The Life and Death of Classical Music Read online

  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.

  www.normanlebrecht.com

  ALSO BY NORMAN LEBRECHT

  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

  Contents

  List of Illustration

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: Past Midnight

  PART I Maestros

  1. Matinee

  2. Middlemen

  3. Midpoint

  4. Millionaires

  5. Miracles on Miracles

  6. Madness

  7. Meltdown

  8. Post Mortem

  Notes to Part I

  PART II Masterpieces: 100 Milestones of the Recorded Century

  PART III Madness: 20 Recordings that Should Never Have Been Made

  Concise Bibliography

  In memory of

  Klaus Tennstedt (1926–1998)

  a studio nightmare

  List of Illustrations

  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.

  Acknowledgements

  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.

  Introduction: Past Midnight

  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 pl
aying 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.

  PART I

  Maestros

  1. Matinee

  One afternoon in 1920, a young pianist sat down in a shuttered room in the capital of defeated Germany and played a Bagatelle by Beethoven. At the return of the main theme, one of his fingers fractionally strayed, touching two keys instead of one. ‘Donnerwetter!’ (dammit!), cried Wilhelm Kempff. He looked around and saw crestfallen faces. ‘That was very beautiful,’ said the machine operator, ‘but the recording is now ruined.’1

  This lapse, recalled by Kempff years later, amounts to a defining moment in the annals of performance-the moment a musician realized that recording required a different discipline and temperament from public concerts. Kempff, had his finger slipped on stage, would have played on regardless, knowing that few would detect the flaw, or remember it afterwards. On record, though, the imperfection was engraved for all time, growing larger and uglier with each replay. There was no hiding place, no camouflage available on disc for inferior technique or inchoate interpretation. The artist stood exposed to eternal scrutiny, stripped of illusory diversion.

  Sound recording had begun in 1877 with the inventor Thomas Alva Edison shouting ‘Mary had a little lamb’ into a phonograph and acquired a mass market in 1902 with the first brass-horn arias of the Neapolitan tenor Enrico Caruso. But the birth of recording as a musical act, separate and distinct from live performance, came in 1920 with the undeletable exclamation of a German artist in the aftermath of the First World War. Kempff, a protege of Brahms’ friend Joseph Joachim, was rooted in gaslight romanticism but sufficiently aware of swirling currents to realize that recording presented more than just an opportunity to earn a fee. What it offered, once an artist had overcome the fear of error, was the chance to achieve a perfect score. For the first time in cultural history, accuracy and speed transcended inspiration as the object of performance, and there was no shortage of young men like Kempff who wanted, quite literally, to set a record with their playing.

  Wiser heads demurred. The professional pianist Artur Schnabel, a man of lofty mind and caustic wit, argued that recording went ‘against the very nature of performance’ by eliminating contact between player and listener, dehumanizing the art.2 Music, he said, was a one-time thing, once played never to sound the same again. Schnabel turned his back monumentally on mechanical impertinences. Kempff, meanwhile, faced fresh dilemmas, moral and aesthetic. Recording, he discovered, was innately competitive. Where, before the war, no one could have asserted empirically that Ferrucio Busoni was a better pianist than Ignacy Jan Paderewski, now it was possible to measure Kempff against Wilhelm Backhaus and, music in lap and stopwatch in hand, checking every note in the Moonlight Sonata and timing each movement against Beethoven’s metronome mark, prove that Kempff was materially superior. Strife ensued. Artists became bitter enemies and listeners were confused. Soon, it was not enough to have one Moonlight in the living-room cabinet; two or three sets displayed intellectual breadth and civilized tolerance. Where emperors in Vienna once staged live contests between Mozart and Clementi, the suburban homeowner in Peck-ham or Pittsburgh now played Rachmaninov against Vladimir Horowitz for a satisfyingly close shave. An element of sporting competition entered the musical game.

  Kempff, who lived to the great age of ninety-five, was a studio master. His articulation was explicit, the notes separated as if bejewelled, his interpretations eschewing an excess of individuality. He recorded the popular classics twice, b
ought a castle near Bayreuth and was exclusive to Deutsche Grammophon from 1935 to his death in 1991. Yet, while his records entered thousands of homes, Kempff was never a household name. Lacking stage magnetism, he did not visit London or New York until 1951 and many who queued for hours to hear Kempff repeat his estimable studio interpretations came away feeling defrauded. Where was the rapt-ness, the subtle variants of colour, when this nondescript little fellow sat upon an empty platform? Kempff, they complained, was a synthetic invention-a soloist who could never have flourished before the anonymity of recording. His fame came from work done in the dark, away from social and political realities. In his memoirs Kempff is untouched by the century’s traumas, by Hitler or mass hysteria, unaware that, when he played in occupied Krakow, he was less than an hour’s drive away from Auschwitz.3

  Schnabel, by contrast, was acutely attuned to public mood and eventually dropped his resistance to recording on an assurance that his work would be sold only in Europe and the British Empire until American audiences had a chance to compare his living presence with the shellac substitute. The principle of eye contact remained uppermost in his mind. Gregarious and polyglot, a commanding presence at the keyboard, Schnabel created a new edition of the thirty-two Beethoven sonatas and played them serially, start to finish, in seven Berlin recitals for the 1927 centenary of the composer’s death. He repeated the cycle twice in London while recording for His Master’s Voice. The last box in the 100-disc series, sold by advance subscription, appeared in 1939. Schnabel, in this set, introduced a twin-edged concept of integrity: the complete works, performed by the supreme authority. But the idea of the complete cycle had another advantage in that it sold people things they never wanted or knew existed. Subscribers who signed up for the Moonlight, the Hammerklavier and the imposing opus III received, together with these summits, discs of less interesting sonatas. Schnabel’s Beethoven showed that great composers could be marketed to the self-improving middle classes as a mantelpiece essential, like Encyclopaedia Britannica, the plays of Shakespeare and a potted aspidistra.