One night in November 1975 the Soltis were having dinner with Sir Edward Lewis. ‘That’ll be Maurice,’ said the chairman, when the phone rang.
‘How is he?’ asked Solti when Lewis returned.
‘He’s dead.’56
Rosengarten’s seat on the Decca board went to his son-in-law, Jack Dimenstein, who talked of selling his stake to EMI. The chairman had other ideas. Three decades after their initial flirtation, Lewis reopened contacts with Philips. Polygram was on a roll. It had bought MGM Records and Verve and, with an Australian, Robert Stigwood, co-produced Saturday Night Fever and Grease, unleashing a tidal wave of disco music and a 1978 profit of $120 million. Awash in cash, Philips bought Decca for just £5.5 million. There was a last-gasp bid from GEC’s Arnold Weinstock, Riccardo Muti’s friend, but the shareholders decided that Philips made a better fit. In 1979 Decca became part of the Dutch-German combine. Its UK factories were shut down, its West Hampstead studios sold. Lewis, sick with leukaemia, barely outlasted the sale, dying in January 1980 ‘as if unable to witness any longer the piecemeal selling-off, like so much scrap, of his beloved company’.57
The hub of classical recording was now located in a brown field in Holland, the landscape flat as far as the eye could see. ‘International Finance & Administration was in a lovely old villa set in very nice grounds and was fired with rather less than driving purpose,’ said a British employee. ‘It felt rather like a rest home. We were … among the first to employ Word Processors (Philips of course), which were exactly the size and shape of a small upright piano.’58 The soporific backdrop was deceptive, for the Dutch were quietly engineering an audio revolution. Philips had stumbled into acoustic invention with the Compact Cassette, an office tool one-eighth of an inch across which played tape at 1.875 inches per second. No cultural use was foreseen until businessmen began taping favourite songs for long sales trips and the record industry started issuing pre-recorded cassettes. Sony offered to recognize the Philips format in exchange for a free right to manufacture the machines. Japanese players soon outsold the Dutch and Philips regretted their generosity. Then the motor industry decided to add a tape player to the dashboard radio. Ford opted for a pocketbook-sized cartridge with an eight-track loop. Labels began issuing music on a third format and cassettes and cartridges slugged it out at high speed on multi-lane highways.
It was a close-run thing. In 1975 Americans bought $583 million worth of pre-recorded cartridges, a quarter of the total recorded-music market. But the rest of the world chose the cassette for its simplicity, versatility and a sound quality improved by Dolby noise reduction. Cartridges died out, but the cassette acquired notoriety as a vehicle for illegal duplication. Piracy, never formerly a threat, became a nervous preoccupation of the music industry. Walter Yetnikoff told Norio Ohga that Sony cassettes were killing his sales. Ohga replied that his machines were opening new markets for music. The industry split between hardware innovators and software conservationists.
Into this schism splashed the calamity of quad. Aiming to supersede stereo, RCA in 1970 fostered a four-speaker system developed by JVC in Japan. Leopold Stokowski, near his ninetieth birthday, conducted the demos. CBS, in rapid response, unleashed Surround Quadraphonic (SQ). The systems were mutually incompatible. Records in one quad format were unplayable on the other, and both quickly died. Sony, meanwhile, presented a video cassette at a 1970 Tokyo press conference fronted by Herbert von Karajan. Video cassettes, said the maestro, would soon replace ‘all phonographic records’.59 Sony’s Betamax system was state of the art. Matsushita challenged it with cheaper, grainier VHS. The result was settled when VHS bought rights to Hollywood movies, leaving Sony with nothing to show. Morita was mortified.
Philips, beavering quietly away, came up with Laservision, a flat disc that bypassed the Edison method of capturing sound as electronic waves and converted it instead into computer digits, stored beneath the impermeable surface of a plastic disc, readable by laser beam. Digital recording eliminated tape noise, flutter, wow, distortion and all the clicks and pops of LPs. Digital was the future, but Laservision was not quite there. Of 400 machines sold in Holland, half were returned to stores. Ohga, in hospital after a helicopter crash, received a Laservision demonstration in April 1979. Smitten, he talked Philips into forming a joint task force to crack the digital atom. The Japanese set a ferocious pace. When the Dutch havered over several modulation systems, Ohga phoned team leader Kees A. Schouhamer Immink and told him he had a week to make a choice, ‘or management would make it for us’.60 Size was set in Japan. ‘Compact Cassette was a great success,’ said Philips. ‘We don’t think compact disc should be bigger.’ Morita discovered that this would limit playing time to less than an hour, equivalent to an LP. He demanded that CDs be large enough to accommodate Beethoven’s ninth symphony, his wife’s favourite work. The Dutch went up half a centimetre to beer-coaster size, giving eighty minutes’ play. The hole in the middle of the CD was cut around the diameter of the smallest Dutch coin. Garage methods, akin to Johnson’s and Berliner’s, gripped the digital inventors. Sony set a deadline of May 1981, a meeting of the International Music Industry in Athens.
