Маэстро, шедевры и безумие. Тайная жизнь и позорная смерть индустрии звукозаписи классической музыки

by Norman Lebrecht, Норман Лебрехт

Новая книга Нормана Лебрехта, автора нашумевших расследований "Кто убил классическую музыку?" и "Маэстро Миф", - первая наиболее полная хроника индустрии звукозаписи.
В центре внимания автора оказываются не только его любимые персонажи - дирижеры, певцы, пианисты - звезды мирового классического репертуара, - но также руководители крупнейших звукозаписывающих корпораций и небольших фирм звукозаписи.
История их закулисной жизни и "позорной смерти", поведанная весьма осведомленным автором, крайне увлекательна и способна в немалой степени стимулировать мыслительный процесс.

Во второй части издания представлен провокационный список из ста записей, которые, по мнению Лебрехта, изменили музыкальный мир. Наряду с ним приводятся двадцать самых бездарных продуктов звукозаписывающей индустрии. Этот хит-парад поможет сориентироваться в безбрежном море классических записей не только новичку, но вполне искушенному меломану.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History, Art, Classical Music

328 pages, Paperback

First published April 5, 2007

About the author

Norman Lebrecht (born 11 July 1948 in London) is a British commentator on music and cultural affairs and a novelist. He was a columnist for The Daily Telegraph from 1994 until 2002 and assistant editor of the Evening Standard from 2002 until 2009. On BBC Radio 3, he has presented lebrecht.live from 2000 and The Lebrecht Interview from 2006.

He has written twelve books about music, which have been translated into 17 languages. Coming up in 2010 is Why Mahler?, a new interpretation of the most influential composer of modern times. See Books for more details. Also coming back in print is Mahler Remembered (Faber, 1987).

Norman Lebrecht's first novel The Song of Names won a Whitbread Award in 2003. His second, The Game of Opposites, was published in the US by Pantheon Books. A third is in preparation.

A collection of Lebrecht columns will be published this year in China, the first such anthology by any western cultural writer. A Lebrecht conversation appears monthly in The Strad, magazine of the strings professions.

The Lebrecht Interview will return in July 2010 on BBC Radio 3 and there will be further editions of The Record Doctor in New York on WNYC.

A year-long series of events, titled Why Mahler?, will open on London's South Bank in September 2010, curated by Norman Lebrecht.

Other works in progress include a stage play and various radio and television documentaries.

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Norman Lebrecht is a curmudgeon of British extraction. Some find the music critic lovable, others hatable. I had heard his name whispered through the library stacks for years until somehow stumbling across his blog, Slippedisc (dot com), whose multiple daily posts covering the world of classical music are, over the course of a week, dull, businesslike, informative, humorous (mostly in the comments), clickbaitish, typo-filled. Lebrecht doesn’t hesitate to descend himself into the comments in order to, usually, castigate someone or announce their outright banishment. Here for example is an excerpt from only today, regarding a very old and expensive violin stolen from a musician on a train at a Geneva station:

Janice from accounting says:
December 11, 2016 at 12:11 pm
Was it stolen “almost from his hands” in the train, or at the train station? Two different things, and what’s “almost from his hands”, was he sleeping and the case slipped from his fingers? Lousy report.

norman lebrecht says:
December 11, 2016 at 12:22 pm
What on earth is the matter with you? The people who have reported the theft do no [sic] speak English as a first language. It is clear from what they say that the violin was taken by force from its lawful owner. Further details will emerge in due course. We do not employ a correspondent on the platform of Geneva station. Now get back to your accounts, Janice.

