshaw first supported Minshull then, in a letter to Edward Lewis, retracted. On being told that Minshull had got the job, Culshaw asked him round for a drink and, in the presence of another producer, David Harvey, set fire to his Lewis letter as a conciliatory gesture. Minshull never forgave him. A featureless man, devoid of personal warmth, Minshull set about undoing Culshaw’s edifice. Where Culshaw fostered team spirit, Minshull shared his plans only with Raeburn. ‘I was delighted when Ray took over,’ said Raeburn. ‘He was the most marvellous senior colleague. But then I was never after his job. Erik, on the other hand, felt his position was a bit untenable.’
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Smith, who lived in Somerset, ‘was supremely indifferent to company politics, far more interested in visiting museums’.
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He did not like taking orders from Minshull and hearing that Philips ‘were looking for new ideas in developing the considerable potential of artists’,
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he arranged to defect and took Marriner with him. Minshull signed up Hogwood, in direct competition. Marriner went on to aggregate a catalogue of 600 recordings of 2,000 works, more than anyone bar Karajan. The next busiest maestro on record was Harnoncourt, with 440. Early music was the Yukon of the late-middle period of classical recording.

Leonard Bernstein, recording Der Rosenkavalier in Vienna, sat in the Sofiensaal, head in hands, weeping, ‘I can’t … I can’t.’ An hour later he was throwing a party for the Decca boys. It was the middle of 1970, the Beethoven bicentennial. ‘I’m two years younger than Beethoven was when he died and I still haven’t written a masterpiece,’ wailed Bernstein. His bipolar swings and delusions were symptomatic of a stalled career. Bernstein had quit the New York Philharmonic to concentrate on composing
but the result was a dismally trite Mass for the Kennedys, and little else.

CBS were discussing his future recording plans when Paul Myers, vice-president for A&R, raised a critical challenge. ‘Name one work,’ said Myers, ‘apart from his own music, that you would rather have Lenny’s performance of than anyone else’s.’
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There was a chilled silence. When it ended, so did Bernstein’s CBS career. Times had truly changed.

At the new CBS Black Rock on Sixth Avenue and Fifty-second, Clive Davis cracked down on classics until he was escorted off the premises by security guards in May 1973, accused of misappropriating $53,700 of company money doing up his Central Park West apartment and another twenty grand paying for his son’s bar-mitzvah. Davis said he had done nothing wrong. He decorated the apartment to impress artists. Charges of fraud and false invoicing (which he denied) were dropped. He pleaded guilty to an unrelated tax evasion count and bounced back inside a year with Arista Records, hitting number one with Barry Manilow. In 2001 he was admitted to Rock and Roll’s Hall of Fame as one of the heroes of the music business. Davis went so far as to boast that the compact disc had been named for his initials, CD.

After the scandal Lieberson was brought back, but it was not the same. A funny thing happened to me on the way to my retirement,’ he told a sales convention, and the laughter was pained. Broadway was putting on
Hair
in full frontal and Pierre Boulez, who followed Bernstein in New York, was a French ascetic who hated Mozart. It was hard to summon much enthusiasm for making records. ‘Goddard liked to emcee the sales conventions,’ said Don Hunstein, ‘taking the microphone after dinner and introducing the acts with a dry wit. The dress code had changed-everybody now dressed casual-but he always turned out in black tie and dinner suit. “I guess you all want to know why I’m wearing this,” he began. “It’s because my jeans didn’t get back in time from the presser’s.” ’
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He hung on for two years, handing over to a Davis sidekick, Walter Yetnikoff, and retiring to Santa Fe, where he fell victim to
an aggressive cancer in May 1977. ‘I was very angry about him dying on me,’ said Yetnikoff. ‘He left with a sterling reputation and he was doing what he wanted to do. He beat the system. And then the motherfucker died on me! It sounds facetious but I was really pissed.’
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Even a deaf mute could tell that the tone had changed at the Tiffany Label.

Yetnikoff, a Brooklyn lawyer with an ego the size of the Empire State, sacked Paul Simon, lost Bob Dylan to the predatory David Geffen and signed Michael Jackson, a family-band child singer who was to became the highest grossing rock star of all time despite his growing weirdness in the society of small boys. Yetnikoff noticed nothing untoward about Jackson’s conduct. ‘I’d come out of a coma around 7 or 8 a.m.,’ he confessed. ‘By 9 I might have drunk a half a bottle of vodka. Then I would call someone at CBS, maybe the head of the network or accounting, and yell at them. I’d finally drag myself out of bed and get into the office around noon. The steward would immediately bring me a screwdriver.’
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