Sound was already being digitized on tape. Thomas Stockham, an MIT professor who had investigated Richard Nixon’s Watergate tapes, built a Soundstream machine that he tried out at Santa Fe opera festival in 1976. He met a pair of Clevelanders, Jack Renner and Robert Woods, who asked if they could use it for wind music sessions on their label, Telarc (CD 67, p. 237). Conducted by Frederick Fennell on 4–5 April 1978, the first digital LP blew out demonstration speakers in stores. Telarc followed with Stravinsky’s Firebird from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra under Robert Shaw, and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, by the Cleveland Orchestra and Maazel. Decca digitally recorded the 1979 New Year’s Day Concert in Vienna in digital sound, far brighter than analogue.
A month before Athens, at the 1981 Salzburg Easter Festival, Morita and Karajan demonstrated the Digital Audio Disc. ‘All else,’ growled the conductor, ‘is gaslight.’ Karajan was a man in a hurry. He had suffered a stroke, followed by spinal surgery, and was in constant pain. At home in Anif, he compulsively viewed and edited his concerts on a giant screen, preparing a video legacy. He put pressure on Polygram to invest 100 million Deutschmarks in a digital pressing plant in Hanover. Ohga spent $30 million of CBS-Sony dividends on a parallel plant in Shizuoka Prefecture. In the race to launch, Nobuyuki Idei, the Sony head of production, suffered a breakdown and watched the presentation from a hospital bed.
At Athens, the industry split between horsepower and nuclear. When Ohga played his prototype CD, label owners rioted, accusing equipment makers of killing the golden LP. ‘The truth is in the groove! The truth is in the groove!’ they chanted. ‘We barely escaped physical violence,’ recalled Jan Timmer, a burly Philips boss.61 EMI and RCA boycotted CD and purists declared it ‘sterile’. ‘It would not be the first time the Japanese have burnt their fingers,’62 gloated Raymond Cooke, president-elect of the International Audio Engineering Society.
But the LP, whatever its loyalists protested, was doomed. ‘Almost every record purchased nowadays has one defect or another and in a number of cases I have found so many bangs, pops, cracks and so on that it is impossible to listen with any semblance of enjoyment,’ ran a typical reader’s complaint in Gramophone.63 The ritual of dusting a disc, laying it on the turntable, inspecting the needle and lowering the arm onto the surface felt antiquated in an automated age. Sales were collapsing. At EMI’s Classics for Pleasure label, an English-sung Ring cycle conducted by the venerable Reginald Goodall sold precisely eighty-six copies. The bleakness of such figures was seldom admitted but every now and then a grim truth shone through. In the summer of 1982 a Polygram executive was trying to wheedle a Sunday Times journalist into writing about two pretty French sisters, Katia and Marielle Labeque, who had a freak hit in France-100,000 sales of Gershwin’s four-hand version of Rhapsody in Blue.
‘How many outside
France?’ said the writer.
‘Not released in the States, 3,000 UK.’
‘That’s not much …’
‘Are you kidding?’ exclaimed the salesman. ‘Three thousand classical in the UK is enormous. Most releases don’t sell a tenth of that …’
‘Are you kidding?’ echoed the writer, unable to believe the disparity of sales to hype.