Dick Ewe says:
December 11, 2016 at 4:23 pm
I am going with Janice here.
In your own words, you literally typed “do no speak English?”
Apparently you don’t speak it either. Come on, Norman: you need an editor before you post: either that, or you need to learn the rules of simple syntax. You make a lot of typos in your little articles.
But quite frankly, I’m sick of your stories of idiots in Europe who leave their valuable violins on a rack when they’re taking a train, or leave their violins in a cab. And then after that, it turns out that some of them have just forgotten their violin instead of it having been stolen. You have made mistakes with posting such stories as well.
In my opinion, I think you toot your own horn far too much: you aren’t half as great as you think you are.
Now go back to your fiddling-diddling.
My fiddle rides on my lap, or it stays in between my legs and on my feet to keep it from touching the floor. I also take the strap and put it around something like my arm or my shoulder. Lucky for myself as well, I’m a big guy, so people don’t tend to mess with me.
But I’m serious: these “I’m a stupid, unattentive violinist” stories have got to stop.
I don’t feel pity for them when they state in their reports that the instrument was left unattended.
Duh?
Honest to God, would you leave a Guadagnini sitting away from you anywhere? A Guadagnini ? A GUADAGNINI ????
Mine stays locked up in the safe.
Janice might be an accountant, but at least she’s accountable.
Shove it, Norman. Shove it.

norman lebrecht says:
December 11, 2016 at 4:28 pm
Nobody forces you to read Slipped Disc. I think it’s time for you to stop.

So I was expecting at least a few typos in this book, along with whatever the print version of outrageous clickbait is. I was pleasantly surprised. Part I, titled Maestros, covers all the recorded history of classical music, from its birth in the late 19th century to its (apparent?) death right about now, hastened into the grave by corporate types with no understanding of the artistic side of music, driven solely by the profit motive. Part II is titled Masterpieces: 100 Milestones of the Recorded Century. These are not necessarily the best recordings ever made, but the most influential. Part III is Madness: 20 Recordings that Should Never Have Been Made. Again, these are not the worst records ever made, not records made by bad musicians, but those “produced with the best of intentions and performed by the finest artists yet which, in one particular or another, stray so far from the intended purpose that they present a caricature of recording, a Versailles mirror in which everything is warped.”

After a slightly boring beginning, more or less the first 25% of the book, Lebrecht and his stories began to get more interesting. For example, there’s the story of Herbert von Karajan (who seems to be a particular Lebrecht bugaboo). Karajan had asked Deutsche Grammophon to pay him a flat fee per LP in order to keep royalties from his wife, whom he was divorcing. But the records sold extremely well; Karajan estimated the scheme had cost him 6 million deutschmarks. He demanded that DG make up the financial loss.

Glenn Gould, not too long before he died, called the conductor Neville Marriner wanting to make a recording with his orchestra. The two chatted and “Gould told him that, on a good day, he might get two minutes of music into the can.” ‘That would be uneconomic,’ said Marriner. They agreed that Gould would play the solo part of a Beethoven concerto in his studio and send it to Marriner, who would wrap an orchestra around it.” [This is a terrible idea.] Gould died before it could happen.

Then there’s the story Lebrecht got “from a family friend” – whose family, isn’t specified. Karajan had just died, leaving a fortune of half a billion dollars to which royalties were still accruing, and he was quietly and secretly buried in Anif, Austria. “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.”

Perhaps you, like me, bought a Jenő Jandó CD back in the day and always wondered who the heck he was. He was one of the inexpensive performers signed by Naxos Records, the budget label which would record the most obscure eastern European artists and orchestras, paying them minimal amounts (orchestral players got $100 per disc, conductors and soloists $500 or $1,000 and no royalties), and charging $6 for a disc in the 80s. As it happened, an album of Beethoven sonatas with Jenő Jandó sold 250,000 units. Since Jandó got no royalties, he was out of luck. Naxos clips sometimes made it onto TV shows like ER, Sex and the City, and The Sopranos, earning Naxos’ CEO big royalties and the performers nothing.

The worst aspect of the book is that the endnotes are stuck smack in the middle, after Part I. Publishers, this stinks.

