Underpinning all this were the two central passions of his life: sport and music (principally classical). A useful tennis player, helped by his height and ball skill, he played competitively and coached. Most people who take up sport to a good level of skill and competition retain the lessons learned in that activity. Klaus Heymann was competitive as a teenager and remained so in business. To him, a skilful return of serve followed a few parries later by a neat passing shot was particularly satisfying. His tennis was not based on overt aggression, the unstoppable volley.
So it has been in business. His business style is not to crush rivals but to play his game to his strengths, and neatly make a move in a time of his own choosing. On the other hand, Heymann is the first to acknowledge that on many occasions he has been lucky with the way the ball has bounced or with a net cord just when he needed it. Winning is the name of the game, without a doubt, and there has been little room for sentimentality. Despite his wife being a violinist he holds no sentimental attitude towards musicians. Of course, being married to a musician, he is acutely aware of what it means to be a performing artist; but as the owner of a record company he can rarely allow his feelings or preferences for an artist to take priority over the needs of the company to make a profit. His view is pragmatic: ‘no profit, no record company, no recordings’.
He knows he holds the aces. He does not have long-term contracts with his musicians but has, from the start, expected his artists to be loyal to him and to Naxos. If a musician was disloyal, by recording for someone else, for example, he would censure them without regret or ensure that they never recorded for him again. This was particularly the case in the early years, when he was building the company and felt that he couldn’t afford to send out the wrong messages. The attitude extended to his business dealings, too: he was capable of sidestepping a business partner who was not performing his or her side of the deal, especially if an opportunity arose. Nevertheless he is sharp rather than ruthless. He has also been known to apologise at a later stage for actions he took but subsequently regretted.
On the other hand, he can be long-suffering and surprisingly generous. This side of his personality can astound those who don’t know him well. One former employee who left under a cloud threatened to sue him and frequently insulted him personally; but Heymann continued to pay for his children’s education as he had promised to do.
He pours resources into music-education projects because he wants to promote classical music, even sing its praises. Some make money; most do not. But he doesn’t seem to mind because the cause is right. Rarely does he take credit for it: despite leading Naxos from the front, he has never been into the personality cult. He is frequently interviewed for classical music or business columns but he is also content to be anonymous. In China, where Nishizaki is a very well-known soloist, he can be referred to as ‘Mr Nishizaki’ and it amuses him; perhaps he is even proud of it. In 2010, at the Hong Kong Business Awards, he was on the stage with some of the richest men in the city (that means mega-rich) after winning the Owner-Operator Award. If the truth be told, he nearly declined it because the event interrupted plans for a break in New Zealand where he would play golf every day. He chose to stay because the exposure was good for Naxos’s profile in its home town.
As with many highly successful men, there are contradictory traits in his character; or maybe it is more accurate to say that there are different traits which manage to co-exist. He makes cool business decisions, quite unemotionally; yet his response to music is clearly emotional. Few business partners of long standing have heard him talk about his passion for music in any intimate way, and would be surprised to hear him describe his response to Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, for instance:
Rosenkavalier is one of the few things that makes me cry. I do not cry at deaths of heroines, or when someone dies on stage … but dramatic resolutions, such as when the Marschallin gives away Octavian to Sophie because she knows that this is the right thing to do – this moves me. In the same way, I was deeply moved when I first saw Pfitzner’s Palestrina, and it still affects me today. Nobody gets killed. But Palestrina’s reconciliation with his persecutor Cardinal Borromeo, and the sense of spiritual release, is extremely powerful. And I prefer Bruckner to Mahler. Bruckner doesn’t have downs: he is an uplifting composer, even in his slow movements, except perhaps the slow movement of the Ninth Symphony. For me, his symphonies are all about the good things of the world: his architecture is grand, his world is whole. Mahler, by comparison, is for me more uneven emotionally, wilder, less sure.
Heymann is direct and refreshingly unpretentious when he talks about music. He did not learn to read it or to play an instrument because there was no such tradition in his family. In any event, there was no money after the war for buying an instrument and funding lessons. From a very young age he had to work because he did not receive pocket money from his parents. He declares that not having learned, at the very least, to play the piano or read music is one of his great regrets in life, though he has famously turned it to his advantage with the creation of Naxos. After a lifetime in music, and years of marriage to a violinist, he still talks of a musician playing ‘high’ or ‘low’ rather than ‘sharp’ or ‘flat’. He has been offered honorary doctorates by a number of universities but has always declined them; he feels that because he doesn’t read music it would be pretentious to accept. Yet he is still confident to stand up at the annual sales conference and sing the praises of Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust or Mozart’s Divertimento in E flat, sublime works with which only the knowledgeable are generally familiar. Furthermore, he knows that in the current climate the recent recording of Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (a large-scale work with full orchestra, soloists and chorus) will probably never recoup its investment. For projects which are particularly dear to him, he doesn’t mind.