Arranging to meet the sisters at the Westbury Hotel, near Oxford Street, where many musicians stayed, he saw two men scurry into a doorway at the end of the corridor as he approached the room. One he recognized as an EMI producer. The situation was surreal. Despite minuscule sales, the girls were being wooed by several labels.64 ‘If compact disc had not come along when it did,’ said Archiv’s André as Holschneider, ‘we would all have been lost.’65
5. Miracles on Miracles
While waiting for digital, daisy labels flowered on English lawns. Brian Couzens, a freelance engineer, founded Chandos with his son Ralph in the Essex backwater of Colchester. They spotted two formidable conductors from the Soviet Baltic states and launched the prodigious careers of Neeme Jarvi and Mariss Jansons. Hyperion was the dreamchild of Ted Perry, who paid for his sessions by driving an ice-cream van by day and a minicab at night; his breakthrough was the monodic chant of the medieval Hildegard of Bingen. Two ex-Decca boys, Jack Boyce and Harley Usill, founded Academy Sound and Vision (ASV). Weirdest of daisies was Nimbus, run by a French-Russian called Numa Labinsky from a castle in Wales. Count Numa claimed to represent ‘the only surviving legacy of older schools of singing’,1 a noise that veered from growl to squeak; he also built the UK’s first CD plant, at Wyastone Leys, Monmouth.
The business was turning bizarre but the majors saw nothing, heard nothing, beyond their own glass walls. CBS needed a new head of Masterworks. Joseph P. Dash, vice-president for strategic planning, was promised the job-only to get pipped by a rank outsider from Israel. Simon Schmidt, founder of the CBS Israel subsidiary which had 80 per cent of national sales, wanted a break from Middle East tension. ‘He was a genius at business,’ said an underling,2 but out of his depth at headquarters. ‘Schmidt caused chaos,’ said Paul Myers. ‘He fired half the staff, [saying] that he intended to buy cheap records from Hungary and sell them for full price on the US market.’ ‘You want to know how he hired a head of A&R?’ demanded Dash. ‘This is the truth, I heard it from Zubin’s own lips.’3
Zubin Mehta, music director of the New York and Israel Philharmonic orchestras, was asked by Schmidt to recommend an assistant. ‘Zubin thought Simon wanted a personal secretary and named a woman called Catherine Reed who had once worked at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Next thing we know, she is vice-president of artists and repertoire. Catherine came into my office as I was looking at a cover for Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet,’ recalled Myers, ‘and demanded to know who was singing the lead.’
An erotic presence, Catherine Reed formed a close friendship with the buttoned-up president of CBS Inc., Thomas Wyman. She told Wyman that Schmidt was useless and the Israeli was fired. Dash, the next head of Masterworks, delicately refrained from asking Reed about her relationship with Wyman. ‘She came into my office saying he wouldn’t leave her alone, but after that no one dared touch her.’ When the board sacked Wyman for mishandling a takeover, Dash reported, ‘In a matter of days, I kicked out Catherine Reed.’
Dash, inheriting a $20-million turnover and no profit, plunged into ‘crossover’ – a not yet pejorative term, which involved some gentle genre bending. If Frank Sinatra could sing Kurt Weill and Joan Baez the Bachianas Brasileiras of Villa-Lobos, why not twin the world’s best tenor with America’s number-one pop writer? The catalyst was Milt Okun, a millionaire folk mogul, producer of Harry Belafonte, Miriam Makeba, Peter, Paul and Mary and a guy called Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr, who topped the charts as John Denver. Milt was smitten with Placido Domingo, who introduced him to Dash in his Covent Garden green room. ‘We go out to dinner, with wives, without wives,’ said Dash. ‘I sign Placido Domingo on an exclusive crossover contract. My staff think I have lost my marbles. Then Milt delivers Placido and John Denver in Perhaps Love. It goes platinum, sells a hundred thousand. In a year, Masterworks is in profit.’
Glenn Gould called. He had decided to make his record with Karajan. While CBS wrangled with DG over which label went on the cover, Gould phoned Neville Marriner, now music director in Minnesota. ‘I want to make a record with orchestra,’ he said.
Marriner headed north to Toronto, heart in mouth. During a long night’s chat, Gould told him that, on a good day, he might get two minutes of music into the can. ‘That would be uneconomic,’ said Marriner. They agreed that Gould would play the solo part of a Beethoven concerto in his studio and send it to Marriner, who would wrap an orchestra around it.4 The conductor went away beaming, but heard nothing more. Days after his fiftieth birthday in September 1982, Gould suffered a fatal stroke and the piano lost an unfathomable legend. Dead, Gould began selling faster than alive. Each memorial release outstripped the last. The same was happening with Maria Callas on EMI, five years after her death. This was an alarming trend, the mark of a doomed civilization that worships its dead.
