The Life and Death of Classical Music

by Lebrecht, Norman

  As president, Lyttelton protected Alward’s purities from Alain Levy while pumping up the bottom line with crossover. Late in 2003, at a brainstorming session, the two men reached a joint conclusion that there was not much left for them to do. There was a hundred years of music in the vaults and it would last for ever, but there was no point in reiterating works that existed in epic interpretations and, while artists would always find an angle, the steady flow of classical records was no longer viable. EMI, a label whose origins predated all others bar Edison’s, would survive. ‘It is not a record label,’ said Lyttelton determinedly. ‘It’s a music company.’ The record was just a vehicle whose time was running out. Something else would turn up.

  Once the two men shook hands in concord, the personal consequences were obvious. Alward, the last occupant of Gaisberg’s seat, took an early pension at the age of fifty-three and went off to improve his piano playing. Shortly before Christmas 2004 a farewell dinner was thrown for him by Costa Pilavachi, his Decca competitor (who would depart a year later), with Lyttelton and the present author among the guests. There was no rancour and few regrets. Most around the table had done their bit to keep the art alive. Nobody wanted it to end this way, but all things in this life are finite and the act of closure is, of itself, cause for celebration. This is the way the world ends, as the poet said; not with a bang, perhaps, but with a dying cadence in the glow of candlelight, the closing of a circle.

  A chance discovery, a tinkering of mechanics, an eruption of noise, had advanced human civilization and brought music into every home. Recording had been a mirror to music, its third dimension: the means by which a performer could stand back and assess sound objectively. It had served as a midwife to fame, a mainstay of the musical economy. There would be fear and uncertainty after it was gone and many fine performers would fail to make themselves heard. But somewhere in a garage or a back room another improviser would be at work, another wide-eyed Fred Gaisberg, another would-be David Sarnoff, and the spark would ignite again as it did in Leonardo da Vinci-the fusion of art and invention, vision and exploitation, that reshapes the world every century or so. The spark that was recording had lasted a whole century and that, as art forms go, was no brief encounter.

  8. Post Mortem

  Just as classical Greece lives on in legend and tourism, so classical recording survives in the imagination of diehards. At a seminar in Helsinki in October 2005, old-timers gathered to insist the earth was flat. An ex-Universal VP, Kevin Kleinmann, now with the Finnish cottage-label Ondine, talked deliriously of new business models. The editorial director of Gramophone, James Jolly, claimed that his magazine was reviewing more records than ever before. Both were telling a truth, of sorts. With the majors mired in classics-lite, fringe labels were bobbing along with low-circulation releases. Ondine had audaciously signed the Philadelphia Orchestra for three live recordings a year. No session fees, but the orchestra owned the product and the musicians were promised a profit share. ‘The record company is like your stockbroker,’ said Kleinmann. ‘He manages your assets and keeps a fee, but you own your equity.’1 The deal was paraded as Philadelphia’s first record contract in a decade, but the releases, patchy and poorly edited, were no more convincing than other own-label CDs flowing from the Concertgebouw, the London Symphony and Bavarian Radio. To ensembles that had once depended on records for their wordly status, own-labels were no fame machine and the earnings put very little jam on the players’ bread. LSO Live, with Haitink, Davis and Jansons, paid out under $ 500 in its fourth year to the players-less than they would have earned in an EMI morning at Abbey Road. Recording, as a buttress of the orchestral economy, was a thing of the past.

  Many CDs reviewed in Gramophone and BBC Music, perhaps as many as half, were now self-promotions-paid for by performers, friends, governments or sponsors-a kind of vanity publishing that lacked editorial rigour and commercial rationale. The rest of the release sheet was made up of Naxos catalogue-fillers, mini-label bleatings and archival plunder. The body of classical recording was twitching spasmodically, giving false hope to those who waited by its life-support machine.

  New media were sapping its strength. A 60Gb iPod, slippable into a shirt pocket, could accommodate the equivalent of 600 symphonic and opera CDs which, redundant, were sold off in thrift and charity shops for three bucks apiece. Classical recording had lost object value. All the music industry could do was rage against the dying of the light and pray for a download revival, though why consumers would take their music from record companies when they could receive it live from opera houses and concert halls was an unanswered question.