Like many entrepreneurs, he is a risk-taker. He says that he never takes a big risk that could sink the company, but he is very prepared to make many small bets, or sink resources into new areas, in the hope that one or two of them will bear fruit. He has probably had more failures than successes in his business life, but all the failures have been small while he made the right decisions in some really crucial areas.
It is not often realised that Naxos is actually the product of a husband-and-wife team. The relationship between Klaus Heymann and Takako Nishizaki is unusually close, both in personal and business terms. Heymann always acknowledges the contribution that his wife has made, though it is not often recognised because he is the label’s most prominent figure. Nishizaki’s recordings helped to start the label, but it is also she who has recommended which musicians should record for Naxos, and even their area of repertoire, after hearing them in concert or on demonstration recordings. She has had a considerable influence on the musical character of Naxos. It should be said that the equality of women has never been an issue with Heymann.
But Naxos the company has been made by one man, which has been its strength and its weakness. For all its twenty-five years Heymann has run the company, even down to a detailed level. Most of the new ideas and directions come from him. He listens to his employees at every level and he supports them, but ultimately nothing happens without his approval. This is both a help and a hindrance. It means that instant decisions are possible. It also means that, despite some capable and dedicated people around him, it has been difficult for the company to move on to a more corporate footing, even when it was evidently too large for one pair of hands. Heymann has been acutely aware of this, and of the track record of companies that have outgrown the entrepreneur–founder: only too often they have closed, or been subsumed into a larger company. Over the years, he has tried to find someone to take over from him, or at least to become CEO and take over the day-to-day running of the company. He has put people in place but few have lasted beyond two or three years. Very simply, Heymann has never found anyone who can match him in the key areas of classical music, business, vision and swift opport
unism, as well as an untiring commitment to work. Unsurprisingly he has little patience for people he deems to have fallen short – a trait that applies at all levels. If people do not come up to his expectations they generally last a short time. To those who do, he gives the kind of loyalty he expects from them.
He has for many years maintained a board, consisting principally of the managing directors of Select Music UK, Naxos of America and Naxos Sweden, plus other occasional, co-opted members. Matters are discussed, and on the whole Heymann does not force issues through, especially on matters that directly affect the distribution companies. He does not interfere in the running of the national companies unless there are problems. The national CEOs run their companies as if they were their own. Most are ‘lifers’ with ten years or more experience with Naxos. He is, however, prone to start new projects, even major initiatives, without discussion or agreement at board level. All his senior executives now expect to find, from time to time, a new venture already committed to, a new person appointed, a new label taken on for worldwide distribution, a new composer cycle underway. Heymann is shrewd but spontaneous; he has an instinctive feel for an overview of a subject, particularly a deal. But in rapidly coming to a conclusion, he sometimes makes mistakes. Paradoxically, he can pay great attention to detail, whether it be in a lawyer’s brief – he has frequently pointed out issues that his own lawyers have missed and thereby won a case – or in the proof-reading of a cover or booklet notes. The underlying explanation is that if he is deeply interested in a topic the scrutiny is minute; if he has marginal interest, or has other, more pressing business, the scrutiny will be cursory.
Heymann is consumed by work. It is not so much that he is driven by it, but more that he is fascinated by it, be it business or the arts. It may have been the oscillation between both, or involvement in them in parallel, that has kept him so fresh and curious. Nevertheless he does have his recreational interests. For some years, wine and golf have held probably equal status. He prefers New World wines to European vintages, and he knows them well: wine was one of the great attractions for him of Australia and New Zealand. Even when he is in Europe he drinks New World wines. He is not a collector because his preferred wines don’t last very long. He is an accomplished golfer, and still walks from hole to hole, declining transport. It is his exercise, his break from the computer and the email (he rarely uses a mobile phone). It is also his opportunity to experience again the spark of competition. He always plays better when he plays against someone – and without doubt he carries that into his business life.
Heymann muses from time to time about retiring, even if it is only partial retirement. He is not really serious, though. In Asia there are many businessmen, both Chinese and Western, who run international companies into their eighties, and in his heart he sees no reason why he should not be one of them. There are few signs that his sharpness or his eagerness for new business have diminished in any way. He remains the most farsighted figure among his colleagues, and is probably still the greatest risk-taker. There is no doubt that Naxos remains his own, and he does with it what he wants while being mindful of the fact that he now has more than 300 employees, many of whom, especially the executives, have devoted their lives to the company. After all, in the end, he sees that he is risking his own money, and that is that.
