THE END OF CLASSICAL

ABRIDGED FROM MY BOOK 'THE BUSINESS', PUBLISHED BY UNBOUND, AVAILABLE ANYWHERE THAT SELLS BOOKS

Standing head and shoulders above all others as the first great recording star was Enrico Caruso.

In the early 1900s, recording was still done acoustically, with the artist singing into a large horn attached to a needle that wriggled around in soft wax, from which records could later be pressed.

Operatic tenors had an edge on other singers. Not only did their formal training gave them built-in amplification, they had exactly the right frequency range for acoustic horn recording. Almost nothing was lost, whereas sopranos or baritones lost a lot.

Caruso made more than 260 recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company and earned millions of dollars from royalties. The sheer quality of his voice convinced the non opera-loving public to buy his records and almost everyone had at least one. So it was opera rather than popular song that gave the record industry its first superstar.

And a superstar, he was. He always dressed immaculately, took two baths a day and smoked Egyptian cigarettes, though his image was slightly smudged when, in 1906, he was charged with committing an indecent act in the monkey house at Central Park Zoo. The New York court found him guilty of pinching a married woman’s bottom and he was fined $90. Caruso said the monkey did it.

Be that as it may, it was Caruso’s operatic singing that took records from a gimmick to an industry. As a result, major record companies always treated their classical departments with a respect not granted to other departments. To break even was considered good; to lose just a little was acceptable; even to lose quite a lot could be tolerated so long as it was a prestigious recording.  But in the 1980s that came to an end.

At CBS, where Walter Yetnikoff was CEO, he decided he had to be practical and give his classical department only the funding it deserved from a commercial viewpoint. Which was almost nil.

But when CBS was sold to Sony, it looked like there might be a reprieve. Norio Ohga, the head man at Sony was a classical fanatic. He was determined that some of the company’s profits should be ploughed back into classical music and told everyone that Sony would be “the most important classical label by the end of the century”.  To make it happen, he hired Gunther Breest, former head of the world’s most respected classical label, Deutsche Grammophon.

Breest immediately moved Sony classical’s headquarters from New York to Hamburg. Then, putting image before practicality, he paid top conductors like Claudio Abbado to give Sony some small part of their output, just for the prestige of it. Deutsche Grammophon would still have first refusal on everything they recorded but Sony could have the leftovers. Breest then paid a vast amount to steal Vladimir Horowitz from Deutsche Grammophon, but Horowitz died after making just one recording. Undeterred, Breest ploughed on anyway, bringing in other big names, including the Boston Pops Orchestra. And a great deal of recording took place.

This big spending by Sony, triggered other companies to do the same, and after a couple of years the world became flooded with high priced classical recordings for which there was insufficient market. The classical recording industry was going bankrupt.

Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, someone had found the secret of selling classics at a profit. Klaus Heymann, a German living abroad, had a local record distribution business and as a result of various business deals found himself the owner of some classical master tapes. So he decided to market them.

“I couldn’t sell them at full price because these were unknown East European orchestras. I had to put them out on a budget label.”

Which is how Naxos Records was born.

At a price of $6, Naxos albums were the cheapest classics by far, a third of the price of anything from a major company. In 1987 they sold at discount stores across Asia. Then in Woolworth’s in Britain and petrol stations in Europe. Then in American supermarkets.

Heymann was simply a businessman who liked classical music. “I sat down with a catalogue and marked everything that had more than ten recordings. Our policy was to record the hundred most popular pieces of music in reasonably good quality.”

Mostly he did this in Eastern Europe where rates of pay for orchestral players were cheap and conductors and soloists got a flat fee with no royalties. The records weren’t sold on the name of the performers, just on their musical content. By 1996, one in six classical records sold anywhere in the world was a Naxos.

For the major companies things got worse when Edgar Bronfman Jr, the heir to the Seagram drinks fortune, decided to spend some of the family money on MCA Records and PolyGram, which included Deutsche Grammophon and Decca, the world’s top two classical labels.

The combined company had a vast catalogue of classical music. But Bronfman, who had no understanding of the historic respect record companies normally paid to classical music, looked at it purely as business and cut funding to a minimum.

At Sony, even their classically passionate Japanese boss, was forced into the same position. The glut of expensive recordings triggered by Gunther Breest’s extravagance, and the cut-price competition created by the Naxos label, had caused the market for top price classical music to collapse. When Norio Ohga learned of the lack of return from Breest’s mad spending spree, he fired him and allowed the classical division to move back to New York.

It was the end forever of classical music’s elite position in the industry. Sony’s classical department was taken over by Peter Gelb, previously Breest’s right-hand man, and his plan was simple – stop recording classics. Instead he would release film music.

To get him off to a good start he received an extraordinary gift. Almost by accident, Sony had acquired the rights to the soundtrack of Titanic including the theme song performed by Celine Dion. The new CEO, Tommy Mottola, intent on giving Sony a hip new look, refused to release it on Epic or Columbia. So it came to Gelb’s department.

Titanic became the best-selling soundtrack of all time, racking up twenty-five million CDs and giving Gelb the aura of a financial genius. He immediately lectured the industry on how it should be done….

“I believe in great music,” he told a classical music conference, “I just don’t want to record it.”

Sounds like so many of the A&R men I’ve known.

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