But Lebrecht has a snappy way with words; Peter Gelb, then an executive with CBS records, now the GM of the Metropolitan Opera, “hit the social circuit with the look of a fortyish spinster at a debutantes’ ball.” (Gelb is another one Lebrecht likes to mock.) “Otto Klemperer’s [composing] efforts fall into early (1920s Berlin) and late (1960s London), the first period overshadowed by Kurt Weill, the latter thick with undigested Mahler.”

Schubert’s Winterreise with singer Peter Pears and pianist (and his lover) Benjamin Britten is #7 on the Madness list. Pears had a certain admirable way with opera, but “in Lieder, hardly got through one song unblemished. To reach a high note, he strained or blared. At the low end, he growled and snuffled. His delivery was nasal, as if one nostril were permanently blocked. His German was imprecise and his entries inelegant. In song after song he teetered at the edge of wrong notes like a tightrope walker on Temazepam. Britten leaped in to save him with a beautifully turned rubato, most daringly in Einsamkeit, where Pears was going it alone down a dead man’s gulch.”

#10 on the not-good list is A Different Mozart – “at first hearing, this sounds like the scores Mozart sold to Starbucks.”

#11 is the Verdi Requiem with Renee Fleming, Olga Borodina, Andrea Bocelli and others, conducted by Valery Gergiev. Gergiev was eager to conduct it on the centennial year of Verdi’s death; he was told he would have to get an all-star line-up in order to break even. The label (Decca) saddled him with Bocelli. “Bocelli’s solos started sweetly, if simplistically …But whenever he had to reach for a note he would slide and swoop like a kid on a playground, oblivious to dignity and art. It was soon obvious that he lacked the technique to cope with Verdi’s subtle shifts of emotion and, joined by the big guns in the great set pieces, Bocelli is exposed as cruelly as a Sunday morning park footballer would be in the World Cup final. To hear Fleming and Borodina cramp their exceptional voices to his limitations is an embarrassment to the listener and an indictment of the makers of this record.”

This is an entertaining book. If you have no classical taste or understanding, a book like this which explains differences in quality and some of the reasons behind them can help you develop it.

[Isidore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Can this straightforward, reasonable book really be by the nasty author of The Maestro Myth? I suppose Lebrecht has mellowed over the years––not enough for the founder of Naxos, mind you, who brought legal pressure to bear and prevented the book's release in Britain, claiming that the section dealing with his company is full of egregious errors. Lebrcht must rue the day when he stopped maligning the safely unlitigious dead.

But really, having been so repelled by his earlier work, I am amazed to find very little to disagree with here. I have no trouble believing the essential truth of Lebrecht's account of how the classical music industry was ruined by a new breed of uncultured corporate buccaneers far more interested in perks and high salaries than in recording music. After all, looters of this kind have been all too busy everywhere else in Big Business over the past thirty years.

One point which Lebrecht does not explore, but which dovetails neatly with his argument, is that the same corporate mentality was equally destructive on the purely retail level. Once upon a time, you went to your local record store and discussed your prospective purchase with a knowledgeable salesperson, and perhaps even auditioned the record in a listening room before buying it. This pleasant, and I would say necessary model for selling classical records disappeared when the big, brutal chain stores took over. These were quite literally modeled on supermarkets: records, like grapefruit, were supposed to sell themselves, and the staff was only there to point the customer at the fruit pile. This may have worked with rock, but the neophyte interested in exploring the unfamiliar world of the classics would rarely get the necessary assistance from staff members who were untrained, paid a minimum wage, and discouraged from staying very long and developing ideas about expertise and advancement. Customers could forget about hearing a record before buying it ––although distributors continued to provide demonstration records for this purpose, they were usually snapped up by store managers to augment their private collections. True, prices were low, much lower than the old stores, which furnished so much more to the customer, could charge and still remain in business. But it's small wonder the buying public for classical dwindled until there was no longer a large enough market to sustain the major labels!