Three
The Early Years: From Frankfurt to Hong Kong 1936–1967
Klaus Heymann was born in a suburb of Frankfurt on 22 October 1936. His father, Ferdinand, was an administrator working for the city government and his mother, Paula, was a traditional housewife, a role which she resented though she had only had a primary school education. She was bright and capable, and when his father was drafted into the army in 1939, as war clouds gathered, she took his job in City Hall. Ferdinand was an anti-aircraft officer and was mainly based around German towns. When Heymann was four years old he was evacuated, in common with other children, to the countryside, to be joined by his mother only later. First of all he was housed in villages in Hesse, then towns in Alsace, and finally, at the end of the war, in Bavaria. When the family returned to Frankfurt in 1945 they found that their apartment had been turned over to displaced persons, and they (Ferdinand, Paula, Klaus and his younger sister Brigitte) moved into the attic of Heymann’s grandmother. A second sister, Barbara, was born three years later. Eventually, in 1948, they moved back to their flat and normal life began. Heymann was twelve. He remembers his childhood home as a ‘cultured’ household:
We were a book-reading family. I remember that as a kid, myself, my two sisters and my mother would be sitting in four different corners of the room, everyone with a different book. The culture was a reading culture. Music came a little later for me, though my parents always liked classical music and went to concerts. Just after the end of the war, in late 1945 when I was nine, I went to my first concert in a spa on the other side of the lake – the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra playing Beethoven’s Leonore 3, the Fourth Piano Concerto and Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony. I remember the pianist was Rosl Schmid and the conductor Hans Rosbaud (I heard many concerts with him later on after he had become music director of the Hesse Radio Orchestra). I found it fascinating. The music made a great impression on me and, back in Frankfurt, I started to go to all the youth concerts’ at the Hessischer Rundfunk. I went to a lot of concerts.
My grandmother on my mother’s side had a house in one of the other suburbs and had friends who lived in the countryside, so she had food. We went there on weekends on a bicycle – a 20-kilometre bicycle ride to eat. And she had a piano in the hallway but she would never let me touch it. I remember her saying: ‘You’re going to destroy it. Don’t touch the piano!’ Perhaps, if she had let me play on it, or just touch it, things might have worked out differently and I might have learned an instrument. But that didn’t happen and I never did. Neither of my parents played, so that was the way of the family. And I never learned to read music either.
I became more involved with music around 1955 when my father bought his first record player, which played LPs. I remember I was in high school because I was still making money as a caddy; I was nineteen. We had one of those old radios, of course, but it had a pretty good sound. The first disc my father bought was Mendelssohn’s Hebrides overture on 45 rpm. And then to aggravate my father, whose musical preferences stopped around 1900, I bought Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel and Don Juan, as well as the Symphonie fantastique by Berlioz. Those were my first three LPs. I think they were all Philips and conducted by Willem van Otterloo [the Dutch conductor of the Residentie Orkest in The Hague], who was particularly known for his recordings of twentieth-century music.
Although I didn’t play an instrument, which is something I regret very much to this day, I did read books. When I was in high school I read lots of adventures by a German author called Karl May. He set his stories around the world – the American Old West and the Middle East – countries which he had never visited. He himself wrote about forty or fifty, and after he died other people concocted others. I had a classmate whose father was an industrialist and he had the money to buy all of them, so I borrowed them from him. My ambition was to read every one of his novels, and I did.
I also read other things. I read everything! I think I was probably the best customer of our local city library. I read under the blanket at night; I read all the time. But not about music. I read the programme notes to the concerts but reading about classical music came later when I began record-collecting seriously, after university.
Heymann learned to earn money from a very young age. At ten he had started buying reading sheets from a kiosk in the early morning and reselling them at school for a small profit. Sport was also a keen interest and he got himself a job at a big tennis club as a ball-boy, and then as a caddy at Frankfurt’s only golf club. In his student years he did many other jobs, ranging from cleaning and removing labels from bottles for re-use to loading mail on the night trains and being a
witness at weddings. He was an able tennis player – he became the playing coach of the Frankfurt University tennis team – and made money by giving tennis lessons at the Frankfurt Press Club and, during the summer holidays, at a big industrial plant near Wiesbaden. He went to Frankfurt University in 1956, just before he turned twenty, to read English and Romance languages and literature. He was always attracted by travel; he became fascinated by Brazil and decided to learn Portuguese. The winter term of 1958 was spent studying Portuguese language and literature at Lisbon University and living with a Portuguese family. He established a pattern of playing and teaching tennis during the summer, and earning sufficient money to fund a winter term at a university abroad. It became an important preparation for his later life.
I learned a lot about the different way people lived. I was some sort of a doer. While studying in Lisbon I also played tennis for the university and met a lot of people. I had two very good professors: one, a Brazilian, had written the most important history of the Portuguese language, and the other one was teaching both linguistics and literature. The Portuguese have many dialects: there were many little valleys that were separated from the rest of the country at the time. This professor would write out the phonetic transcription of a sentence and we would have to guess from which part of the country it came. He spoke very movingly about the extreme poverty there – how some villages had only one suit: when one of the villagers had to go to the city for an official visit he put on the one village suit.
The Story of Naxos Page 4