What finally swayed her was the opportunity to produce a cycle of Mozart operas, having argued that it would be a national disgrace if Mozart was sung only on English labels during his 1956 birth bicentennial. Die Entführung aus dem Serail, the first release, drew fire from Stuckenschmidt for its untimely frivolity. Fricsay replied: ‘Through Mozart, we become better people.’48 Schiller’s Wiedergutmachung – making good again-involved signing Jewish artists to the Yellow Label. When Fricsay left Berlin after the US Senate discovered it was spending tax money on a foreign orchestra (something it would never do at home), she lined up Lorin Maazel for RIAS and DGG. Hearing reports of a quartet of three Austro-German refugees and a British Jew, she invited the Amadeus to Berlin. ‘She was a very lively personality,’ said Siegmund Nissel, the second violinist. ‘We had just been offered a contract by EMI. Soon afterwards, Frau Schiller got in touch. I said, “I am terribly sorry, I have already agreed with EMI …” She said, “Would you allow me to come to London and talk to them?”
‘Some time later she called: “I didn’t get you, but at least I got you the same conditions from EMI that you would have got from us”.’49 Nissel, embarrassed, asked EMI to split the contract with DGG. Six years later, Schiller won exclusive rights. ‘She was a very shrewd Jewish lady,’ said Martin Lovett, the cellist. ‘She would look through you and weigh you up in a way I only ever experienced from Margaret Thatcher. I was a bit uncomfortable recording for the Germans, but Sigi’s father had been in Dachau. Who was I to object?’50
‘In Germany I always wondered who I was shaking hands with,’ said Siegmund Nissel. ‘You had to put it out of your mind. Deutsche Grammophon was the best firm for us. They made records of marvellous quality and gave us enormous time to make them.’ It took less than a decade for Schiller to rehabilitate the German label.
To the west, another giant stirred. Philips of Holland was famous for close-shaving men’s razors and women’s depilators; it also made light bulbs, radios and record players. Frits Philips, the family’s rising star, was anxious to secure a flow of good LPs for his turntables. He bought the local Decca dealership, HDD, and proposed a global merger to Edward Lewis. When that offer was rebuffed, he snatched CBS sales away from EMI and founded his own label.
Early releases were feeble. Philips poured forth light music of unfathomable triviality, fronted by the bandleader Geraldo. Classics, based in sleepy Baarn, wore a muddy-brown sleeve colour-milk-chocolate, in polite parlance-and unfamiliar faces, but the somnolence was deceptive. Amsterdam, lacking an opera house, had an intense concert life. Eduard van Beinum, the Concertgebouw music director, gesturally inelegant and unhealthily overweight, was a refined Francophile who attracted rare and unusual artists. Clara Haskil, a Romanian refugee in Switzerland, melted Dutch hearts in Mozart, recorded for Philips and earned, at the age of 57, enough money for the first time in her life to buy a piano. Claudio Arrau, the silken Chilean, recorded Beethoven sonatas. Arthur Grumiaux and Henryk Szeryng were the key violinists, Maurice Gendron the label cellist. These quiet musicians were no match for RCA’s ‘million dollar trio’ of Rubinstein, Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky, but the Dutch, deploring tall tulips, were building a label without stars, a label where music came first. Philips was the sixth and last of the great classical labels, completing a set of so-called ‘majors’ that controlled the distribution game-the networks, the discounts, the deals-and colluded at times over prices (for which they were fined) and programming. No start-up ever succeeded in breaking up their cosy colloquy.
Which is not to say that others did not try. George Mendelssohn, a Hungarian in Los Angeles, lit upon a diaspora of talent-the pianists Shura Cherkassky, the violinist Ruggiero Ricci and the brothers Jakob and Bronislaw Gimpel. No relation to the great Felix, the would-be music mogul styled himself George de Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and named his label Vox. He grabbed hold of Otto Klemperer, who had wrecked his American career with manic-depressive escapades and was heading off to conduct the state opera in Hungary, a rash move in the gathering Cold War. Mendelssohn got Klemperer to record a few symphonies in Paris and Vienna. Back in LA, the pair entered a record store and asked for Beethoven’s Fifth, conducted by Klemperer.
‘Sorry,’ said the assistant, ‘we’ve only got Toscanini and Walter
‘But we want Klemperer.’
‘These are the best recordings,’ said the sales guy. ‘Why do you want anyone else?’
‘Because I am Klemperer,’ growled the conductor.
