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December 20, 2003
TT: The last shall be first
I wonder how many classical music lovers under the age of 40 know who Walter Legge was. Not many, I suspect. Older record collectors, of course, know exactly who Legge was: from the end of World War II to 1964, he was one of the half-dozen most powerful people in the classical music business. He founded and ran London's Philharmonia Orchestra, which in the days of Herbert von Karajan and Otto Klemperer was the best orchestra in Great Britain; he was the husband of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, whose career as an opera singer and recitalist he supervised painstakingly and obsessively. Most important of all, he was EMI's chief classical producer, the man to whom we owe, among countless other irreplaceable treasures, such complete opera sets as the Callas-Gobbi-de Sabata Tosca, the Schwarzkopf-Karajan Rosenkavalier, and the Flagstad-Furtwängler Tristan und Isolde. Remove from your shelves every record originally produced by Legge, and you'll have more holes than a film-noir corpse.Legge was more than just a powerful businessman: he was also a powerful personality, shrewd and witty and arrogant, the last of these virtually without limit. He made enemies easily and happily, and so when he finally needed friends in power, he didn't have any. Legge left EMI in 1964, assuming that every other classical label in the world would bid for his services--but none of them did. He walked away from the Philharmonia that same year, assuming it would fold--but it immediately reorganized and went on without him. He spent the rest of his life in embittered exile from the music business, pouring his thwarted energies into his personal correspondence and his wife's dwindling career, hoping that somebody, anybody, would hire him to run a record company, an opera house, even a music festival--but hoping in vain.
A candid biography of Legge would be a feast of gossip, as well as a matchless cautionary tale. Alas, no such book exists, though Legge drafted a short memoir that saw print in 1982 as part of On and Off the Record: A Memoir of Walter Legge, a book nominally credited to Schwarzkopf but consisting in the main of her husband's own pungent comments on music and musicians; in addition, Legge's own Walter Legge: Words and Music contains a straightforward biographical chapter by Marie Tobin, Legge's younger sister, that tells the story of his life up to the end of World War II. Between them, these two books also reprint most of Legge's published writings about music--including a generous selection of the concert and opera reviews he wrote for the Manchester Guardian between 1934 and 1938--as well as a good-sized chunk of his correspondence.
Needless to say, not all of this material can be taken at face value, for Legge was much given to retrospective self-justification, especially in his later years. But there are also unauthorized versions of various bits and pieces of his story, most notably the second volume of Peter Heyworth's biography of Otto Klemperer, in which the story of Klemperer's uneasy association with Legge is told from the conductor's jaundiced point of view. I hope somebody will eventually finally get around to writing a full-scale biography (though probably not until after Schwarzkopf dies), but these varied sources have already told us quite a bit about the life, work, and character of the greatest record producer of the LP era, much of it in his own vivid words.
One thing that startled me was just how uncautious Legge was. His spectacularly tactless interoffice memos, for instance, were manifestly the work of a bullying egomaniac who thought himself incapable of error and had nothing but contempt for anyone benighted enough to disagree with him. This included musicians as well as fellow employees, for Legge was one of the few record producers who habitually told performers how to do their jobs. Rarely have I read anything so odiously smug as this excerpt from a letter he sent to a friend in Israel: "My wife is going to the U.S.A. on Sunday and I follow 12 days later to try to extract from an American accompanist some of the sensitivity I squeezed out of Gerald Moore and more recently Geoffrey Parsons. Accompanists are made, not born."
Why did musicians swallow this kind of talk? Fear had a lot to do with it, of course, though some of them genuinely believed that Legge's aggressive coaching brought out the best in them. But Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau would have none of it. In Reverberations, his 1987 autobiography, he recalls the first time the two men worked together in the studio: "Walter Legge, as supervisor of the recording, wanted to follow his usual habit of involving himself in shaping my understanding (of some Hugo Wolf lieder and Schubert's 'Schone Müllerin'). Estimating the situation subjectively, I thought I should stick with my own ideas, and he soon fell silent. He never forgave me." And Klemperer's final verdict on Legge, quoted by Peter Heyworth, is franker still: "He likes to think of himself as an incomparable musician...He is a very gifted connoisseur and a very good record producer--c'est tout."
But if that was all, it was also--up to a point--more than enough. For Legge really was a connoisseur of the highest order, consistently capable of spotting and appreciating the very best; the deeply admiring obituaries he wrote for such close colleagues as Dennis Brain, David Oistrakh, and Dinu Lipatti, all reprinted in Words and Music, leave no doubt of that. Moreover, he insisted on the best at his recording sessions, and settled for nothing less. This is part of what he meant when he spoke of himself as "the first of what are called 'producers' of records":
Before I established myself and my ideas, the attitude of recording managers of all companies was, "We are in the studio to record as well as we can on wax what the artists habitually do in the opera house or on the concert platform." My predecessor, Fred Gaisberg, told me: "We are out to make sound photographs of as many sides as we can get during each session." My ideas were different. It was my aim to make records that would set the standards by which public performances and the artists of the future would be judged--to leave behind a large series of examples of the best performances of my epoch.
Implicit in this characteristic statement of purpose was the notion that recordings could be superior to live performances--indeed, that they could exist as wholly independent art objects (a very Glenn Gouldian notion, that). And when Legge joined forces with similarly inclined artists of compatible temperament, the results were often extraordinary. On and Off the Record ends with a 45-page discography of recordings produced by Legge, among which you will find many of the most memorable performances of the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties, a great many of which have since been transferred to CD and continue to set standards to this day.
Legge left another mark on the classical recording business: it was in large part because of his example that the major labels came to concentrate on recording celebrity performances of the standard repertoire. Though he claimed to like the tonal modernists, he had little time for them in the studio (the only two living composers whose music he recorded at all extensively were Walton and Hindemith), preferring to devote his energies to setting down flawless recordings by star performers of popular operas and the safest of Austro-German classics. His concert reviews make it all too clear that he had no feel for the Franco-Russian style, or for modern music in general.
Legge's conservative tastes served his masters well, and continue to do two decades after his death: the records he made are still selling. But his consistent lack of adventurousness, even in the areas of modern music he affected to find interesting, would have dire results in the long run. Of all the major classical labels, EMI has probably had the least success at transforming itself into a repertoire-driven operation, and in recent years it has also had little luck at finding younger artists capable of performing the standard repertoire in a way that captures the attention of younger listeners, save by the worst sort of pandering. How ironic that the label of Walter Legge and Fred Gaisberg has become the home of Thomas Adés and the Eroica Trio.
But, then, maybe it isn't as ironic as all that, for Legge was never a man to take chances. Under John Culshaw, Decca/London poured vast resources into recording the music of Benjamin Britten; Columbia's Goddard Lieberson did the same thing with Stravinsky and Schoenberg, simultaneously letting Leonard Bernstein record a generous helping of then-obscure American music. Not Walter Legge. "I do not believe in spending money to play to empty seats," he wrote. "Ever!" Instead, he preferred to play it safe, and the classical recording industry eventually followed his lead--right over a cliff.
The moral? Never forget to keep one eye on the future. Sooner or later, it turns into the present.
Posted December 20, 2003 12:01 PM