Lebrecht supplements (an unkind person might say "pads") his study with a list of the hundred most important classical recordings in history, and another of the twenty worst. Although he makes the customary claim of impartiality, his list, like all such lists, is littered with idiosyncrasies: he seems particularly interested in "crossover" recordings (ten in List A, eight in List B), and a whopping thirteen important recordings are there in part because he sees them as anti-Communist (Lebrecht knows that whenever a Russian musician plays sadly, or agitatedly, it's because he's thinking of Stalin).

Such foibles don't detract from the list's interest and entertainment value, and on the whole his selections are reasonable, if heavily weighted to recent years; even Toscanini puts in a few appearances, despite having been consigned to the Outer Darkness in Lebrecht's earlier book. However, his omission of the famous Walter-Ferrier Das Lied von der Erde is astonishing, and Lebrecht really gets out of hand when he places the Peter Pears Winterreise among the worst recordings ever made. He's welcome not to like it, and Pears's voice isn't always lovely, but it's scarcely one of the twenty worst recordings of all time.

Altogether, a useful, informative, and entertaining book. I wouldn't take it as the last word on the collapse of the classics, given its sketchiness and Lebrecht's reputation for inaccuracy, but until a reputable historian takes on the subject it will suffice.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 rounded to 4

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 2 out of 5]

An odd one, this, divided into three uneven sections. 140 pages are given over to a whistlestop account of how the recorded classical music industry went from world-class, ground-breaking dynamism to irrelevance brought on by corporate indifference and short-term profits from crossover pabulum. This is the “maestros” section, even though Lebrecht’s focus is producers, engineers and studio heads rather than actual conductors. For the most part he dismisses titans of the art, who created recordings which remain definitive fifty or sixty years down the line, with the shallow snideness of a ‘Top Gear’ presenter. Karl Richter had no time for period instrument anorak minutiae, so Lebrecht utterly ignores his peerless lifetime’s work as an interpreter of Bach. Karajan strove for sonic perfection so Lebrecht lambasts him for disallowing mistakes (an accusation that makes as much sense as negatively reviewing a garage on an online forum because they got your car through its MOT as well as improving its MPG performance). He refers to Haitink, that cerebral and elegant arbiter of high culture as “graceless” and similarly snubs Masur. (I have seen both maestri perform live and met them after said concerts and both were generous, welcoming and utterly committed to their art.)

Section two is Lebrecht’s choice of 100 epochal recordings (he has the nous to define them as milestones rather than a “best of” selection) and he makes a good case for each of them, but a work that was, say, recorded at a socio-political flashpoint and is charged with the context of said event - or a work that emerges as sounding fresh and invigorated having been done to death over the proceeding decades - doesn’t necessarily establish it as the definitive or quintessential recording that the serious collector must have. Therefore, while Lebrecht gives a solid case for McGegan’s borderline interactive take on Handel’s Messiah, it doesn’t change the fact that Sir Neville Marriner’s transcendental Decca recording is the unsurpassed standard-bearer; nor does Zinman’s Beethoven symphony cycle, never mind that it outshone a substandard glut of competitors in the 1990s, present any real challenge to Karajan’s astounding 1963 cycle, Bernstein’s set with the VPO, Klemperer’s titanic EMI recordings with the Philharmonia, or Kubelik’s deliriously iconoclastic cycle where he pairs a different orchestra with each symphony.

Section three is a countdown of twenty genuinely fuck-awful recordings that should never have seen the light of day. Most of Lebrecht’s choices are justified, though picking on Te Kanawa’s Christmas album when just about everything released by, say, Lesley Garrett or Katherine Jenkins, is equally egregious in terms of recording quality and naked consumerism, seems like a cheap shot.

Where Lebrecht scores highly is in his assault on the genuine charlatans. His four page takedown of the shyster who founded Naxos is worth the cover price alone and if this book nudges just one person away from patronising that awful label and spending a few extra quid on a properly engineered recording whose players actually stand a chance of seeing some royalties, then so much the better.