Gould’s producer, Paul Myers, had moved to Decca, hoping for a happier atmosphere but finding an office thick with intrigue. ‘Ray Minshull had trouble communicating sympathetically with staff,’ he discovered. ‘Ray was always secretive,’ said producer James Mallinson, ‘and the Polygram pressures just made it worse.’ Mallinson left the company shortly after the night he won thirteen Grammies, prompting rumours-unfounded, he insists-that Minshull fired him out of jealousy. Michael Haas, a young gay producer, was beset by office gossip that he was sleeping with the boss. He reported the story to Minshull, who gave him ‘years and years of artists on contracts not being renewed: Karl Muünchinger, Horst Stein, Geneva recordings. The official administration was very unfriendly towards me, but Christopher Raeburn remained a loyal supporter and so did Solti. He was generous and extremely kind, the most impressive “Mensch” I have worked with.’5
Decca, bottom of the pecking order in Polygram, fought with its sisters like cats in a sack. A clash-prevention system designed to stop the three labels covering the same repertoire was constantly breached. During one month all three issued Bruckner’s fifth symphony; another year each produced a Tristan und Isolde. Harried producers, trapped between corporate discipline and the insistent demands of Karajan, Haitink and Solti, hit the bottle. As drugs were to rock, booze became the classical companion. Several senior men were sent to dry out at sanatoria; one D G producer committed suicide in a Black Forest clinic.
Tensions eased when André as Holschneider became chairman of the clash committee. ‘Coming from Archiv, the smallest label, and from an academic background, I was seen as relatively neutral,’ he said. ‘I did the job for some years. In the view of my bosses I did it quite well. In the end, I was asked to become head of Deutsche Grammophon.’6 His timing was immaculate: there had never been a better moment to take charge of a classical enterprise.
The rainbow dawn broke on 31 August 1982 with an announcement from Tokyo that a four-walled consortium of Sony, CBS-Sony, Philips and Polygram had perfected Compact Disc. On 1 October Sony’s CDP-101 player went into Japanese shops, its name representing the binary numerals, one and zero, that encoded digital sound. Fifty CBS-Sony CDs were available, topped by Billy Joel’s 52nd Street. ‘There has never been an example as strong as the CD of how effective the combined power of the Sony Group can be,’ exulted Ohga. Sony’s CDP-101 cost $700 and CDs were twice the price of LPs. Aimed at the high end of the hi-fi hobby, the release sheet was geared to wealthy, middle-aged audiophiles. One fifth of the batch was classical.
Japanese stores ran out of stock in a week and supply was running nine months behind demand,7 but the European launch went ahead in March 1983, with 100 Polygram releases, equally over-represented in classics. In Britain, 30,000 CDs sold in a month, and the reception was repeated in F
rance, West Germany and Holland. In May, when CD reached Australia, EMI joined the format. ‘We will do whatever the consumer wants,’ grouched company spokesman Brian Southall. ‘We’ll press music on vinyl, tape or even banana leaves if that’s what they will buy.’8 By the time of the US launch in September, CD was the new world order. An in-car player arrived, followed in September 1984 by Walkman CD. Players fell to generally affordable prices but discs stayed high, fattening label profits. By 1986 CDs outsold LPs. US sales rose from a million in 1983 to 334 million by 1990, 943 million by 2000.
The desperate decade was over. Classical had a double-figure market share for the first time since before the Beatles. What’s more, anything sold. Labels put out short-measure CDs. Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony, running forty minutes, occupied a whole disc on every label except Telarc. Customers who wanted the Bach cello suites paid for three discs on DG and EMI, but for only two on CBS and Decca.
Digital sound was stunningly transparent. A press demo of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture extruded carpentry noises from the Chicago cellos. On a third hearing, the sawing was traced to a microphone placed too close to the cellos. Early stereo and even mono recordings sounded more natural on CD than multi-miked modernities. Furtwängler, Ferrier, Beecham, Kreisler and Casals (though not harsh Toscanini) were outselling their successors. Worse still, the CD was indestructible. Once a consumer had bought a basic classical library he need never buy another record.
Although business boomed through the 1980s, the countdown to meltdown had begun. Not everyone liked digital. Nigel Kennedy, a quaintly counter-cultural British violinist with a 2 million-selling Four Seasons, had EMI record him on analogue machines. ‘A lot of my favourite records were made on acetate,’ he wrote, ‘and I think that there would be far many more beautiful performances if more performers could drag themselves away from the clinical and sterile technical standards provided for and expected by today’s musical fashion.’9 Unknown to Kennedy, as he played the Beethoven concerto with Klaus Tennstedt in Kiel, northern Germany, producers ran a digital tape as backup.10
The Life and Death of Classical Music Page 10