Read The Life and Death of Classical Music Online
Authors: Norman Lebrecht
The Life and Death of Classical Music
Norman Lebrecht
THE LIFE AND DEATH
OF CLASSICAL MUSIC
Norman Lebrecht, assistant editor of the
Evening Standard
in London and presenter of BBC’s
lebrecht.live
, is a prolific writer on music and cultural affairs, whose weekly column has been called required reading. Lebrecht has written eleven books about music, and is also author of the novel
The Song of Names
, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003.
Mahler Remembered
The Maestro Myth
When the Music Stops
The Complete Companion to 20th Century Music
Covent Garden: The Untold Story
The Song of Names
In memory of
Klaus Tennstedt (1926–1998)
a studio nightmare
A crowd in Queen’s Park, Manchester, listening to an Auxeto Gramophone
Fred Gaisberg turning pages in a 1920s Berlin studio for Fritz Kreisler and his accompanist Franz Rupp
A gramophone, early 1930s
Arturo Toscanini at the 1937 Salzburg Festival
Arthur Schnabel
Marian Anderson, early 1940s
Gregor Piatigorsky, Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, Hollywood, 1949
Professor Elsa Schiller
Herbert von Karajan in Berlin, 1955, with Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt and Gerhart von Westermann
Glenn Gould, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, New York, March 1961
Goddard Lieberson
Herbert von Karajan and Walter Legge at Abbey Road, March 1960
Sir Georg Solti and John Culshaw, Vienna, spring 1966
Herbert von Karajan with Sviatoslav Richter, Mstislav Rostropovich and David Oistrakh, Berlin 1970
Herbert von Karajan and Akio Morita near Salzburg, March 1986
Neville Marriner, 1990s
Copyright in all the pictures is held by Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library.
As so often in a work of untold history, the ones who deserve greatest thanks are those who asked to have their names kept out of the book. Many of my other informants are acknowledged in the notes and have been thanked by the author in person. I am eft with the agreeable task of expressing my gratitude to those who, at one stage or other, provided encouragement or assistance in getting the story of classical recording finally on the record.
To my colleagues at the
Evening Standard
Veronica Wadley, Fiona Hughes, Sally Chatterton, and MaryAnn Mallet; at BBC Radio 3 Roger Wright, Tony Cheevers, Jessica Isaacs, Paul Frankl, Olwen Fisher and Cameron Smith; at Scherzo (Spain) Luis and Cristina Sunen; at
www.scena.org
(Canada) Wah Keung Chung and Mike Vincent; to my agents Jane Gelfman and Jonny Geller; to my publishers Marty Asher and Simon Winder; to my assiduous copy-editor Trevor Horwood and to my attentive reader Catherine Best.
And to all of those people in and out of the record business, some no longer alive, who shared with me their insights, ideas and access over the years:
Antonio de Almeida; Peter Alward; Peter Andry; Shirley Apthorp; Nicole Bachmann; Robert von Bahr; Mike Batt; Richard Bebb; Roxy Bellamy; Gunther Breest; Lucy Bright; Paul Burger; Marius Carboni; Schuyler and Ted Chapin; Matthew Cosgrove; Didier de Cottignies; Chris Craker; John G. Deacon; Peter Donohoe; Cor Dubois; Albrecht Du¨mling; Tony Faulkner; Ute Fesquet; Johanna Fiedler; Michael Fine; Ernest Fleischmann; Maureen Fortey; Simon Foster; Medi Gasteiner-Girth; Sir Clive Gillinson; Judy Grahame; Michael Haas; Ida Haendel; Gavin Henderson; Antje Henneking; Klaus Heymann; Bill Holland; Katharine Howard; Alexander Ivashkin; Peter Jamieson; Mariss
Jansons; Jane Krivine; Gilbert E. Kaplan; Madeleine Kasket; Lotte Klemperer; Michael Lang; Mona Levin; Naomi Lewin; Susi and Martin Lovett; Richard Lyttelton; James Mallinson; Nella Marcus; Richard Marek; Lucy Maxwell-Stewart; Monika Mertl; Henry Meyer; John Mordler; Melanne Mueller; Christopher Nupen; Dr Stephen Paul; Ted and Simon Perry; Costa Pilavachi; Karen Pitchford; Christopher Pollard; Martha Richler; Terri Robson; Stephen Rubin; Peter Russell; Isabella de Sabata (Lady Gardiner); Karen Schrader; José Serebrier; Yehuda Shapiro; Sylvana Sintow; Ed Smith; Sir Georg and Lady Solti; Denise Stravinsky; Sheila and Adrian Sunshine; Inge and Klaus Tennstedt; Maria Vandamme; Alison Wenham; John Willan; Dolly Williamson; Claire Willis; Dr Marie-Luise Wolff.
A week before Christmas 2004 the president of a major classical record label gave a farewell dinner for the vice-president of another, who was taking early retirement. It was an intimate affair in an exquisite restaurant in the Pimlico district of London. Present, besides the host, were another label chief, a jovial singers’ agent and myself-just a few good friends and their tolerant partners who had heard all the best yarns many times over and knew exactly when to laugh.
As fine wines flowed and reputations were cheerily trashed, it struck me how unusual this party might seem to a greasy-pole climber in the more ruthless worlds of media, or car rentals. You could never imagine the head of Hertz, say, giving a feast for the number two at Avis. But classical recording had always been a convivial activity and, now that it was nearing nemesis, there was no reason to dispense with civilities. After all, as someone remarked, the band played on even as the
Titanic
sank.
