The Life and Death of Classical Music (11 page)

On 2 December 1970 EMI brought Muti over to conduct the New Philharmonia in Croydon, on the unreviewed outskirts of London. The players, alert to a record deal, asked him to become principal conductor. For Muti-coal-black hair, razor-sharp tailoring and just past thirty-Christmas came early that year. After recording Cherubini’s Requiem, he stamped his authority on Aida at Walthamstow Town Hall. The first take was desultory, too many musicians dispersed around a vast building. Muti listened to the playback with a brow darker than thunder. He stormed back into the heart of the hall and fired up a performance that left the cast sweat-soaked and uplifted. ‘The magnetism was irresistible,’ said Mordler, and the set (Montserrat Caballe, Domingo, Fiorenza Cossotto, Nicolai Ghiaurov and Piero Cappuccilli) was hailed as a classic. Sales, though, were stubbornly slow. In the thick of the oil crisis few would risk £12 (the price of a good restaurant meal for two) on a young maestro. An ‘anonymous admirer’, apparently the General Electric Company chairman Arnold Weinstock, chipped in £25,000 to get EMI to record Muti again in Bellini’s I Capuletti e I Montecchi at Covent Garden.

He was not an easy colleague. Seducing an EMI blonde, he used her to demand the sacking of an executive he disliked. After the early buzz, Philharmonia audiences fell and the players were relieved when the aged Ormandy offered Muti his Philadelphia post. Muti livened up the old town with a dazzle of stars-Pavarotti, Renata Scotto, Maurizio Pollini and the Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter, with whom he enjoyed an innate understanding-and dragged EMI warily into recording in America. Although his sales were low and his Beethoven symphonies bombed,
Muti, newly head of La Scala and talked of as the next Karajan, kept EMI and Philips flinging ever more despairing wads of cash at his combustible career.

EMI kept its door ever open to options. Simon Rattle, a wire-haired kid from Liverpool, twenty-one years old, won a cigarette-sponsored conducting competition with an EMI recording as part of the prize. He asked to perform Mahler’s tenth symphony, a deathbed work completed in 1964 by a BBC producer, Deryck Cooke, with the emigre composer Berthold Goldschmidt. Senior conductors had scorned the score, Bernstein and Kubelik rejecting it for their cycles. Ormandy made a premiere recording on CBS and Kurt Sanderling another in East Germany, but the case for the Tenth was yet to be made. Rattle studied with Goldschmidt and expanded the more speculative passages with the brother-composers Colin and David Matthews. The music, he wrote, ‘requires an unusual degree of creativity from the conductor … one comes face to face with the bare material in a way that a conductor of Mahler’s generation would have been’
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(CD 71, p. 242). The record, blazing with conviction, would fix the symphony in the canon. Before it was out, Rattle was named principal conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Britain’s second city. He was on a vertical curve.

It took EMI fifteen years to break even on Rattle and he was not the toast of the tearoom when one of his enthusiasms, Nicholas Maw’s Odyssey, sold just ninety copies on release. But EMI held firm and Rattle repaid the label with dogged exclusivity and, ultimately, the supreme trophy of Berlin.

And still the door stayed open. An East German refugee, Klaus Tennstedt, made an explosive US debut with a Bruckner Eighth in Boston. ‘Once in a lifetime,’ gasped the
Globe.
Lanky, weak-willed, and prone to alcoholic consolation, Tennstedt collapsed in tears in a Philadelphia rehearsal and suffered a complete breakdown soon after, unable to cope with success. He found an empathy with Gustav Mahler; an EMI producer, John Willan, nursed him through an unforgettably intense cycle (CD 89, p. 262). Tennstedt, said a wide-eyed Rattle, ‘has the effect of energising an orchestra
in his own way quicker than almost anyone’.
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He was a one-off, not long for this world, but Willan captured the best of Tennstedt and when the bedraggled anti-hero returned from illness to the Royal Festival Hall, banners waved from the balcony: ‘Welcome back, Klaus.’ Even Karajan was impressed.

