The Life and Death of Classical Music (35 page)

By Christmas the following year it was selling at the rate of one a minute on Oxford Street. Gorecki became the target of a bidding war by music publishers and promptly clammed up, producing no further scores for a decade. The symphony failed resoundingly in live performances, its success confined to record. But its composer could go home content, knowing that he had outsold most of the world’s pop stars.

No one who saw Klaus Tennstedt conduct will forget the prefatory uncertainty. The orchestra would sit on stage, half-expecting cancellation as minutes ticked past the appointed hour. Then, rushing out of the wings, almost stumbling over his feet, this ramshackle figure would mount the podium and, with the most sheepish of grins, pitch into a performance that was like no other, before or since. The essence of his art was spontaneity, anathema to the perfectionist ethos of the recording studio.

Tennstedt (1926–98) was a natural, a non-intellectual who grasped the principles of conducting from his father, concertmaster in the small town of Halle, and took it up when a hand injury ended his violin career. Mistrusted by the communists, he found provincial obscurity in West Germany before a chain of coincidences propelled him to an explosive US debut in Boston, after which the world and its record labels were at his feet. Tennstedt responded with a massive nervous breakdown. He found succour in the music of Gustav Mahler, which became the leitmotiv of his anxious life.

Tennstedt’s Mahler was wholly intuitive, ignorant of critical theory and infused with personal experience. The Sixth, he once told me, anticipated in its opening bars the tramp of Nazi jackboots and in its bleak finale the impotence of the individual against state tyranny. These insights were integrated subliminally into performances, without explicit gesture or rehearsal explanation. A Tennstedt concert was enriched as much by momentary impulse as by cogitated foresight.

His approach to Mahler was narrative, event relentlessly succeeding event until the pressure grew unendurable and catharsis broke. In the Sixth he balanced the opening movement terror with passages of profound compassion, upping the pace to a frenzied Scherzo, yielding to an Andante of unexampled tenderness. In the bleak finale, none bleaker in the whole symphonic repertoire, he allowed chinks of consolation. A BBC Proms audience stood motionless through the ninety minutes of Tennstedt’s Sixth, petrified by its intensity. A 1983 EMI studio recording at Kingsway Hall lacked the high-wire risk that Tennstedt courted and was over-polished at the editing desk. This live concert performance, taken after his return from throat-cancer treatment, is less wild than usual but deepened with an irresistible finality. Cancer and self-doubt soon brought Tennstedt’s art to a tragic, stuttering close.

Awash with Three Tenors profits, Decca set out in search of composers whose music was banned by the Nazis and deserving of resurrection. The producer Michael Haas was directed to an old man, Bertold Goldschmidt, who was living in the same two-room flat in Belsize Park, northwest London, that he had first rented as a refugee in 1935. Goldschmidt, Haas came to realize, was not just a surviving witness of Weimar art but one of its foremost voices. His opera, Der gewaltige Hahnrei, had triumphed in Mannheim in February 1932 and was on its way to the Berlin State Opera when Hitler brought down the curtain on works by Jews.

Haas selected the opera as a cornerstone of Entartete Musik, a series named by the Nazi title for proscribed and ‘degenerate’ works. Goldschmidt, nearing ninety, supervised the recording sessions in Berlin. He walked about picking wild tomatoes on the waste ground above Hitler’s bunker and sat with me in Kurfürstendamm cafés arguing that nothing much had changed. The Nazis were a brief, tragic aberration, a footnote in history.

His opera was a comedy of marital jealousy, melodically woven around the irresistible but virtuous wife Stella, sung by the American soprano Roberta Alexander. The febrile opening theme places Goldschmidt in familiar territory, between Weill and Hindemith, with harkings ahead to Britten and Shostakovich. The fun of the affair is grounded in a lascivious array of musical seductions, as much from the orchestral woodwind as from the singing characters-though the third-act opening ‘Du und ich und ich und du’ is a virtuosic comic set-piece.

Lothar Zagrosek conducted with subtle fervour and the opera received a huge ovation at a final public performance at the Philharmonie. It was also staged at the Komische Opera, sixty years behind its intended debut. The Cuckold sold well on record and served
as the series flagship but corporate cuts in the mid-Nineties put a summary end to Entartete Musik, the record industry’s last great educational venture.