A year earlier I had written a column announcing the end of classical recording. Nothing had since disturbed that thesis. Deutsche Grammophon, the arbiter of classical purity, was employing its star mezzo-soprano, Anne Sofie von Otter, in songs by the Seventies band Abba.
Gramophone
, the classical review magazine, had pop crooner Elvis Costello on its cover. Sony Classical, heir to the Columbia legacy, was forcibly merged with its historic rival Victor, now German owned. A century of recorded heritage was tossed from hand to corporate hand, as if worthless.
Productivity was at its lowest since the Great Depression, a trickle of two or three releases monthly from so-called major labels and another handful from sole traders. The days when DG and EMI each flourished ten new titles in the month before Christmas seemed mythical barely a decade on. As we sat past midnight
retelling glories and follies, recalling indispensable records that were planned and never made and others that should never have seen light of laser, we shared a golden glow of something whose significance had yet to be defined. What, exactly, had the classical record contributed to modern civilization? Who had been the driving forces, and who the destroyers? Where did this hybrid object-part art, part engineering-fit into the kaleidoscope of contemporary culture? These questions had never been comprehensively addressed and the need to understand them acquired a tangible urgency as the last producers were turning out the lights.
Unlike photography, recording could not claim to be a pure art since the impetus was commercial. Nevertheless, by some sym-biotic quirk, the organs of recording acquired an artistic personality and a spiritual dimension. The Decca Sound differed materially, or so it was said, from RCA Living Stereo and both could be told apart from Mercury Living Sound. The act of making and playing a record involved a quasi-religious ritual: the cleansing of the surface, the placing of the needle. No private sanctum was complete without several versions of major works in divergent interpretations-the Beethoven symphonies conducted variously by Arturo Toscanini, Herbert von Karajan, Claudio Abbado, Simon Rattle, Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Whether this cult amounted culturally to more than a row of has-beens was impossible to adjudicate until a line was drawn beneath the recording century and the entirety was assessed as a single artefact.
From the endpoint, where we sat, it became clear that classical recording had changed the world in more ways than previously told. It had brought Western civilization within everyman’s reach. No hamlet was too remote to hear Shakespeare and Goethe, Shostakovich and Gregorian chant. A child in Szechuan, enchanted by a sound, grew up into a celebrated virtuoso. Conversely, pentatonic Szechuan tunes, captured on early records, found their way into Western symphonies. Classical recording shrank the world to fit anybody’s fist, long ahead of mass tourism and multiculturalism.
Certain recordings united nations in grief and reflection. A Bruckner symphony signalled, for Germans, the end of the Third
Reich; Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings mourned, for Americans, the death of presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy. Classical recording, over the course of a century, reordered musical priorities. In 1900 Beethoven was the most important composer that ever lived. By 2000 he had given way to Mahler, a symphonist whose metamorphosis from non-person to most-popular was wrought not by live performance or broadcasts but through classical recordings by Leonard Bernstein and Otto Klemperer which changed musical taste.
That such a useful activity could collapse at the end of the century, supplanted by the froth of ephemeral celebrity, is a cultural loss of some magnitude, equivalent to the drowning of Venice. It came about when labels were pushed by corporate owners to chase the popular buck. Decca signed a quartet of girls in bodysuits. EMI embraced a
Playboy
centrefold. America’s foremost cellist went hillbilly. A Welsh warbler gobbled up the promotion budget of Sony Classical, then declared that she was done with classics. A civilization was ending. It could not be allowed to die without eulogy or explanation.
I began, in my weekly newspaper column and on my website, to enumerate the milestones-the hundred classical records that, in some way or other, altered the world and its music. These were not necessarily the most perfect records, nor the most ambitious, but they were ventures which-singly or taken together-signified the legacy. A voluminous response from readers the world over revealed an engagement that was both catholic and passionate. It appeared that classical records mattered profoundly, even to people who never bought records and did not listen much. They were, in some way, a cornerstone of cultural certainty.
Readers wanted to know why. Why symphonies had been displaced by crossover, why the regular flow of durable masterpieces had stopped, why new artists were not selling. I had no empirical answer since the historical background was opaque and largely untold. The more I strove to select a hundred recordings by an objective criterion of cultural significance, the more I had to discover about the circumstances of their creation. Great
recordings do not come about by accident, or stand alone in time. I needed to furnish the critical discussion of the hundred greatest recordings in this book with an account of how they came about, from Caruso’s first scratchings to the serenity of CD. I expected this industrial history to be brief and uneventful, only to find myself overwhelmed by fantastical storylines. Who would have imagined that one famous label came about as the child of a Nazi war criminal and a concentration camp victim? Why would a strictly orthodox Jew finance a gay men’s collective? What made one record chief fly to Hong Kong with a million dollars in two suitcases? These romances cried out to be investigated. Once word got round that I was writing the inside story of classical recording, artists, producers and executives opened their hearts and archives to my inquiries. Much of what follows is hitherto undocumented, the oral lore of a civilization that is no more.
Our farewell dinner ended in tears. Among the gifts on the table was a DVD recording of the late Carlos Kleiber, a conducting titan who had cost our departing friend millions of dollars in cancelled projects. Moisture welled in our friend’s eyes. He thanked our host, hand on heart. He would watch the DVD as soon as he got home. Working, and mostly not working, with Kleiber had been an incomparable privilege. His executive life had been made tolerable by helping a few mortals of genius achieve a fragment of their potential. If the history of recording was over, so be it. The music would endure.