Elsewhere, however, a nasty whiff of misogyny hangs over the work. On Callas: “fat Greek soprano”. On Sutherland: “gawky soprano”. On Ferrier: “devoid of beauty, brilliance or sexual appeal”. A Google image search on Lebrecht reveals that he’s no oil painting himself. What he is, is a highly capable writer with some understanding of classical music who seems to have been poisoned against his bread-and-butter subject.

[James Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating, but marred history of classical music recording. As such, it is glaringly misnamed, for it is neither a history of classical music, as such, nor of the attendance and financial plight of many orchestras. It is about recording, and as such is a very interesting account. But it has its flaws.

Norman Lebrecht is a British cultural critic who sometimes runs so close to gossip that he might be thought of as the Hedda Hopper of classical music. This book was first published under the title Maestros, Masterpieces, and Madness in the UK. But all copies were pulped after Lebrecht lost a defamation suit brought by Naxos Records impresario Klaus Heymann. The US version was not affected by the ruling, so the "15 inaccuracies in 3 pages" still stand.

There's more. Lebrecht claims Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony were signed to a recording contract because it was a non-union orchestra, which is not the case. He has contempt for any non-classical recordings made by classical artists, dismissing Yo Yo Ma's recording on "Appalachian Waltz" with Mark O'Connor and Edgar Meyer as "a hillbilly album." He heaps mild contempt on innovative approaches like Naxos Records, even though it stands in sharp contrast to the overproduction of classical warhorses that he cites as one of the causes of the decline in classical recording. (Signum Classics, whose Mahler symphonic cycle by Lorin Maazel and the Philharmonia Orchestra I am listening to as I write this is not even mentioned.)

Lebrecht sometimes jumps two decades in a single paragraph, tying together events that are not necessarily connected in order to make a point. Some of the writing seems to take place in a mad rush, with protagonists and antagonists entering and existing in near pandemonium, making it difficult to follow the thread of the story.

For all these faults, Lebrecht does a great job of presenting the arc that is classical music from its inception in the early recordings of of Caruso to its contraction (I dispute that it's in collapse) following the introduction of the CD and the retrenchment of the big classical labels is an engaging and valuable history. The personalities of the maestros and the corporate chieftains who populated the golden age of recording are valuable, if often gossipy. (Every gay man is outed, regardless of the relevance to the story.) The history of the technological advances will be of great interest to everyone in the audio field.

Finally, there is great meat in the appendix, which occupies fully half the book, that lists Lebrecht's list of 100 milestones in recording history and 20 "recordings that should never have been made." One may quarrel with some of his selections, but the stories behind them are invaluable.

It's a fine book for what it gets right. It's unfortunate that so much is wrong and tendentious.

[Maximilian Gerboc · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title is a bit misleading - this book is primarily a history of classical music RECORDING, which, to be honest, was much more interesting than I thought it would be. Told in Lebrecht's tabloid style, we get to see how the technology was first developed. Then, most interestingly, we get to know all of the major music labels and the personalities involved in the companies. The history and the economics of the industry are fascinating - the booms and busts, market over-saturation, technological advances, all mixed with the great visionaries and shithead corporatists (all with hilariously large egos) - and I honestly wish this had been a bit longer to really delve into those topics more. For anyone interested in this very niche history (and who doesn't mind the gossip-column-like style), this is an educational and entertaining read. The second half of this book is really a look through famously good recordings (and some famously bad). The reviews he has for each one, describing the merits and historical context, were of particular interest.

[Peter Ruark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book on the history of classical music recording from which I learned a lot, and the second section with "100 recording milestones" and "20 recordings that should have never been made" is interesting as well. The reason it doesn't get five stars from me? I cannot trust that all of its assertions are true. Other commenters have written about the Klaus Heymann defamation suit against the author and the publisher, but I have also been told (on an online forum by someone whose wife was actually there) that his account in the "20 recordings" section of Bernstein conducting Elgar with the BBC Orchestra portrayed the recording sessions quite unfairly. Lebrecht is a fascinating storyteller and I can certainly recommend this book, albeit with the caveat that readers should take some of the insider stories with a grain of salt.

