The Life and Death of Classical Music: Featuring the 100 Best and 20 Worst Recordings Ever Made [Paperback]

Norman Lebrecht (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 10, 2007

In this compulsively readable, fascinating, and provocative guide to classical music, Norman Lebrecht, one of the world’s most widely read cultural commentators tells the story of the rise of the classical recording industry from Caruso’s first notes to the heyday of Bernstein, Glenn Gould, Callas, and von Karajan.

Lebrecht compellingly demonstrates that classical recording has reached its end point–but this is not simply an expos? of decline and fall. It is, for the first time, the full story of a minor art form, analyzing the cultural revolution wrought by Schnabel, Toscanini, Callas, Rattle, the Three Tenors, and Charlotte Church. It is the story of how stars were made and broken by the record business; how a war criminal conspired with a concentration-camp victim to create a record empire; and how advancing technology, boardroom wars, public credulity and unscrupulous exploitation shaped the musical backdrop to our modern lives. The book ends with a suitable shrine to classical recording: the author’s critical selection of the 100 most important recordings–and the 20 most appalling.

Filled with memorable incidents and unforgettable personalities–from Goddard Lieberson, legendary head of CBS Masterworks who signed his letters as God; to Georg Solti, who turned the Chicago Symphony into “ the loudest symphony on earth”–this is at once the captivating story of the life and death of classical recording and an opinioned, insider’s guide to appreciating the genre, now and for years to come.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

British novelist and music critic Lebrecht (The Song of Names) revisits the question raised in the title of his 1997 exposéWho Killed Classical Music? Here he delivers a barbed requiem for the classical recording industry, reviewing its historical and technological arc from "Caruso's first scratchings to the serenity of the CD," while measuring the rise and fall of classical music in terms of its popularity, availability, producers and performers. His dishy, personality-driven prose features both intelligence and point of view, while his commentary and list of the best and worst recordings—arguably the freshest element in the book—make plain the author's pugnacious, critical tastes. With subjectivity acknowledged, the author's pick of the best includes discs that have influenced public imagination or the development of recording. The worst recordings note the "things that can go wrong when we aspire to the highest." Finding favor is a 1987 release of Debussy's La Mer and Elgar's Enigma Variations performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Arturo Toscanini. The Debussy, says Lebrecht, "shimmered like the English Channel at Eastbourne on a summer's day, a pointillist's paradise." Among the worst is a 2000 recording of Verdi's Requiem featuring tenor Andrea Bocelli, whose technique is deemed so insufficient that he "is exposed as cruelly as a Sunday morning park footballer would be in the World Cup final." In its arguments and attitudes, this is a lively approach to this art form. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The history of recording classical music spans the twentieth century. Competing intensely for market share, EMI, Decca, RCA, Columbia, and DGG exploited technological advantages and vied for star performers. Now, despite clear, undistorted digital recordings that capture only the music, the classical music recording industry has collapsed, perhaps largely because of competition with other forms of entertainment and changes in musical tastes. In a fast-paced narrative history, Lebrecht, assistant editor of London's Evening Standard, first introduces all the personages and describes the rivalries that made and broke the business. Then, in the book's second part, he lists and comments about the 100 most significant recordings and the 20 recordings that never should have been made. These are subjective choices, yet they illustrate the recording-industry history of the first part. A remarkably concise and thorough compendium of the larger events and milestones in the rise and fall of the classical music recording industry, for die-hard record collectors and the more casually interested alike. Alan Hirsch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 324 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; First Edition edition (April 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400096588
• ISBN-13: 978-1400096589
• Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 5.1 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #462,435 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

64 of 68 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Deserves to be placed aside next to the Penguin Guide.... June 21, 2007

By Kenneth M. Pizzi VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

A fascinating and absorbing read, Lebrecht's expose into the demise of classical music is as revealing as it is heartbreaking. Ten years ago, I was fortunate enough to work at one of the top classical radio stations in the US--(KDFC Classical 102.1 FM in San Francisco)there, I acquired a passion for classical music, reading Grammaphone and the Penguin Guide to Classial Compact Disc's with a fervor as children do with comic books. In short, it was an education in many ways--music as an art form, the aquisition of a refined taste, and a practical education into a highly unpredicatable business.

Lebrecht's book sheds light on all the vanities, egos, and personalities in the industry--past and present. Here is Karajan--masestro grandioso--feared but respected, whose net worth at his death was estimated at over $500 million with most of it derived from reissues of his earlier and better performances. Here is Bernstein, who, considered a somewhat of a second-tier conductor, plagued with insecurities and pretentious self-doubt, would often exasperate orchestras without punctuality or form (often forcing entire orchestras to wait an hour or more before he took to the podium) with his disdain for the inviolate nature of some works that are an inherent part of a country's national identity. Although venerated as a national treasure, Lebrecht paints another dimension to Bernstein; he recalls how the conductor completely botched a recording session with BBC Orchestra to produce one of the "worst classical recordings of all time"--Elgar's Enigma Variations in 1982. A very sloppy and unprofessional approach to a job overall and a personal insult to the dead composer's memory and the English....

