aaron
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Carmina Burana & Classical Music Sales in a Pop World
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May 7 20:16 UTC 1995 |
(c) The Daily Telegraph, November 26, 1994, Arts Section, Pg. 10
Faking it with Carmina. Norman Lebrecht on why he objects so strongly
to the over-employed cantata now being passed off as hard rock
By Normal LeBrecht
There are certain things you cannot avoid at this time of year and
one of them is Carmina Burana. Flick on the television and there it
is: the crashing wave, the solitary surfer, the heroic chorus, the
anticipated waft of unwanted aftershave.
This Christmas, the medium and the message are reversed. As well as
helping to sell Old Spice, Carl Orff's Carmina Burana is now being used
to sell Carmina Burana itself. Decca is splashing out L500,000 on
television time to advertise a CD of the pounding cantata. Forget
serious composer, symphony orchestra, famous conductor; you won't find
their names on the front of the recording. We are talking here of "25
spectacular songs of dancing, drinking, sex and death" - something
along the lines of a Club 18-30 fortnight in Torremolinos.
The narration on the television ad promises "passion, pain and
pleasure". Phew! Why are they doing this? Because classical recording
is caught in an economic stranglehold. With the cost of making records
rising inexorably - L30,000 basic for an orchestral disc, up to L1
million for an opera - and the sales of most new releases falling below
2,000, the industry relies on freak hits to stay afloat.
On paper, the British figures look healthy enough with a seven per cent
increase last year and more than 13 million classical discs sold. But
a high proportion of the profit comes from a handful of hits - Three
Tenors; EMI's Gregorian chant; Michael Nyman's music for the film, The
Piano.
The key indicator of classical fortunes is the share of the total
record market. In the late Eighties, classics commanded 15 per cent of
all record sales. This year, they have dropped below 10 per cent for
the first time since compact discs came on to the scene. Diehard buffs
have renewed their collections on CD and new listeners are not coming
forward in sufficient numbers. So the industry has to entice them in
whatever way it can.
The Carmina Burana campaign features a dreamgirl in diaphanous gown
steaming up the screen with gestures of simulated self-arousal. Paul
Moseley, Decca's marketing chief, acknowledges that his advert may have
"a slightly negative feel for women". But he knows that the vast
majority of CDs are bought by young males. He knows also that men in
their twenties are not buying classics. So he has dressed it up for
them in the rituals of hard rock.
Carmina's popular credentials are well proven. It has been heard on the
soundtracks of Excalibur, The Omen and Richard Gere's latest movie, Mr
Jones. It is a tune everyone can hum and hardly any can name. So why
does the campaign which began this month make me want to dash off one
complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority and another to the
Arts Council? Not, I can assure you, because the integrity of the work
is being impugned in any way. Carmina Burana has no integrity worth
impugning.
Composed in 1936 by a derivative Bavarian in rhythms and
instrumentation reminiscent of early Stravinsky, it became Nazi
Germany's only contribution to the international concert hall
repertoire. Its elitist fraternality, rapacious paganism and violent
percussiveness echoed Third Reich culture, although Carl Orff was not
himself an ardent Hitlerite.
After the war, Carmina was discovered by choral societies as a jolly
good sing and by the music industry as a spectacular demonstration
piece for hi-fi systems. It has been recorded about 100 times, at least
twice as often as any other 20th-century score. Releases by Herbert von
Karajan and Andre Previn were big sellers in the Sixties and Seventies.
Riccardo Chailly conducted it in 1983 with the Berlin Radio Orchestra
and chorus and sold 100,000 discs.
The label has now decided that this performance is ripe for what
music-biz lawyers call "secondary exploitation", where the artists do
not approve the packaging and are, indeed, lucky to get their name on
it in microscopic print. Orff's has been left off the spine, in the
belief that record stores will stock this Carmina under "C" and stop
advert-led consumers from buying cheaper versions from the "O" racks.
All this is par for the course in the games of love and war that are
played to hook people on classical music when they cannot discover it
for themselves. Decca spent more than L1 million to launch the Three
Tenors in 1990 and Warner has already topped that in the past four
months on Three Tenors Two. Warner is planning a modest L100,000
television spend this month on two releases - a Miserere by Henryk
Gorecki, whose Third Symphony reached number six in the charts, and a
video of the Last Night of the Proms. Having scooped seven million
sales worldwide of an album of Gregorian chant, EMI is venturing a
small television campaign on the follow-up, Canto Noel.
What these campaigns have in common is their total transparency. What
you see and hear is what you get. Where Decca has taken a dubious leap
into desperation is by conveying a false impression of the music's
impact. Carmina Burana may contain profane Latin verses and rumpty-tum
beats, but it does not cause audiences to jump frenziedly up and down.
Any rock fan who buys a complete Carmina on the strength of this
campaign will feel thoroughly conned and may never want to hear another
classical record. No doubt Decca will plough back Carmina profits into
esoteric modernities, as it did with the Three Tenors windfall. But no
good can come of a lie. Perhaps the worst outcome will be if the
campaign succeeds. The credibility of classical music will have been
debased by the admission that its survival depends on recognising the
supremacy of rock.
Politicians of the philistine majority will proclaim this new "realism"
as proof that classical music can pay its own way and needs no state
subsidy. Concertgoers will defect from an art that has lost its pride.
Schoolchildren will flock to hard rock, rather than ersatz imitations.
The reimaging of Carmina Burana could turn out to be one of the more
costly faked orgasms in modern culture.
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md
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response 1 of 2:
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May 8 12:56 UTC 1995 |
[chuckle] I like Norman Lebrecht, and agree with his assessment
of Orff and his music. His encyclopedia of 20th century music
is a wonderful book, but filled with little errors of fact like
the one (the one I noticed, anyway) in the above piece. Obviously,
it doesn't matter whether Norman Lebrecht thinks O Fortuna is
in The Omen, or whether I think it isn't. Either it is or it isn't,
right?
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