‘And I guess your pal’s Beethoven,’ grinned the assistant.
‘No, he’s Mendelssohn,’ roared Klemperer.
‘Wow,’ exclaimed the clerk. ‘You know, I’ve always loved your Wedding March.’
Another ex-Hungarian named his New York label Remington after a phonograph company that went bust in 1921. Don Gabor, cousin of glamour-puss Zsa Zsa, recorded Bartok at the piano and, working as a packer at RCA, picked up a few distribution tricks. He launched Remington in 1946 on a red label, mistakable for Victor’s Red Seal. Laszlo Halasz, chief conductor at New York City Opera, was his musical adviser and Marcel Prawy, lawyer to the movie actors Jan Kiepura and Marta Eggerth, his Vienna fixer. Prawy got Vienna Philharmonic players (under exclusive contract to Decca) to record for Remington under such pseudonyms as Pro Musica and Vienna State Opera Orchestra.
Subterfuge was the lifeblood of little labels. Vox issued Beethoven’s first symphony under ‘Conductor X’ after Artur Rodzinski refused to put his name to it. It recorded the conductor George Ludwig Jochum, brother of DGG’s Eugen, and violinist Walter Schneiderhan, not to be mistaken for the Vienna concertmaster, Wolfgang. Gabor was run out of stores by ruinous reviews, but not before he had tapped such promising talents as the pianists Jorge Bolet and Jorg Demus. Vox discovered Ingrid Haebler and Alfred Brendel who, after voluminous activity in Vienna, transferred to Philips.
Some of the upstarts had taste, others good ears. Mercury, founded in New York in 1945, was driven by C. Robert Fine, a sound engineer, and his fiancee Wilma Cozart, sometime secretary to Antal Dorati, music director in Dallas and Minneapolis. They got Rafael Kubelik to conduct Ravel’s score of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in Chicago in a sound so distinctive that the New York Times reviewer said it felt like the orchestra’s ‘living presence’, a term the Fines swiftly trademarked. ‘We wanted the performance to seem so lifelike that the listener could “see” it before his eyes,’ explained Cozart in a press release.
Knowing how US orchestras worked, Cozart could usually get round union barriers and overtime premia. When these proved insurmountable, Mercury came to England. ‘One August,’ said Neville Marriner, leader of the London Symphony Orchestra’s second violins, ‘we worked thirty days on the trot, three sessions a day, alternating from Dorati to Pierre Monteux. You couldn’t have bought a better education.’51 So large did Mercury loom for a while that its director of music, Harold Lawrence, became the LSO’s next general manager.
Westminster, another New York indy,52 hooked up with a UK independent, Pye-Nixa, one of whose labels was set up by the father of child star Petula Clark, who was still recording half a century later.53 Westminster issued the world premiere recording of Mahler’s seventh symphony with Hermann Scherchen. Frustratingly it appeared in 1953, just weeks before Hans Rosbaud’s performance appeared on Urania, a shadowy outlet for German radio tapes, often conducted by ex-Nazis.
In France, Bernard Coutaz got into his Citroën 2CV and drove an engineer and organist from one cathedral to the next, recording baroque sonatas. Based in Arles, where Vincent Van Gogh lost his ear, Coutaz and his Harmonia Mundi opened untapped realms of early music. In London an Australian heiress, Louise Hanson-Dyer, launched L’Oiseau Lyre (the lyre bird) as a baroque niche but could not resist supporting her struggling compatriots. She gave a gawky soprano at Covent Garden a recital LP. Later, on Decca, Joan Sutherland became the top-selling soprano on record, after Callas.
Klemperer’s life on Vox ended rancorously whe
n another baton finished off Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony in his absence-‘a gross public deception,’ he called it.54 The formidable giant joined EMI, where Legge tended his temperamental swings with unexpected sensitivity. Klemperer loudly scorned records, which, he said, were a poor substitute for live music. ‘Listening to a recording,’ he sonorously proclaimed, ‘is like going to bed with a photograph of Marilyn Monroe.’55
3. Midpoint
Halfway through its century, classical recording reached a set of turning points. EMI set the ball rolling with a $3 million bid for US Capitol. Decca formed a counter-alliance with RCA. CBS tied up with Philips. Old enemies became Orwellian allies. EMI’s new chairman, Joseph Lockwood, was a miller’s son from Nottingham who had organized national animal-feed supplies during the war. He took one look at the music business and decided the classical tail could not continue to wag the popular dog. ‘It was a conscious decision of mine to support pop music and play down the importance of the classical people a bit,’ he explained, ‘not to discourage them, but not to let them think they owned the bloody place.’1
In future, Lockwood decreed, no record could be made without approval from an International Classical Recording Committee (ICRC) comprising the heads of the largest regions. Unless a majority agreed that a project would show profit in their territories in three years, the record would not be made. The fiat was received with horror by the classical sector. ‘What will I tell Karajan?’ wailed Legge, but the clamp stayed until executives got round it in backroom deals. At international conferences, Paris would submit an inflated sales projection for a Beecham LP in exchange for London’s reciprocal overestimation of Georges Pretre.2 The figures were pure fiction.
