The Life and Death of Classical Music

by Lebrecht, Norman

  ‘Anyone who cannot hear that CDs are incomparably superior to records, 9.7 to a perfect 10, has a tin ear and no business listening to music,’ thundered Norio Ohga.11 Karajan, equally emphatic, had 200 CDs out by his eightieth birthday, some of them in a ‘special edition’ with pastel covers by his wife, Eliette, who had taken up painting as a hobby. That year, Karajan accounted for a third of DG sales.12 His influence, wrote Gramophone, was ‘almost incalculable … There can be few record collectors who are without at least one of his discs.’13

  But Karajan was in torment. His health was broken and an unexpectedly objective biography by an American sailing writer, Roger Vaughan, exposed an ugly supremacism. ‘I was born to command,’ said Karajan.14 When Berlin players vetoed a female clarinettist, Sabine Mayer, whose sound jarred against the rest of the section, Karajan sulked in his tent for months before severing ties with Berlin. Switching to Vienna, he demanded ever-higher royalties to fund his video legacy. Within DG, his favourite producer Gunther Breest wanted to release the videodiscs but Holschneider argued they would be ‘an expensive mistake’.15 Karajan’s fourth recording of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique and Dvorák’s New World symphonies were mannered and insipid beside the controlled rigour of his prime; the cameras dwelled on his tightly shut eyes and his fixed, face-lifted expression. CDs, meanwhile, continued to grow and DG, said its rivals, ‘was where we all wanted to be’.16

  Philips was the chief loser in the CD boom. Devastated by the sudden death of disco, its Polygram subsidiary was $200 million in debt by 1983. The Bee Gees launched a lawsuit, draining another $70 million. Jan Timmer, a classically trained singer, took the helm, moving Polygram HQ from sleepy Baarn to London and New York, where he negotiated a merger with Warner. Yetnikoff, terrified of competition, invoked anti-monopoly procedures and stalled the deal at the Federal Trade Commission. Thwarted, Timmer bought out Siemens’ share, taking the whole of the music and movie combine under Dutch control. In 1989 he floated Polygram on the Amsterdam stock exchange with a valuation of $5.6 billion.

  The classical consequences were savage. Three autonomous labels were geared to shareholder expectations and ordered to obtain head office approval for all major outlays. Timmer meddled in musical decisions. When he rose in 1990 to executive chairman of the parent Philips group, his successor, Alain Levy, was ‘the kind of man who has to be in your face all the time or he’s not doing his job’.17 A thickset, square-spectacled, frizzy-haired executive of North African descent, Levy called himself ‘a businessman, not a music man: I don’t trust my ears’.18 Classical chiefs quaked on his white carpet but found his ignorance easier to bear than Timmer’s half-knowledge. ‘For us, it was better with Levy,’ said Holschneider, who was plotting the post-Karajan cartography.

  Holschneider’s model for the new DG was an Italian designer label, built around Claudio Abbado, once of La Scala and now of the Vienna Opera. In contrast to the reactionary Karajan, Abbado, intellectually chic and sexually charismatic, favoured living composers, left-wing causes and lean cuisine. Carlo-Maria Giulini would join him as elder statesman while Giuseppe Sinopoli, a physician and archaeologist who conducted the Philharmonia, would add an alternative dimension. Leonard Bernstein would be the label’s international icon, guaranteed ‘absolute star treatment’,19 his every whim fulfilled. ‘I took a personal interest in the Abbado and Bernstein contracts,’ said Holschneider. ‘I had to make sure that if anything happened to Karajan we weren’t left naked.’20

  Sony, however, had ulterior plans. While Morita lectured Western leaders on how to run their economies, Ohga was circling CBS like an eagle at noon. ‘I never knew when Ohga was going to be in New York, but he always came by,’ said Joseph Dash. ‘One day he says to me “Joe, I think Daniel Barenboim is going to be the next Karajan. You should sign him to do the Bruckner symphonies.” I said, “Thanks very much, we’ll look into it.”’ James T. Wolfensohn, a CBS board director and future World Bank president who was Barenboim’s close friend, had made a similar pitch. Dash was doubtful. ‘I liked Barenboim, but I didn’t think he’d sell enough records to support the kind of deal he wanted from us.’