  Either way, the classical record was dead. ‘You want to know what killed it?’ demanded Paul Burger, ex-president of Sony Europe. ‘Wall Street killed it. People in the record business understood that classics was where we all came from, the basis of what we do. We were happy to carry on making records in that area, even losing a bit of money. But investors aren’t like that. If they see sentiment, they make heads roll.’2

  Corporatization had repressed creativity and fostered collusion. The big four-Universal, Sony-BMG, EMI, Warner-held 85 per cent of the US market,3 a virtual monopoly. Charged with price fixing by forty-one state attorney-generals in September 2002, they paid a fine of $140 million, a modest settlement, according to former Federal Trade Commission chairman Robert Pitofsky who reckoned they had bilked consumers out of half a billion dollars in five years.4

  Creatively, the oligopoly spread a homogeneous blur, one set of suits copying the others to justify their outrageous wages. Salaries had gone off the scale when Clive Davis argued that he could not negotiate with Bob Dylan when he was earning fifty grand a year and the singer 2 million. Davis, in the early 1970s, kept the big wage for himself. Yetnikoff spread it around middle management and sent label overheads sky-high. It was executive costs that made the break-even point for a classical release effectively unattainable.

  Once the Liebersons, Culshaws, Schillers and Legges were gone, corporate bosses treated classics like a quaint maiden aunt, reducing its producers to ciphers. ‘In the 1950s and 1960s,’ said Nikolaus Harnoncourt, ‘you dealt with real personalities, a producer who was responsible and took it on his shoulders. The next man above him was the head of the company. Later on, when the companies made battleships, the boss didn’t even know that in a little corner somewhere classical music was being made. You had very nice people to negotiate with but they had no authority and you had no personal contact with the ones who decide.’5 Weak producers gave conductors a chance to run riot. The worst records ever made were the product of an inflated ego and a timid production team. Corporatization, inevitable when distribution is controlled by three or four chains, was the principal cause for the collapse of classical recording. The other factors, arranged here in binary Os and Is, accelerated its demise:

  Overproduction began when Karajan upped his DG demands after Elsa Schiller’s retirement. A pattern was established in which he, and rival maestros, recorded the same works over and over again. By 1994, there were seventy-nine Dvorak New World symphonies on sale. In 2006 a Swedish website listed 435 versions of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons,6 Etailer amazon.com offered 276 Beethoven Fifths, a mind-fuddling deterrent. Karajan, Marriner, Solti and Haitink accounted together for 2,000 releases. Put six impartial critics from different countries in a room and they would struggle to select a dozen indispensables from that disc mountain. Many of the rest should never have been made (the most otiose are listed in Part III). The compact disc boom carried their self-repetition way beyond the point of consumer saturation.

  Indestructibility, the CD’s unique selling point, spelled ruin for an industry that relied on consumers to replace records when they wore out. CD sound was as good as it was ever likely to get, equalizing quality across the board. Labels lost their sonic mystique when Naxos in Bratislava matched Berlin DG for clarity and Decca’s studio best could be emulated by a spotty teen in a suburban back bedroom. As manufacturing costs fell,
CDs were given away as promotional cover-mounts in newspapers and magazines.

  A classical record, once an object of aspiration, lost its social value in a free shrinkwrap.

  Norio Ohga rebooted Sony’s overproduction by trying vainly to overtake DG. Tough as tinder at the board table, Ohga went mushy over classical music and broke the bank on records nobody needed. By the time his folly was stopped, music was going off the record and into a virtual vortex.

  The Internet released music from jewel-cases to flow freely on websites. No studio line-up could match the excitement of a live download. Google and Amazon brought the whole of Western civilization to the world’s fingertips. There was no further need to keep a home reference collection of classical recordings.