Lockwood fumed and tightened his scrutiny. ‘He once visited our department at Hayes’ (EMI Records, Export Dept, Branch Supplies), said a junior clerk. ‘I was about twenty-two. He was introduced to me at my desk and asked me two very pertinent and detailed questions about my work. I never worked out how a chairman could possibly know so much.’3 A crusty bachelor, the chairman had an eye for sharp young men. He appointed George Martin, twenty-eight, as EMI’s youngest-ever director, head of Parlophone. An oboist by training, it took Martin little more than a couple of years to overturn the musical economy.
That same midpoint moment brought Goddard Lieberson in 1955 to the presidency of CBS Records, in place of Edward Wallerstein. Signing his letters ‘God’, Lieberson was the last classical man to head a major label. He gave the pop side to Mitch Miller, an ex-classmate of his at Eastman Musical School and oboist in the school band. Miller meant business. He fired Frank Sinatra (years later, meeting him on the street, Miller said ‘Hi, Frank’; Sinatra said, ‘Just keep on walking’) and became overnight the mightiest man in pop. Piratically opportunistic – he put Frankie Laine’s cover version of High Noon in the shops three weeks ahead of the official soundtrack-Miller won his own singalong show on CBS television, selling 20 million records. ‘He had too much power and not enough taste,’ wrote the pop historian Donald Clarke.4 Miller liked Johnny Mathis-style smooch and the sepia sound of a fading America, untouched by social discord. To kids on street corners, CBS looked old and out of touch.
Lieberson went searching for another South Pacific. ‘Goddard backed My Fair Lady when everyone else turned it down at backers’ auditions,’ said a producer, ‘and he was respected enough to go on the road and make suggestions for cuts and improvements. At recording sessions, he was the real star.’5 In studio, observed CBS photographer Don Hunstein, ‘he would sit in Savile Row suits, keeping the atmosphere friendly with little jokes. The president of the company was the working producer of these show records.’6 With the president at the console and the A&R boss singing along, CBS Records was a hands-on cottage industry operating out of five floors at 799 Seventh Avenue. In the southern US, its LPs were sold by Philips (or Philco) reps, along with personal grooming products. Total sales amounted to $277 million, and one in five records sold was classical.
Down on the mean streets, a storm was gathering. On 12 April 1954 a southern bandleader, Bill Haley, and his group, the Comets, rattled the world’s vertebrae with Rock Around the Clock, which inaugurated rock ’n’ roll. A gritty movie, The Blackboard Jungle, used the song as its soundtrack. The idea came not from the star, Glenn Ford, but from his nine-year-old son, Peter. Kids were calling the shots in music, and Mitch Miller did not like that one little bit. In a caustic address to a convention of radio disc jockeys, he laid into rock merchants for pandering to the under-age. ‘You abdicated your programming to the corner record shop, to the eight-to fourteen-year-olds, to the pre-shave crowds that make up 12 per cent of the country’s population and zero per cent of its buying power,’ he raged. But Mitch was wrong. Teens were rolling in prosperity pocket money. They bought music that was loud, rhythmic, melancholic, sexually assertive. Kids, from here on, were the driving force, responding to a beat that was set on the streets, not in media towers.
Rhythm and blues brayed forth from independent labels in Chicago, Cincinnati and Detroit, getting heavy radio play through deejay bribes, known as payola. Listeners couldn’t care less so long as the music rocked. The major labels, terrified, could not tell a hit from the whooping cough. A hip-swiggling crooner who drove girls wild left Mitch Miller stone cold. In November 1955 his RCA rivals paid Sun Records thirty-five grand for Elvis Presley, plus five thousand to his personal manager. Six weeks later, two days after his twenty-first birthday, Elvis sauntered into a Nashville studio and delivered himself of Heartbreak Hotel. It would sell 300,000 in three weeks, a million by springtime. By the end of 1956 Elvis had sold $22 million worth of discs and merchandise in the US, half as much as the whole of the classical market.