  He called Yetnikoff for a steer on dealing with his Japanese partner. ‘The word came back: Ignore Ohga.’21 This was the last time anyone at CBS was able to ignore Ohga. The company had been taken over by an asset stripper, Lawrence Tisch, and Yetnikoff was trying to sell its record division. He linked up with Ohga at a Karajan Don Giovanni in Salzburg, only for his friend, in the middle of the second act, to be stretchered off following a heart attack. Morita agreed to the asking price but Tisch asked for more. Then came Black Monday of October 1987. Share values shrivelled and Tisch needed cash. Sony gulped down CBS Records before breakfast, adding Columbia Pictures for dessert. The bill was $6 billion but the yen was high and the shock value priceless. Sony had collared enough popular culture to feed its gadgets for ever. Matsushita and Toshiba followed suit with swoops on Universal Pictures, MCA Records and a bite of Time-Warner. Within months, much of Western entertainment was in Japanese hands and Variety was awash in despair.

  To maintain confidence, Ohga left Sony Records in the hands of Yetnikoff, despite his escalating excesses. He was ordered into rehab. The Sony bosses, in his absence, pounced for their ultimate target. Karajan kept them waiting. ‘He kept saying, I’ll sign, I’ll sign, just not today,’ said Paul Burger, a Sony exec. On the morning of 16 July 1989 Ohga flew into Salzburg with Michael P. Schulhof an American executive and physician, much liked by the maestro. ‘I received a message that he wanted me to come to him straight from the airport,’ said Ohga.22 The Sony pair drove to Anif and were shown to the master’s bedroom. Karajan had been suffering chest pains and cancelled the day’s rehearsal. A cardiologist called to perform an ECG but was sent away. ‘I have my most important friend here today,’ said Karajan, ‘and even the King of China cannot disturb our discussion.’ Shortly before lunch, he asked for water. Schulhof brought a glass to his bed. ‘He took a sip,’ said Ohga, ‘his face slumped to one side and he started to snort. Mickey Schulhof said: “My goodness, a heart attack!” I said, “Herbert, Herbert …” We called his wife-she was washing her hair-but he had already passed away.’ Two days later, a devastated Ohga was rushed into open-heart surgery.

  Karajan was buried at midnight in the Anif churchyard to avoid a media scrum. On the third night after his death, the widow Eliette went up to the grounds to commune with her loss. As she neared the grave, she sensed another presence.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she cried, ‘what do you want?’

  ‘It’s me, Carlos Kleiber,’ wept the world’s most elusive conductor. ‘I had to come. He was the one I admired most.’

  Eliette took Kleiber home and sat him down in the kitchen until dawn, trying to sign him up as director of the Easter Festival.23 The monarch was dead, but the music went on. Karajan left a mountain of 950 recordings and a fortune of half a billion dollars, the estate swelled annually by royalties from such DG gimmicks as ‘Karajan Express’ and ‘Karajan Adagio’. There was no limit to his recyclability. Eliette, loyal to his example, sued his last lawyer successfully for 3 million euros.

  6. Madness

  Until Sony came along, classics were a frugal operation. Pennies were counted and projects costed to the last double bass. ‘We ran a tight ship,’ said EMI’s Peter Andry. ‘We didn’t go bananas,’ said Joseph Dash.

  All that altered with the advent of Ohga and his new head of classics, Gunther Breest, Karajan’s DG producer. Breest was not a natural leader of men. A convivial colleague, he had spent too many years as Karajan’s doormat to assume authority. ‘If I have a personal motivation,’ said Breest, ‘it is that I don’t want to disappoint Mr Ohga. He is a great visionary.’1 Ohga announced that Sony would be ‘the most important classical label by the end of the century’. Breest, blinkered by life at DG, remodelled the label along German lines, moving headquarters to Hamburg.

