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

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.