Rock took longer to conquer Germany, where the Cold War was hotting up and billions were being pumped into rebuilding West Berlin as a showcase for capitalist plenty against communism’s empty windows. Office blocks soared on bombsites and cultural life was fuelled by Bonn government subsidy and secret CIA payments. Elvis was unheard of in Berlin until he joined the US Army and served, from October 1958 to March 1960, in a tank battalion at Friedberg, dating the granddaughter of Olga Chekhova, a notorious Soviet spy.
Musical life in Berlin centred on the Philharmonic Orchestra and its new music director, Herbert von Karajan. On its first US tour in February 1955 the orchestra faced an anti-Nazi demonstration at Carnegie Hall. Back home, Karajan was awarded a Liberty Bell by the Mayor of West Berlin. The symbolism was explicit. Karajan was not just music director but a moral leader in the fight for freedom.
A photograph taken on 27 April shows him at lunch in a rooftop restaurant with the influential critic Stuckenschmidt and the orchestra’s grey-faced manager, Gerhart von Westermann. Karajan, suntanned chin resting on upturned left hand, looks neither man in the eye yet commands rapt attention. A satisfied smile flickers on his lips. This is a cat that has collared the cream, a conductor who can do as he pleases, the most powerful maestro on earth. In addition to Berlin, he had taken command of the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival, and held positions at La Scala Milan and the Philharmonia in London. The one area where his writ fell short was the record industry, but there too the wind was blowing his way.
Vienna Philharmonic players, employed at the State Opera, urged Decca to make records with him. Karajan was keen, believing Decca had a sonic advantage and its new RCA partnership could get him access to the valuable US market. Also beckoning was Deutsche Grammophon. Ernst von Siemens invited him, as a personal favour, to an audio demonstration. ‘They made an experiment for him in the studio-“Look, maestro, this is what we can do with a crescendo.”’7 Karajan, impressed, held discussions with Elsa Schiller. ‘She understood this business better than anyone, apart from Legge,’ he discovered.8
When his EMI contract expired in August 1957, he invited competing bids. Decca came top, DGG second, EMI bottom, with a pittance (Bicknell put his money on Barbirolli against Karajan). Legge was mortified
, fatally disempowered. Months later, Karajan marched into the Sofiensaal to open his Decca account.
He handed his coat to Gordon Parry, who let it drop to the floor. At Decca there were no flunkeys. ‘Don’t stand up,’ said Karajan. It had not crossed anyone’s mind, but they saw his point: the Decca boys towered above the maestro, who was sensitive about his five-foot four. Karajan proceeded to whip up a spectacular Holst Planets for Decca, along with Strauss waltzes and a memorable Madam Butterfly and Aida. But he never warmed to Culshaw and the contract ended in six years, leaving Karajan with a grasp of Decca’s advanced techniques which he duly took to Deutsche Grammophon.
Among the Germans he was met with much bowing and scraping. Karajan led off with Richard Strauss’s A Hero’s Life. ‘The sessions took place on three consecutive March mornings in 1959 in the Jesus-Christus Church,’ wrote producer Hans Ritter. ‘I had been warned that Karajan’s signing of a contract depended on whether he was satisfied with our trial recording. When I took the tapes to him in Vienna, he admitted that he had been anxious to make a good impression on us, as he badly wanted the contract. Unfortunately, I made only two more recordings with him.’9 The record, with melting solos by concertmaster Michel Schwalbe, was beautifully engineered but it failed to sell and Karajan demanded the producer’s head.
His next LP was a set of Brahms and Dvorák dances, Hungarian and Slavonic; it sold 55,000 in a year and went on selling. He went on to make 330 recordings on DGG, powering the label to world leadership and turning the public-funded Berlin Philharmonic into his private recording machine, its rehearsals and concerts routinely taped and edited for release. Each summer near Salzburg, DGG would throw a party at Schloss Fuüschl where Karajan mingled with his ‘family’, but behind the happy smiles no one felt secure in his approbation. After Ritter, Karajan was produced by Otto Gerdes, a part-time conductor with several DGG recordings to his credit. One morning, having given a concert the night before, Gerdes greeted Karajan jovially as ‘Herr Kollege’. He was sacked on the spot.
The Life and Death of Classical Music Page 5