[C · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't think I was particularly interested in the history of the music recording industry, but I ended up finishing it, surprisingly, so it was very readable. The author's extensive knowledge of music recordings is incredible.
Some good lines which made me laugh, ex.
"The blind pop singer Andrea Bocelli was redesignated classical and foisted on Valery Gergiev as a soloist in the Verdi Requiem, which he vocally murdered."

[Wei Gao · Rating 2 out of 5]

uninterested in the label gossips

[Roland · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delightfully bitchy history of recorded classical music, from Caruso to Church. Coming to this material as a complete novice, I found that Lebrecht bounced around between events a bit too unevenly for my liking, and the story he tells rarely feels like a well-constructed timeline. However, I'm willing to look past that because his writing is full of personality and I felt like I got to know the characters presented in this story. The history is great, and just as good is his list at the end of the book of essential and worthless recordings. Unlike many classical music guides that I've read, this one explains exactly why a performance stands out, what makes it different from other recordings of the same piece, and the conditions that it was recorded under. While flawed, I liked this book enough that I'd like to add it to my collection at some point, mainly as a reference when seeking out performances.

[Tony Gleeson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've enjoyed Norman Lebrecht in his earlier books-- "Discord," "The Maestro Myth"-- where he's consistently been witty, engaging, cynical, informed, opinionated and quirky. He carries through in this telescoped history of classical music recording. It can get a little confusing, what with so many characters and events being rattled off at breakneck speed, and there's seldom a question of how he really feels about any of the artists or executives included. Lebrecht means "death" in a quite literal sense-- he states that he believes the true classical recording industry is gone. He offers up plenty of reasons and plenty of villains. It's a fascinating read for anyone at all interested in the classics on LP or CD. Probably the last part of the book will get more attention-- his lists of what he feels to be the 100 most important classical recordings of all time, from the 1920s to the 2000s, and the 20 absolutely worst of all time. I found plenty to disagree with but never was less than entertained and informed all the way through.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book would have been better (for me) if it concentrated on the best 10 or 20 classical recordings - and went into much more detail -than a paragraph or 2. I found the political history and how it affected not only composers, conductors and other musicians but recording companies as well, really interesting.

I quite enjoy Mr Lebrecht's writing style - I just wish that he went into way more detail on why the recordings were chosen,

[Ernest · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read which seeks to pull the curtain back on the world of classical music recording and expose the politics and characters behind them. This book would have the most relevance to those with knowledge of classical music. The (necessarily subjective) best and worse recordings list is interesting, if not always agreed.

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lebrecht has real flaws -- he's smug, overly opinionated, and far too prone to talking in superlatives. However, he also clearly loves this music, and knows it better than almost anyone else alive. His recounting of the back-room machinations behind classical recording is fascinating, and I enjoyed the list of great recordings to check out.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Behind the scenes history of the twentieth century recording industry heard through the ears of classical music.

Reminded me why I don't own some of these masterpieces, and made me want to get them.

[Ross Mckinney · Rating 3 out of 5]

A not very exciting history of the classical record/CD industry. I was interested in the topic, but this is short on details when it should have them, long on catty insider stories when they aren't that interesting. I'd pass.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really gives you an idea of how the classical culture and industry operate. And the 20 worst are amusing.

[Guillaume Bourgault]

Already loving it: witty!

[Douglaszhao · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is the 100 Best and 20 Worst is not the important,most reasonable is the view of the author.

[Linda Gaines · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting to see the author's take on the death of classical music and his "best" recordings. I have a few of them.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A shimmering whistle-stop tour of a century of culture-defining recorded classical music. How it came about and why it finally killed itself. Essential reading for classical music lovers.