Amid EMI’s thicket of batons, Karajan was never the main event that he was on DG. His ill-judged EMI comeback featured the Soviet dream team of Richter, David Oistrakh and Mstislav Rostropovich (see p. 283). There followed a Dresden Meistersinger and the late symphonies of Mozart and Tchaikovsky. EMI made a £652,719 profit on Karajan in the 1970s, plus a fixed overheads contribution of almost
£1
million.
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Andry, to stroke Karajan’s vanity, assigned a red-haired lad from marketing to work on his image. Peter Alward flew to Berlin to arrange a fresh set of cover photographs. Given the runaround by Karajan’s minder, Emil Jucker, he turned to Michel Glotz, the maestro’s independent recording consultant, who stole half an hour of D G time for the EMI shots. Afterwards Karajan said to the young man, ‘What are you doing tonight?’ ‘Going back to Munich, Maestro.’ ‘No, you will come to dinner with me.’

Back in London, Alward was called in to see Andry: ‘I’ve just had Karajan on the phone. He wants you to be involved in all his recordings.’ Half-English, half-German-Jewish, a fount of minutiae and industry gossip, Alward formed a bond with Karajan that proved crucial for the classical division when EMI finally fell apart in 1979 after a run of Read depredations. In crisis, Andry sent Alward to tell Karajan that EMI could not fulfil a long-cherished Tosca. ‘We’ll have to see about that,’ retorted the litigious Karajan. After a moment or two he said to Alward, ‘What if my next record for EMI was Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with Anne-Sophie Mutter?’ The combination of old master and German teenager in a surefire hit left EMI with a million seller and Alward with the impression that the wily maestro understood the record business better than any of its bosses.
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Woe betide anyone, though, who took him for granted. ‘He never forgot a slight,’ said the soprano Birgit Nilsson.
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Emil Jucker,
who did his dirty work for decades, was destroyed by a multi-million Karajan lawsuit. Told that Jucker had suffered a stroke during one of his performances, Karajan said, ‘People who go against me always come to harm’ (he also bragged that he had caught Rosengarten stealing royalties and won a huge settlement, an assertion hotly denied by the Decca man’s heirs
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).

The more records Karajan made, the more he sold, and the more critics took against him. Even
Gramophone
struggled to find praise for his fourth and fifth Beethoven cycles and musicians muttered that his seamless perfectionism was simply boring, though few spoke out. An exception was the free-spirited Richter, who avoided Karajan after a contretemps during the Beethoven triple concerto when the conductor refused his request for a retake in order to pose for photographs. ‘It’s a dreadful recording,’ wrote Richter, ‘and I disown it utterly … And what a nauseating photograph it is, with him posing artfully and the rest of us grinning like idiots.’
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That image defines its era, a picture of the captive state of classical recording at the heyday of Herbert von Karajan.

The last formative figures slipped away in sorrow or disgrace. In March 1975 Decca sacked Gordon Parry, after an investigation for abuse of expenses. ‘Once Culshaw left Decca there was no controlling hand and Gordon’s talent for excess took over,’ said James Mallinson. ‘He walked out on me in the middle of a session-you can’t have that,’ said Christopher Raeburn. The creator of the Decca Sound went on to work as a sound consultant at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Released within months he was jobless until a friend in the garment trade put him to work on the cutting floor. ‘I’m a member of a team again,’ he beamed, ‘which is how I always saw myself at Decca.’
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A visitor to his bungalow, in the featureless east of London, noticed that he had no record player. His death, in February 2003, passed unrecorded in the British press.

Rosengarten kept his hands on the reins to the last, his eye on the bottom line. He told producers to lash out on expenses, which were covered by London; their salaries, paid from Zurich, were
tiny. A Decca producer in the mid-1970s earned £100 a month in take-home pay, but sat in £36 seats at the opera,
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travelled first-class and stayed in five-star hotels.

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.’
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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’.
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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.’
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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’.
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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’.
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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.