  Other media made classics on record look stiff and outmoded. Modern homes had colour TVs with plasma screens and 200 satellite and cable channels, as well as a computer with its cornucopia of games. The packaged symphony and opera stood no chance against such diversions, even on DVD, the visual extension to audio CD.

  Above all, a failure of invention sank the genre. When Heifetz, Menuhin, Horowitz and Rubinstein were in the ascendant they played music by living composers-Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Sibelius, Bartok, Szymanowski. Even Toscanini, no modernist, put new works in his concerts as a matter of course. Stokowski, who died in 1977, gave some 800 world premieres. In their heyday, music was alive. Atonal modernism aroused audience mistrust. Stravinsky, who died in 1971, was the last household name composer, though few listened to his late serialisms. ‘Ultimately, Classical was let down by the composer,’ said ex-Sony producer Michael Haas. ‘Without new music that intelligent sensitive consumers want to hear, there was no choice but to rehash and re-cook the past.’7 Classical labels were stuck with dead, white, male, European composers and a regressive, ageing, heterogeneous audience. The failure to explore multicultural sounds was the final dereliction, the dying man losing touch with the world. A year or two past its centenary, classical recording sighed its last. Sic transit gloria mundi.

  The end is a point from which history is viewed whole. As the earliest mass medium, two decades ahead of radio, recording brought music into everyday life. It invaded homes, schools and hospitals. Soldiers took records to war, missionaries into the heart of darkness. No place on earth was beyond reach of an aria. Music became a utility like running water, its ownership a mark of culture and refinement. There were practical consequences: the availability of music on tap, as it were, promoted musical passivity, eroded domestic performance and eradicated local distinctions. A musician crossing Germany in the 1920s would hear a different Beethoven sound in Bochum from the one he had experienced the night before in Bremen.8 With the coming of records, orchestras came to sound much the same. There was also a concomitant improvement in playing standards. No audience today would tolerate the inaccuracies and disunity that prevailed in ensembles of the 1930s, plainly documented on unsparing CDs. Weak bands were driven out of business by the recording angel.

  Soloists similarly reduced stylistic variety. Fritz Kreisler imposed a ubiquitous vibrato and Arthur Rubinstein fostered an irritating imbalance between piano and orchestra. Heifetz and Horowitz set impossible standards of note-perfection and the temptation to filch their effects proved irresistible. An upcoming Carnegie Hall contender would stock up with armloads of master-played Chopin at Tower Records or Sam Goody’s, substituting imitation for interpretation. Conversely, records created a critical audience, alert to deviance and ineptitude. No twenty-first-century soloist could get away with Artur Schnabel’s finger slips.

  How much did classical recording affect our political destiny? The evidence is patchy. Lenin refused to listen to records in case Beethoven might melt his revolutionary zeal. Hitler inflicted interminable evenings of record playing, mainly Wagner and Lehár, on his acolytes; Churchill was partial to a spin of Gilbert and Sullivan. Poland’s first prime minister was the formidably recorded pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski. A German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, played third piano in Mozart’s three-piano concerto on EMI, with Christoph Eschenbach and Justus Franz.

  One British premier, Edward Heath, conducted an Elgar overture, and another, Margaret Thatcher, narrated Copland’s Lincoln’s Portrait; former presidents of the US and Soviet Union, Clinton and Gorbachev, played parts in Peter and the Wolf for Naxos. A Norwegian prime minister wrote a scholarly note for the first Decca recording of a Grieg symphony. A King of Denmark, Frederick IX, made several records as a conductor. Classical records were well played in high places and occasionally reached a mass audience. Leonard Bernstein’s recording of Mahler’s Adagietto helped Americans address the death of John F. Kennedy. A perception of outer space was sounded by Gyorgy Ligeti’s Aventures in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey(CD 98, p. 274). Woody Allen used Gershwin as a metaphor for Manhattan. Webern signified terror in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist.