Georg Solti was making a sentimental return to Covent Garden, which he had ruled in the 1960s, with an opera that he had somehow never conducted and was having to study from scratch. The director was Richard Eyre, head of Britain’s National Theatre, a man who hated the artifice of opera and had never directed one before. Eyre was appalled to discover, on entering the opera house, that a singer earned ten times as much on stage as the greatest Shakespearean actress. There was a puritan bitterness to Eyre’s approach that augured ill for the opera.

Serendipity intervened. A soprano from nowhere, a Romanian railworker’s daughter, had caught the eye of Covent Garden’s casting director weeks after leaving the Bucharest conservatory. Big-eyed, beautiful and with a ferocity reminiscent of Callas, Angela Gheorghiu ticked all the boxes for vocal and dramatic power and was being hotly pursued for all manner of roles by Placido Domingo, among others. Solti and Eyre agreed that she was the ideal Violetta.

Backstage, her life took a different turn. A French-Sicilian tenor, Roberto Alagna, flew in from his wife’s funeral to sing Gounod’s Romeo. Sparks flew backstage. Before long, he married Gheorghiu. ‘The public is lucky to have us,’ proclaimed Alagna. Jonathan Miller, the British stage director, called the celebrity pair ‘the Bonnie and Clyde of opera’. They got fired, like Callas, from the Met. All that, however, lay ahead.

Solti, sensing an extraordinary debut, badgered the BBC to screen the opening night. Andrew Porter, the veteran critic, wrote:

‘I encountered one of those performances when only the present seems to matter: when memories fade and any connoisseurship and comparisons are laid aside.’
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Decca rushed in with a recording crew.

Rough as some of the live recording may be, Solti’s command of the opera is wondrously compassionate and the secondary roles are extremely well sung, but it is Gheorghiu who catches the ear with a magnetism unheard for a diva generation. Her sotto voce entry ‘E strano’ combines pathos and fear with sexual confidence of a blazing voltage. As with Callas in Tosca, you feel that nothing is beyond this woman, including murder. Lustrous and faultless in voice and articulation, casting memories of Sutherland and Pavarotti (likewise on Decca) deep into shade, Gheorghiu possesses the role of Violetta with shattering conviction and you do not need the audience eruption to confirm the sighting of an ascendant comet.

A new classical label appeared in 1988 selling CDs at one-third of the usual price, a mere impulse purchase. The orchestras were remote, the conductors and soloists obscure. The discs came from Hong Kong and seemed to be pitched at the growing and somewhat indiscriminate Asian-tiger taste for high culture.

Critics greeted Naxos with collective disdain. What changed their tune was a cycle of Bruckner symphonies that called up mighty reminiscences of old masters: Klemperer, Furtwängler, Karajan. From the fifth symphony’s opening footfall, the immaculate phrasing, idiomatic pacing and resolute passion announced an interpretation of unarguable authority.

The conductor, Georg Tintner, was a name unknown even to
obsessive spotters of maestro movements. Evicted in 1938 from Vienna, where he had conducted at the Volksoper, Tintner wandered fruitlessly around New Zealand and Australia, impressing musicians with his rigour and offending managements with a rigid adherence to principle. In his mid-seventies, he had found some contentment with an orchestra in Nova Scotia, Canada, but his driving ambition seemed doomed to failure when a meeting with Klaus Heymann, the Naxos owner, clicked into gear.

Heymann had begun recording the symphonic repertoire systematically, one composer after the next. He had pencilled in two German conductors and the New Zealand Symphony for Bruckner but neither maestro could get on with the musicians, who were in stroppy mood. Tintner flew out to attempt the Bruckner sixth and ninth symphonies in New Zealand but the players misbehaved and the sessions had to be abandoned. Heymann approached several British orchestras, none of whom was prepared to risk their reputations on an unfamiliar conductor.

