Because I had studied abroad I got a part-time job running a seminar for my fellow students at Frankfurt University, and this, together with coaching tennis, meant that I was actually starting to become quite well off. And my languages were expanding. I spoke German, English and Portuguese, and I was reading in French, Spanish and Italian – and I took some courses in Romanian, which was half Romance language, half Slav.
In 1959 Heymann spent the winter term at King’s College London; he was ostensibly studying in the Portuguese department but he also went to lectures on French and English. He regards his time there as crucial because he learned ‘a critical approach to literature’, which was very different from the more deferential German attitude. In 1960 it was back to Frankfurt for the summer, earning well, and then to Paris and the Sorbonne for the winter, where he had the good fortune to study with the distinguished professor and author Antoine Adam. Heymann had brought with him his tape recorder and recorded the lectures while all his fellow students took notes. These winter study periods also introduced him to a lot of opera, theatre and concerts: the San Carlos Opera in Lisbon, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in London (it was the early years of Georg Solti), and the Opéra and Comédie-Française in Paris. But it was a life that couldn’t continue: he decided that five years as a student had been enough. He was told that in order to finish his Frankfurt degree he would need to stay for another two years, so he dropped out.
It was 1961 and he was accustomed to earning a living in a variety of ways. Tennis was not an option as a profession: ‘I was a good state-level player but no more – and there was no professional circuit as there is now.’ He didn’t want the life of a club tennis coach, either. But it was through his tennis coaching at the Frankfurt Press Club that he got a job as an advertising sales supervisor for a newspaper called The Overseas Weekly (which was nicknamed ‘The Over-Sexed Weekly’ because of the cheesecake pictures that featured in all issues). It was an English-language tabloid for the 300,000 troops in the American armed forces stationed in Germany.
My boss was a hi-fi nut and also a classical music lover. We hit on the idea of publishing a hi-fi supplement, which is where I got to learn about hi-fi. Then people came to me and said they needed translations of hi-fi manuals from German into English. So I started a very lucrative business of doing translations of operating instructions and advertisements which would be polished up by my boss. Even today, if you buy a Braun shaver, you will find a lot of terminology in the instructions that came from me many years ago. Then I started freelance copywriting on the side. I was working all the time, doing my day job, and then having translations or copywriting delivered to me at 7 p.m. which had to be completed overnight. It was proper on-the-job training. I got to know the ad agencies not only as a translator or writer but also as a model for brochures. I modelled as a Lufthansa captain once, with a gorgeous blonde model sitting next to me in a fancy car; it was winter, but I was dressed in the captain’s summer uniform because the advertisement was scheduled to run in summer. It was freezing. The advertising-agency people put a fur coat on the model between shoots but I was standing there, shivering, in my summer uniform. On another occasion I did a cigarette commercial and had to hold a cigarette; but I had never smoked, and my eyes began watering and I started to cough. I learned that you never look into a camera but have to focus on a spot, like the shoulder of the cameraman; otherwise you look vague. So now, whenever we do a shoot with a musician or if a press photographer takes pictures of me, I know what to do.
It became clear that there was not a real future in The Overseas Weekly and when, at the start of 1966, Braun offered Heymann a job as the export advertising manager, he changed paths. It was an important step because he learned key sales and marketing methods that he was later to use in his classical music business. Braun was famous for its classic, clean design, but Heymann realised that the export markets were not carrying this through in their advertising. He therefore wrote a Braun style guide for advertising – and many of these principles were carried through to Naxos.
Braun did lots of tests on which typography and layouts are easiest to read and used the results in their designs. No indentation because it delays the reading speed; dark blue on white is easier to read than black on white; sans serif type is easier to read than serif. Braun used templates for layouts into which the text and pictures had to fit, and, as a result, all their advertisements and printed material had a very clean look. I learned a lot.
After Heymann had spent a year with Braun, The Overseas Weekly invited him to open an office in Hong Kong. It was the time of the Vietnam War, and he arrived in Hong Kong on 6 January 1967 with a suitcase and a two-year contract. Although he has travelled the world, Hong Kong has remained his base ever since.
Four
A New Home in the Far East: Building a Business Career 1967–1982
The move to Hong Kong set Heymann on a steep learning curve, setting up an office, and solving problems with printers, distributors, and not least the military authorities. They were not supporters of the paper because it had been critical of the military, and they refused to allow it on the military newsstands. Yet without distribution there could be no advertising. Heymann travelled around Asia – Thailand, the Philippines, Korea, Taiwan, Japan and, of course, Vietnam – finding outlets in front of the bases. He made a go of it, but realised that there were better ways to get wider distribution. He managed to get hold of military phone books, base by base, which carried details of key personnel, and these became the core of an unrivalled network. He devised a way of shipping out the newspaper in bulk to an international mail exchange centre in Japan, which then shipped it free of charge to the key personnel – even to soldiers and airmen in the front line! What’s more, he made no charge to the readers for the newspaper itself – a very early example of a free newspaper funded by advertising, which included most of the main Japanese camera and hi-fi makers. After two years he left and went out on his own. The next step was a direct-advertising business, Davidson and Partners; and then a mail-order company for the US armed forces in Asia, Pacific Mail Order System. It was 1969.