  The therapeutic usage of classical recording is empirically attested. A 1997 survey by the American Medical Association found that ‘surgeons had lower blood pressure and pulse rates and performed better on non-surgical mental exercises while listening to music …’ ‘It has to be classical music,’ stipulated a Loyola University Medical Center consultant. ‘Anything else interferes with the rhythm of the operation.’ A British transplant surgeon at St Mary’s, Paddington, testified that he always put on a record in theatre-never the radio, which was liable to interruption and disruption-and always the same work, in his case a particular Mozart piano concerto.

  Mozart on record was claimed to foster intelligence in pre-natal foetuses and ease pain in Swedish labour wards. Other remedial applications were attested in psychiatric and geriatric care. Classical records were part of school life until the 1960s; some believe that their withdrawal fostered rowdiness and lowered concentration spans. In Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth drove social outcasts to sadistic violence. Classical recordings are played at funeral services. Their use extends from before conception to beyond the grave.

  Nevertheless, by comparison to pop music, their usage is minuscule. Ninety-two pop albums sold over 10 million US copies, led by The Eagles Greatest Hits (28 million) and followed by Michael Jackson’s Thriller (26 million), Pink Floyd: The Wall (23 million), Led Zeppelin IV (22 million) and Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits (21 million).

  The figures for classical sales have been closely guarded, in the main because their modesty might have disarmed media hype. With nemesis approaching, labels came clean and cooperated in providing data for the following chart, the first verified sales list of the world’s best-selling classical recordings. In all, twenty-five releases topped 1 million sales.

  The chart excludes non-classical submissions. Sony Classical’s top-seller, for example, was Titanic with 25 million, followed by Charlotte Church’s 10 million; three Broadway shows also sold well into seven figures. The top classical entry, Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, came in at number 11. EMI’s biggest ‘classical’ success after Gregorian chant was the pop violinist Vanessa-Mae with 3.5 million. On Decca, ‘operatic megastar’ Katherine Jenkins, who never set foot on an opera stage, sold more records in the UK than Callas. Bellowing Russell Watson, an old-fashioned, semi-trained belter, sold 1.7 million.

  Such synthetic additives were not part of the classical narrative but symptoms of its terminal disease. The health of classical recording appears, from the chart above, to have depended heavily on Three Tenors and Four Seasons. But the chart is deceptive, for hundreds of classical records of great diversity sold upwards of half a million and thousands more made a decent profit. Classical recording was once a robust business, as testified by lifetime sales of its leading artists. The following figures are, for legal reasons, somewhat less precise than the album totals.

  No other artist comes close. Cecilia Bartoli, the next biggest diva after Callas, has sold 4 million units in fifteen years.

  Adding up the top-selling artists and ext
rapolating their totals across overall output figures, one arrives at a total classical sale of somewhere between 1 and 1.3 billion records. Pop comparison proves unexpectedly instructive. Fifteen pop artists topped 200 million sales, and fifty-eight made 100 million. The all-time leaders9 are the Beatles with EMI estimates of 1 to 1.3 billion sales-exactly the same as the entirety of classical recording. The Beatles affected modern times more than any politician, scientist, writer or film maker. If classical recording as a cultural artefact achieved a similar impact over the century, it can safely be described as a world changing medium, life enhancing and incontrovertibly worthwhile.

  So what remains? At the back of the store and out in cyberspace, an indelible heritage of thousands of recordings, some of them defining milestones in musical history. The end, however, was nigh. Hyperion, after Ted Perry’s death, lost a million-pound lawsuit and was pushed to the brink, Chandos cut staff by two-thirds and Dorian Records went bankrupt. Naxos was named Gramophone’s Label of the Year 2005, the only company to sustain full classical production. That summer in Aspen, Colorado, Warner’s chairman Edgar J. Bronfman urged artists to join his internet-only label ‘to develop in a supportive lower-risk environment’. If this did not quite mean the end of the record, the next sentence did. ‘We are excited by the power of digital distribution now available to every potential artist.’10 But if distribution was now available to every potential artist, who needed big labels? Peer to peer, musician to listener, was the new way for music to flow, by-passing established channels. Arctic Monkeys rose without a label. Music companies were out of the loop. Their last resort was to file another 2,000 lawsuits against home downloaders, criminalizing their customers.