  To CBS veterans it felt like a slap in the face with
a Baltic flounder. Masterworks had been doing well in America, reclaiming a quarter of US classical sales and the top Billboard award in six of the past seven years. ‘It’s one of the most profitable entities within CBS Records,’ said a Yetnikoff aide. Joseph Dash took Breest to the Met to hand Domingo a platinum disc for a million sales of Perhaps Love. Next day, Breest said there would be no more crossover on Sony Classical. In May 1990 he fired Dash and reduced New York to a remote branch office. CBS staffers, many of them Jewish, called Breest’s team ‘Nazis’ and the Japanese ‘Nips’. In Hamburg André as Holschneider told the evening newspaper that a ‘yellow peril’ was jeopardizing German music.2 DG was under siege. Never before had one of its officers gone over to an enemy. The atmosphere turned acrid as old pals and drinking partners were forbidden to meet. Breest proceeded to outbid DG for Karajan’s videos, paying $10 million and spending another $10 million on production and promotion costs. Knowing that Karajan on his own could not underpin a new laser disc format (known in Germany as Bildplatte, or picture disc), Breest shelled out another fortune to film concerts by Sergiu Celibidache, who had given up making records in 1948 on the grounds that listeners could not witness his input. ‘Celi’, nearing eighty, was a slightly wacky cult figure at the Munich Philharmonic. His oddity and scarcity value were not enough to save the Bildplatte, and DG nipped in to split Karajan sales by reeling out his 1970s operas on VHS. Sony’s advanced format crashed shortly after takeoff.

  Breest provocatively planted his tanks on DG’s lawn, taking possession of a fin-de-siecle villa on the classy Nonnenstieg, complete with imperial staircase and decorated ceilings. He had Greek goddesses added to the decor of his private office and edged them in gold leaf. Money was no object and aesthetics no impediment. ‘I still own an ashtray in the style of Hermes with a colour image of the villa,’ said one employee.3 Artists and agents arrived to witness the opulence. Many did a quick calculation and doubled their fees. The Berlin Philharmonic racked up its rates to 180,000 Deutschmarks ($125,000) for a three-session symphony, a cost base that required 40,000 sales to break even. The economics of classical recording parted company with market reality.

  Breest’s hirelings enjoyed a huge salary hike. A Decca man went from £40,000 a year to £100,000 overnight, then found he was the lowest paid producer at the water cooler. Olympia Gineri, Abbado’s Vienna Opera assistant, was named head of artists and repertoire, with a brief to lure her boss away from DG. This was misplaced thinking since Abbado had developed a loathing for Gineri. Still, like other musicians, he could not resist Sony gold and when the Berlin Philharmonic elected him as Karajan’s successor, ahead of Maazel and Levine, he signed over a small part of his work to Sony. Ohga proclaimed a joint interpretive venture with Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra’ and Breest, snapping at DG’s Italian strategy, signed Giulini and Muti. ‘Look,’ he told a visitor to his Salzburg festival office, decorated with maestro portraits, ‘we have the greatest living Italian conductors on Sony Classical.’4

  It may have looked good on the wall, but the detail defied belief. Abbado, who had won Berlin on the size of his D G contract, was not about to jeopardize his job. He gave DG first refusal on recordings and Sony the leftovers. While Breest bragged, Holschneider invited independent press witnesses, myself among them, to watch Abbado sign a new D G contract the morning after his inaugural concert in Berlin.

  Breest switched to early music, Holschneider’s heartland. Raiding Teldec, he hired Wolf Erichson, Harnoncourt’s producer, to launch a new label, Vivarte. Erichson made a hundred recordings with the likes of Leonhardt, Kuijken, Bylsma and von Asperen, but he failed to sign Harnoncourt or any of the baroque big guns.

  Gineri, her usefulness expired, was replaced by ‘artist relations manager’ Ervin Veg. Veg shared with Breest an affinity for fine cigars and wines. Some producers considered him a high-rolling braggart. ‘You had only to say to Veg, lovely building and he’d reply, “I know the architect.” Lovely meal: “I showed the chef how to scramble an egg.” Good music: “I suggested to Wolfgang Amadeus that he compose this work.”’ Veg’s friends called him ‘a career diplomat, a man who spent a lot of his time unravelling other people’s messes’.5

  Breest snatched film composer John Williams and the Boston Pops from Philips. ‘They were big earners for us,’ said a rueful A&R chief6 He then swooped for a legend he had signed to DG in a deal brokered by a young publicist. Peter Gelb had been making a film about Vladimir Horowitz but got no interest at CBS or RCA. Breest brought the watery-eyed old master onto DG for six extraordinary recitals, recorded in his Manhattan living room by ex-CBS producer Thomas Frost. When Horowitz sat at the piano for the seventh disc on 20 October 1989 both he and Frost thought they were on DG, unaware that Breest and Gelb had switched them to Sony.7 The sessions took twelve days, unusually fast for the fussy Horowitz. Four days after the final note, Horowitz died and Breest, for all his bluster, was left with a single release-one more for the trophy wall. He was getting a reputation for being unlucky and losing respect for the way he flashed his cash. ‘Anything he wanted to do, he outbid the rest of us,’ said EMI’s Peter Alward.