It was the Scots who broke the ice, warming to Tintner’s other-worldly fervour, itself reflective of Bruckner’s peasant naivety. Tintner’s interpretation, however, was morally prophetic, conceived on a scale as large as a Gothic cathedral. After the opening Adagio, the first movement Allegro portends human suffering and redemption; the middle movements are a fertile canvas of rustic civilization and the finale, in this masterly performance, weaves together not only the disparate themes of an eighty-minute work but, in fleeting echoes, the history of music from Bach to Beethoven. It actually sounds as if Tintner had been waiting all of his life to give this performance. The Scottish orchestra, in fine form, completed the cycle over the next two years, apart from three works that went to the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. Acclaim mounted with each release. A set of Bruckner masses was planned and the English National Opera was contemplating a Tintner Parsifal when the conductor, aged eighty-two, flung himself off a high-rise balcony while in the throes of terminal cancer. His Bruckner symphonies sold half a million copies, far more than any set before or since.

Ted Perry, a minicab driver with musical dreams, set up his label in a dreary corner of southeast London with a little loan from a friend. Once solvent, he asked the world’s best Lieder singers to sing all 631 Schubert songs. So brash was the request, and so sincere, that although stars were exclusive to big labels, they got out of their contracts and trundled off to belt-and-braces Hyperion to join the integral edition. It helped that Graham Johnson, one of the world’s most trusted accompanists, was selecting the programmes, carefully balancing familiar songs on each release with the esoteric.

Janet Baker, Elly Ameling and Brigitte Fassbander came out of retirement for one last song; Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, past singing in his seventies, narrated episodes in Die schone Müllerin. Arleen Auger, critically ill, sang a sensational set with piano and clarinet. Lucia Popp, also tragically cut short, cut her last track. Margaret Price and Peter Schreier, Thomas Hampson and Edith Mathis, joined an ever-swelling party that blossomed into a set of forty discs, with an accompanying book of song texts.

Beside them sparkled a bevy of budding singers, spotted by Johnson on the way up. Ian Bostridge, Christine Schafer, Matthias Gorne and Simon Keenlyside were the Lieder talent of the future, learning as they sang. Bostridge is ideally innocent in Mein! and Ann Murray is magical in Ruckweg. Some of the more famous names are on the verge of being past it but this is not a set to be judged by its parts, or even by their sum. Hyperion’s Schubert Edition is one of the great achievements of the classical record industry, the more impressive for having been achieved by a one-man band in the back of beyond. It is an historic monument, unique and unsurpassable.

Arturo Toscanini, in the early 1950s, established the Beethoven symphonies as the summit of a conductor’s recorded achievement and the cornerstone of every classical collection. The ceiling was swiftly lowered by mass imitation. Herbert von Karajan, who recorded the cycle energetically with EMI’s Philharmonia Orchestra around the same time, went on to repeat it four more times. His 1962 Berlin DG set, recorded as the Wall went up, defined a certain materialist defiance both of communism and of all-purpose American consumerism. Karajan aspired in his Beethoven assaults to ever-greater purities of sonic perfection and proofs of his commercial dominance.

Otto Klemperer, in London, countered the Karajan effect with spiritual verities from a prior age, his recalcitrant tempi a reflection of the composer’s growling misanthropy. Ego inflation then set in as just about every conductor with a record deal demanded a Beethoven box of his own. Haitink, Solti, Josef Krips and André Cluytens were quick off the mark, followed by Bernstein (twice), Vaclav Neumann, Kubelik, Bohm, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Colin Davis, Neville Marriner, Walter Weller, Charles Mackerras, Gunter Wand and Kurt Masur. Abbado had two cracks at the cycle, as did his arch-rival Muti. Christopher Hogwood led an onslaught from period instrument bands, followed by Gardiner, Norrington, Roy Goodman and a million-selling set from Harnoncourt. The shelves groaned with Beethoven excess, and still the inflationary maestros demanded more.

Simon Rattle preached early-music teachings to the Vienna Philharmonic, new tricks to old dogs, in an unsatisfying hybrid compilation. Daniel Barenboim sought to apply Furtwängler mannerisms to the Berlin Staatskapelle with equally varied effects. Interpretation turned to pastiche. Finally, patience ran out and record labels slammed down the shutters. Rattle and Barenboim
were supposed to be the last, sustained by their celebrity and a public curiosity to discover what they might add to the canon.