Tenors, dollars and doom

When the Music Stops Norman Lebrecht Simon & Schuster, pounds 16.99

Classical music, it seems, is in a bad way. Stars are paid too much, record companies are too big, imaginations are too small. Ticket sales have "tumbled", record revenues have "shrivelled", funds have "dried up," orchestras are "threatened with extinction". Agents are greedy, maestros are greedy, managements are greedy. Standards of performances are down.

And this - mark Norman Lebrecht"s words - is only the bit we can see. The corporate murder of "classical" music - as his subtitle has it - is only half the story. The classical music business "condones child sex", the author hisses. It practises the "corruption of youth and truth". He would like to tell us about "the money, the lies, the illegal sex".

As it turns out, he doesn't tell us too much about the latter, preferring to dwell on the business angle instead. The allegation of wholesale, apocalyptic moral corruption, however, needs considering. It comes down, apparently, to the fact that "a certain top conductor has a compulsion for sex with under-age boys", something "widely known" in the business. The conductor has been arrested in the past, but his agent and others within the "upper echelons of classical music" have covered up for him. Such behaviour would be tolerated in no other sector of the entertainment industry, claims Lebrecht: even Hollywood "retched" when Michael Jackson was accused of child molesting.

It stands to reason, then, according to Lebrecht, that the entire music business must be guilty of moral corruption. If one covers up, they all cover up. A similar logic operates through the book, referring particular instances of corruption to a general culture of sin. An agent in America was a bit of a cad? Agents are cads. Karajan was a megalomanic There's a list of half a dozen more. Musicians and their associates are bad, no doubt, but are they really worse than the rest of us, as Lebrecht appears to believe?

Might he not find a similar share of perversion, cover-up and conspiracy in the chemicals business, the publishing business, the garden centre business?

If his logic is dubious, Lebrecht's description of the state of musical affairs, his tenacious noting of board room shuffles and record industry statistics is hard to argue with. Even for those who disdain such things, his figures make riveting reading. PT Barnum, the "Greatest showman on Earth" offered Liszt half a million dollars to play an American tour back in the 1850s and the scope for musical venality has been on the increase ever since: when Liszt refused, Barnum signed up the soprano Jenny Lind instead, without even hearing her. How far from this to the star culture of today? Pavarotti earned $15m in 1993, 4 million more than Nigel Mansell (sporting comparisons are a thing with this author). The Big Three have a lot to answer for altogether: their Three Tenors concert in 1990, according to Lebrecht, was "the day the music died".

Even before them, Lebrecht's catalogue of artistic greed is gleeful, however: Herbert von Karajan's domination of the Salzburg festival so that only his artists, his record companies, got the bookings; the operation of agency monopolies in America, the domination of record companies by multi-national conglomerates. Post- Three Tenors, fee inflation was inevitable and was, it seems, the last straw. Without Luciano, Joe and Placido fees would not have gone through the roof. Domingo wouldn't have broken his contract with Covent Garden to sing with the others. Entire production budgets would not have been wasted on stars and rank-and-file musicians would not have suffered frozen pay. The manager of the Paris Opera would not have suggested his House had "no need for a music director".

"Music cried out for help," goes the author's final lament, "but the music business turned its back ... and went all out to make money". Sadly, however, detailed and impassioned though it is, Lebrecht's book is a missed opportunity. Why cry "woe" once calamity has struck? His reactionary yearning for "epic heroes and moral leaders" - as if music were an endangered nation, not a living, healthy art - will take Lebrecht nowhere. Nobody wants jobs lost and salaries cut. But blinded by tears, Lebrecht misses the potential for good lurking in the change, the chance that the current turn towards a cosmopolitan, flexible, small-scale, plurality of influence may be precisely the saviour music needs

Dermot Clinch