I knew how to convert military phonebooks into mailing lists and so I hit on the idea of starting a mail-order business, because as I travelled around the military bases I kept being asked: ‘Where can I buy a camera?’ So I began a mail-order business and sold cameras. I made a camera catalogue. I didn’t know much about cameras and it had rather a lot of mistakes! But I mailed it out and three weeks later I looked in my letter-box and hundreds of envelopes containing cheques fell out. I was a dollar millionaire within the year. I was thirty-three. It sounds easy, but there were many problems to be overcome, especially the posting difficulties – getting the cameras to the buyers on the military bases. I found out that the nearest US territory to Hong Kong was a place called Guam. I set up a warehouse there, and shipped the parcels in bulk by air freight from Hong Kong to Guam. Our people in Guam posted the parcels at the local post office and the goods were then sent all over Asia to the armed forces by the US Government, at US domestic postage rates.
It was an exciting time. Heymann flew in military helicopters over the Vietnamese terrain and saw, at first hand, the testing circumstances, with guns jamming and communications wild and difficult. He was in Saigon during the Tet Offensive: he learned not to sit near windows in cafés because the Vietcong might throw explosive devices through them. He became involved in travel tourism for soldiers on R&R, working with a big American airline.
Then came the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 and the writing was on the wall for this form of mail-order activity. However, he wasn’t quite finished: he adapted the business, offering hi-fi equipment to members of the military who were preparing to return to the US; they would buy it while still in the Far East, and have it shipped home for their arrival. Although it was clear that his life in Hong Kong and the Far East would be very different, Heymann had no thought of returning to Europe. ‘I couldn’t imagine
living anywhere else.’
During this time he continued to listen to music, but mainly on LP: there was very little live music-making of any reasonable standard in Hong Kong. He also maintained an interest in hi-fi equipment. He had been selling Revox tape recorders and Bose speakers to the GIs, and it was this that led to the next major step in his career: he had a meeting with the innovative designer of speakers, Dr Amar G. Bose. Dr Bose had come to Hong Kong to visit the distributor of his unusual speakers but was disappointed in the distributor’s performance. He offered the distribution of Bose in Hong Kong and China to Heymann. It was the beginning of a fruitful relationship that was to last more than twenty-five years and later make a crucial contribution to Naxos itself. Revox also gave him the distributorship of its tape recorders for Hong Kong and China. It was a natural step for Heymann because, even during those heady and busy days since his arrival in the Far East, music had remained a central part of his life, an emotional lifeline to his Western heritage.
From the start of my life in Hong Kong I collected records. I used to read all the catalogues and buy LPs from all over the world – including the Eastern European recordings from Hungaroton, Supraphon and Opus. I got these from a little distributor in Hong Kong called Essex Trading. The company’s salesman David Levy knew a lot of unusual music – all the Polish and Czech and Hungarian composers – as well as the central repertoire. I had hundreds of LPs lined up on my shelves at home. I tried cataloguing them but didn’t have the time to keep it up, and eventually I shelved them according to the order in which I bought them.
I knew mainly about orchestral music and opera. I liked the big piano and violin concertos, and the symphonic repertoire – Bruckner and Mahler: particularly music that was fast and loud. It was only later, after I met my wife, Takako Nishizaki, that I really learned about chamber music, and how to listen to music intelligently and sensitively. As the Revox and Bose distributor, I decided it was a good idea to promote the equipment by organising concerts. But also I was missing the European environment. I had been accustomed to going to concerts and opera in Europe, and while I loved being in the Far East, and could listen to records, I felt the lack of live music. So I started to correct that myself.
The first concert Heymann organised was a recital by the American pianist Michael Ponti, arranged through family contacts. Ponti had recorded extensively for the American independent company Vox-Turnabout, making some eighty titles – including largely forgotten Romantic piano concertos by Moscheles, Bronsart, Thalberg and others on its rarities label Candide. Heymann knew the recordings, and learned from Michael how a label like Vox could reduce recording costs in order to make such discs economically viable – such a contrast to the grand ways of the majors, such as Deutsche Grammophon or EMI. This initial contact was fortuitous because Vox, with its subsidiary label Turnabout, was one of the first low-price record labels, pioneering the ‘cheap LPs’ approach in the 1950s. It launched the recording careers of a number of great artists, including the pianist Alfred Brendel and the conductors Jascha Horenstein and Otto Klemperer. It was just as innovative in its choice of repertoire, which included both specialist and core works. It released the first complete recordings of Bach’s St Matthew Passion and Orff’s Carmina Burana as well as Baroque music that subsequently became standard fare: composers such as Vivaldi, Corelli and Tartini were brought to a wider audience, almost for the first time. For a collector like Heymann it was a label of particular interest: he was intrigued as to how its founder, George Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (a descendant of Felix Mendelssohn), could issue acceptable, and sometimes very good, recordings of both standard and rare repertoire at a low price. Until the moment Ponti arrived in Hong Kong, the interest was at arm’s length: Heymann was running his mail-order business and had no thought of going into classical records. The idea was prompted inadvertently by Michael Ponti’s expressing disappointment that his discs were not available in the record shops in Hong Kong. Could Heymann, who was involved in the import–export business, remedy this?