  The backlash took a different turn among conductors who, egos inflated with riches beyond reason, demanded extra rehearsals and star casts. If Breest refused, Abbado would phone Ohga, who longed to be loved by maestros. Ohga regularly overruled Breest, causing chaos on Sony Classical. Too many conductors were making too many records with no coherent purpose. Abbado’s Mozart symphonies, Levine’s Verdi and Maazel’s Sibelius sounded anaemic beside their tightly focused earlier works. Other labels moved to higher ground. DG picked up the unwanted Pierre Boulez from Sony and recorded him with the perfectionist Cleveland Orchestra. Ray Minshull at Decca invested further in the Cleveland music director Christoph von Dohnanyi and guest conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy. At Philips, Erik Smith brought out the complete works of Mozart for the 1991 bicentennial. Holschneider, at DG, sniffed victory – pyrrhic though it might be-in a cautiously worded midpoint report: ‘The past year, bringing a noticeable increase in competition, has in no way deterred DG from achieving its goals of stabilizing and maintaining its high international profile and further expanding its star artist roster.’8

  The Sony splurge loosened budget constraints. As a matter of macho pride, Alain Levy urged his classical labels to spend more and win the war. Output on each of the majors rose to a hundred new releases a year, with no visible increase in demand. On the contrary, collectors finished replacing their old LPs and stopped buying CDs. ‘The average classical collection in the US was around a hundred LPs,’ noted a marketing man. ‘In the ’80s, people replaced them at a rate of eight to ten CDs a year; by the early nineties, it was three or four.’9 ‘Before CD, classics had six percent of the total market,’ recalled one corporate chief. ‘By 1987 it had doubled to twelve percent, by the end of the decade it was back down to six.’10

  The boom was over. Black Monday and the end of communism set off a worldwide recession. The death of Bernstein, fourteen months after Karajan, eliminated the last household name maestro.

  Consumers, confused by a glut of classical faces, stuck to the great and the dead. But as long as Sony poured forth, the others felt obliged to keep pace. A well-ordered economy ran riot. Breest, said EMI’s Peter Alward, ‘almost bankrupted the industry’.11

  Ten years on, when the last ones to leave were turning out the lights, people asked each other why the glut had raged for so long; why Sony was allowed to blow $100 million before Ohga was called to account; why hardly anyone in the community of artists, producers, executives, critics, radio presenters and orchestral managers had denounced the absurdity of it all. Stores were swamped with unsold CDs but a pretence was maintained of prosperity and progress. Gramophone proclaimed a golden age of classical recording and faced stiff competition from BBC Music magazine, which mounted a free disc on the cover, dangerously devaluing the CD as a prestige item. The Classic FM radio franchise was founded on the same
myth of classical resurgence. Gripped by self-delusion, the classical world ignored Euripides’ warning: ‘Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.’

  Signs and wonders appeared in the heavens. On 7 July 1990, in the thick of a soccer World Cup, three tenors linked arms in a Roman arena and sang their way into the record books. Pavarotti and Domingo, sworn rivals, had come together out of compassion for José Carreras, a thinner vocalist who had survived leukaemia. Media giants dismissed their concert as a gimmick and Decca agreed to record it only on condition that the singers worked for a one-off fee. It seemed a fair deal-a million dollars for two hours’ work. The tenors sang happily in the baths of Caracalla and a global television audience, numbed by goalless draws, rushed out to buy the disc in spectacular quantities. Fourteen million were sold, more than any single classical recording in history.

  The tenors, incensed, demanded compensation. Pavarotti got an under-the-table extra $1 million from Decca-the secret broken in his manager’s memoirs12-but the label owed no favours to the other two. Furious, Domingo and Carreras barred Decca from the 1994 World Cup replay. Warner won that auction for $16 million, needing to sell 6 million CDs to break even. They sold 8 million. The Three Tenors brand struck twice and, for pop executives, was proof positive that classical music could make big money.

  It was not the only such omen. Nigel Kennedy’s 1990 Four Seasons, its movements segmented into pop-sized three-minute tracks, was selling at a rate of two CDs a minute. Kennedy, who wore Aston Villa soccer shirts and Jimi Hendrix’s headscarf, appealed more to grannies than to adolescents, but 2 million Four Seasons seemed to confirm the chimera of classical popularity.