What is interesting about this book is how Lebrecht puts it all together; the rivalries between the major labels: Decca, DG, Phillips, EMI and their producers scrambling to be the first to sign an exclusive contract with the industry's power players--Bernstein, Solti, Rattle, among others; how "crossover" discs and performances(a Bono and Pavarotti duo easily comes to mind)ultimately spelled doom for serious classical music fan; how the major labels used sexy CD cover art of young and talented artists like Vanessa Mae, Anne Sophie Mutter and Charlotte Church to increase sales of an already declining market, and the unexpected rise of Klaus Heymann and NAXOS. Here is the budget CD tycoon who taught all the "majors" a valuable lesson by hiring lesser known and Eastern European orchestras looking for work and produced several Grammaphone award-winning discs with Vivaldi's Four Seasons taking away honors as one of the best-selling classical recordings ever produced topping sales of 1.16 million besting even the venerated Arthur Fiedler of the Boston Pops!

If you ever wanted to know the in and outs of a business as fascinating as the classical music industry, this is a must read. Read more ›

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars An interesting but sloppy book March 16, 2008

By MacroV

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Unlike a lot of musicians and music lovers, I generally quite like Norman Lebrecht, find him one of the more interesting and provocative writers about the music scene, and have read several of his books. The first part of the book is interesting for his account of the many behind-the-scenes goings-on that have gone into the making of so many recordings, the personalities and egos of the musicians making them and, perhaps more critically, the enormously small stakes involved. Even though I've often been amazed that commercial enterprises would spend so much money producing recordings that at best will appeal to five percent of the record-buying public, it's still astonishing to learn just how few copies some classical recordings, even by major artists, tend to sell.

My major criticism of this book (and indeed most of Lebrecht's books) is that it's sloppy. He could use a good editor and fact-checker to catch such obvious errors as saying that around 1970 the Boston Symphony was still a non-union orchestra that worked "cheap." He also criticizes companies for continuing to issue new performances of the same repertory (fair enough), but then also ridicules them when they make recordings of less familiar repertoire that fail to sell in order to satisfy egomaniac conductors. Also, he often strings together anecdotes with very little thematic context or chronological coherence, often jumping several decades in the space of a sentence or two; if you aren't at least vaguely aware of a lot of these events, you'll be entirely lost (then again, if you're not vaguely aware of them, you probably won't be reading this book).

As for his 100 best/20 worst list, his 100 best has a few whose significance I would question, and excludes some others I would add.... I had a few disagreements with the "20 Worst" list, though: I LOVE Simon Rattle's "The Jazz Album" for the amazing clarinetist Michael Collins and the only performance that has ever made me like Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue). He also calls Gidon Kremer's Beethoven Violin Concerto recording (with the Schnittke cadenzas) a failure, not because it's a bad recording or was a bad idea, but because Philips apparently chickened out of promoting the novel cadenzas. I'm more in agreement with him about Bernstein's disastrous Enigma Variations. He probably should have added Bernstein's recording of West Side Story with Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras.

It's also important to point out, as others have, that the title is misleading: Lebrecht is talking mostly about the life and death of the classical record industry, rather than classical music itself (though he does make the usual points about declining audiences).

Definitely worth reading if you're into this sort of thing. Read more ›

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Lebrecht tells it as it is May 10, 2007

By Ilkka Talvi

Format:Paperback

Norman Lebrecht belongs to a rare group of people who not only know more about classical music than most music encyclopedias but also are extremely gifted with writing. All his books are fascinating and even if the reader doesn't always want to agree with his often pessimistic views of this art form's future, one cannot brush aside the facts he so powerfully presents.

"Life and Death of Classical Music" is two books in one: exactly a half of it is dedicated to the history of the recording business, the other listing one hundred recordings that were in Mr. Lebrecht's opinion milestones in the recorded history, plus another twenty that should never have been made. The first part tells generally previously unheard behind-the-scenes stories of all the leading recording companies, their bigwigs both in management and their cash cows, the conductors and other artists, since the very beginning of the industry. The author manages to weave all this together in an irresistibly interesting story that reads like the best suspense novel. As the title indicates, the story doesn't end with a 'they lived happily ever after' but paints a rather dark picture of the collapse of the industry, well documented by nose-diving global sales figures, and the reader at this point is not surprised by the reasons. It is hard to put the book down during the first 150 pages as the writing is so captivating.

I read the 'worst' list before starting with the 'best', as I found it more tempting. Many music lovers have traditionally bought recordings, both LPs and CDs, based on the familiarity and reputation of the artists on the cover.... The reader is in for a shock as the 'mistakes' chapter has many of the same stars featured, but as every recording, both good and bad, is discussed in a form of a short essay, the reasons for Mr. Lebrecht's choices become evident. The 'masterpiece' list in a chronological order. Some of the early recordings may not be familiar to many of today's listeners, although they ought to be. Editing wasn't possible in the early days, and it is a well documented fact that some of the greatest names might have 20-30 takes of the same 4+ minutes that would fit on a side of a 78 rpm disc, until they were pleased with the results. With magnetic tape splicing gave a never-before-seen opportunity to fix mistakes and with today's technology even individual 16th notes can be corrected and a faulty pitch raised or lowered. This means is that a recording can sound equally good whether it is done by musicians in Moscow, Russia or Moscow, Idaho.

The late Finnish music critic (of the Helsingin Sanomat) and journalist Seppo Heikinheimo called Norman Lebrecht "the world's best expert of conductors" in his posthumously published memoirs and I would like to agree with this. This new book (published under the title "Maestros, Masterpieces, and Madness" in the U.K.) gives readers an amazing amount of insight into the business of conducting, the enormous egos of the maestros and star soloists alike, and details about the crazy financial arrangements which at the end brought the 'house of cards' down. This book is a must-read to anyone involved in classical music, whether a musician or just an ordinary listener and lover of the art form. Read more ›