At the start, importing LPs was a hobby. The main business was importing and selling studio equipment, principally Revox and Studer. In 1969 he had formed Revox (HK) Ltd which, in 1976, he was to change to Studer-Revox (HK) Ltd because by then the company had started to market professional recording equipment.
The company that manufactured the Revox tape recorders also made the famous Studer professional recording machines. They asked me to take on the distribution of these machines for Hong Kong and China, and I decided that it was difficult to sell only tape machines so I started looking for other equipment (mixing consoles, reverb units, equalisers, microphones) that would enable us to offer people turnkey studio projects.
In the early 1970s he spotted a gap in the international camera market and began to buy cameras – Minolta, Canon, Nikon – in Japan through semi-official routes and parallel-export them to Germany. He sidestepped the main processes which kept Japanese export prices high. Using barter arrangements with airlines, maintained from his days in the direct-mail business, he would fly first-class from Japan to Hong Kong with 2,000 cameras in thirty to forty boxes that were classed as excess baggage. Payment to his Japanese suppliers was often in cash and he found himself travelling with millions of Yen in a briefcase. It was totally legal, so he could turn up to customs in Japan, declare it, and stand in front of customs officers as they opened up his briefcase stuffed with bank notes. ‘It kept me fed between the close of the mail-order business and the start of the studio business.’
By 1973 Heymann was a well-known figure in Hong Kong recording and studio circles, and his love for classical music brought him into contact with other expatriates who had similar interests. His work in putting on concerts such as Ponti’s recital was noticed by the conductor of the semi-professional Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and he was invited to join the board. He accepted on the basis that the orchestra would turn fully professional, and he set out to make this happen. Heymann was appointed chairman of the fund-raising committee and honorary general manager. One of the members of the fund-raising committee was a senior executive in the chemical branch of Esso and he introduced Heymann to all the ‘big shots’ in Hong Kong. Heymann sold them his concept: that Hong Kong would benefit from a professional orchestra and that it gave them an opportunity to entertain their visiting guests as well as advertise and promote their companies. Would they help fund it?
I came up with a good little scheme without really knowing anything about it, but they had never seen anybody like me and had never thought of the concept themselves. I got the necessary funding and in January 1974 we launched the fully professional Hong Kong Philharmonic. We had a mixed bag of musicians: we brought in some Koreans and a few Japanese and others who lived in Hong Kong; we also advertised and hired people based on taped auditions. There were a lot of problems later on, but that’s how we started. When we wanted to do bigger pieces, we would hire Filipino musicians from the night clubs to make up the numbers. I got to learn the repertoire – I studied all the publishers’ catalogues – and even today I can tell you the instrumentation for most of the standard symphonic works.
I didn’t know a lot about soloists, so I made some rules. Among them was to hire only artists who either had a contract with a major record company or had won an important competition in the last three years. One soloist who was offered to me was Takako Nishizaki, but she didn’t fulfil any of these criteria. She was a gifted Japanese violinist who had been Shinichi Suzuki’s first pupil (though her main teacher was her father, a colleague of Suzuki). She had studied at Juilliard with Joseph Fuchs and had been awarded the Fritz Kreisler Scholarship, given to the top violin student every year. She had come second in the Leventritt Competition in 1964 (behind Itzhak Perlman) but that was ten years earlier, and then after touring a lot she had returned to Japan. So I rejected her. But in early 1974 I got a phone-call from her Japanese manager, saying that she was coming to Hong Kong to play with the Philharmonic and t
o give a recital with a Korean pianist, and would I meet her and hear her. As it happened, the orchestra had a cancellation by a Romanian violinist who was to play Wieniawski’s Violin Concerto No. 2, so the management agreed that Takako should replace her. By that time I was no longer involved with the orchestra but I met her at the airport on 13 August 1974, and that is how the whole thing started.
In fact, when we first met, she was distraught. Somebody had stepped on her violin on the plane and she was very concerned. As it happened he was very light, the case had taken the impact, and the violin was fine. She walked past me, saying, ‘My violin, my violin!’ and got into the car the orchestra had sent, which dropped her off at the Mandarin Hotel. I hadn’t heard her play yet but I thought she was cute. I invited her out for dinner but she said she had had dinner. How about a drink? She said she didn’t drink. How about a cup of tea? She couldn’t say no to that, so we went out for a cup of tea at 8.30 and stayed talking until 1.30 a.m. We were the last ones to leave. She told me later that she had expected me to be an elderly gentleman with three children, and she was amazed how much I knew about classical music.
The Story of Naxos Page 5