Walter Legge
Harry Walter Legge (1 June 1906 – 22 March 1979) was an English
After the war, Legge founded the Philharmonia Orchestra and worked for EMI as a recording producer. In the 1960s, he quarrelled with EMI and resigned. He attempted to disband the Philharmonia in 1964, but it continued as an independent body without him. After this he had no permanent job, and confined himself to giving masterclasses with, and supervising the recordings of, his second wife, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.
Life
Early years
Legge was born in Shepherd's Bush, London, where his father was a tailor.[1] He was educated at the Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith.[2] He excelled in Latin and French, but received no musical training. He left school at 16 and had no further formal education. Encouraged by his father he developed a taste for music, and Richard Wagner in particular, in pursuit of which he taught himself to read music and to speak German.[3]
Legge first joined HMV in 1927, writing album and analytical notes and copy for the company's monthly retailing magazine, The Voice, but he caught the eye of the leading record producer, Fred Gaisberg, and was soon taking an active role in HMV recording procedures. Between 1933 and 1938, Legge also worked as a music critic for The Manchester Guardian.[4]
In the pre-war years, Legge pioneered "subscription" recordings, by which the public were invited to pay in advance for their copies of future recordings, thus making it economically possible for EMI to make such "niche" but classic recordings as the songs of Hugo Wolf[5] and the complete piano works of Beethoven (played by Artur Schnabel).[6] Another pre-war recording supervised by Legge, which has been reissued on LP and CD, was Sir Thomas Beecham's set of The Magic Flute, made in Berlin in 1937.[7] Beecham invited Legge to join him at the Opera as assistant artistic director. Given a free hand by Beecham he engaged Richard Tauber, Jussi Björling, Maria Reining, Hilde Konetzni, Julius Patzak and Helge Roswänge in their Covent Garden debuts.[8]
During World War II, Legge's poor eyesight prevented him from serving in the armed forces. At Beecham's instigation he took on the musical side of
EMI and the Philharmonia
After the war Legge set to work to refresh EMI's catalogue and its roster of star performers. He set up his base in Vienna, then still occupied by the Allies, and contracted German and Austrian artists who were then seriously short of work. These performers included
Legge had promoted some
Last years
Legge's employer, EMI, tolerated his independent ways for many years, but in the 1960s attempts were made to curtail his freedom of choice of repertoire, and finally in 1964 he resigned. His memoirs, edited by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and published in 1982, set out his disenchantment with EMI and its increasingly powerful internal committees:
- I am convinced that in the arts, committees are useless. What is necessary are people like Karajan, Culshaw and me; we know not only how to achieve the best artistic results but how to attract the public and carry out the whole operation with carefully chosen collaborators. Democracy is fatal for the arts; it leads only to chaos or the achievement of new and lower common denominators of quality.[14]
In retirement Legge, together with Schwarzkopf, gave many joint masterclasses for young singers but he failed to find a permanent job. He was offered, and accepted, the directorship of the Wexford Festival, but he suffered a disabling heart attack in 1967 before he could take up the post, and he withdrew. He continued to supervise the EMI recordings made by his wife, but the breach with the company was complete when in 1977 and 1979 he produced her last recordings not for EMI but for Decca, EMI's great rival.[15]
Legge attended Schwarzkopf's final appearance, a recital at Zürich Opera House on 19 March 1979, despite having suffered a heart attack two days earlier.[16] Three days after the recital, he died in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, France, at the age of 72. He was cremated, and his ashes were initially placed near those of Hugo Wolf in Vienna, as he had requested.[16] After Elisabeth Schwarzkopf's death in 2006, their ashes were buried next to her parents in Zumikon near Zürich, where she had lived from 1982 to 2003.
Musical legacy
Legge's artistic judgment was sometimes questioned. He was aesthetically conservative; he wrote to a friend, "If producers and scenic designers are allowed to continue their writing of graffiti and vulgarity and stupidity on masterpieces … not to mention Chéreau at Bayreuth – we shall be forced to insist that they write the libretto and music to match the rubbish they put on the stage!" Legge predicted to John Culshaw and Georg Solti that their Decca recording of Das Rheingold would not sell; it became a classical best-seller.[17] He was responsible for three recordings of The Magic Flute, conducted by Beecham, Karajan and Klemperer, each of which has incurred the disapproval of critics for omitting the spoken dialogue.[18] His recording of Fidelio under Klemperer has been compared unfavourably with Klemperer's contemporaneous live recording from Covent Garden, on the grounds that Legge's chosen singers were less effective than their ROH rivals.[19] He was suspicious of stereo recording, and resisted it for as long as he could.[20]
Nevertheless Legge's legacy is "a vast number of outstanding recordings that set standards unlikely ever to be surpassed".[1] His recordings of The Dream of Gerontius (Sargent), Tristan und Isolde (Furtwängler), Tosca (De Sabata), Der Rosenkavalier and Falstaff (Karajan), Così fan tutte (Böhm) and the core German symphonic repertory (Klemperer, Furtwängler, Karajan…) have remained in the catalogue for decades, first on LP and then on CD.[12]
Notes
- ^ a b c d Martland, Peter, "Legge, (Harry) Walter (1906–1979)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, January 2010. Retrieved 7 October 2010 (subscription required)
- ^ "MUSIC SCHOLARSHIPS AT 11+ AND 16+" (PDF). Latymer Upper School. January 2020. Retrieved 19 March 2024. A music scholarship honouring Legge was established by anonymous donors at Latymer Upper School in January 2006.
- ^ Schwarzkopf, pp. 15–16
- ^ Mann, William "Legge, Walter", Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online. Retrieved 7 October 2010 (subscription required)
- ^ Blyth, Alan. "Hugo Wolf Society, Vol. 1". Gramophone. Retrieved 8 December 2015.
- ^ Schwarzkopf pp. 57–58
- ^ Schwarzkopf, p. 59
- ^ Schwarzkopf, p. 60
- ^ The Times, 20 September 1943, p. 8; Schwarzkopf, pp. 59, 61
- ^ Schwarzkopf, p. 64
- ^ Schwarzkopf, p. 67
- ^ a b c Mann, William "Walter Legge", Gramophone, May 1979, p. 57. Retrieved 7 October 2010
- ^ Legge, Walter, "The Birth of the Philharmonia", The Times, 27 December 1975, p. 4
- ^ Schwarzkopf, p. 83
- ^ Schwarzkopf, p. 288
- ^ a b Richard Davis, Geoffrey Parsons: Among Friends, 2006, ch. 10
- ^ Culshaw p. 91
- ^ See, for example, Hope-Wallace, Philip, "Die Zauberflöte", Gramophone, November 1964, p. 66
- ^ Blyth, Alan, "Fidelio", Gramophone, February 2004, p. 81
- ^ Keener, Andrew, "News and Views", Gramophone, March 1985, p. 7
References
- Culshaw, John (1968). Ring Resounding. London: Secker & Warburg ISBN 0-436-11800-9
- Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth (1982). On and Off the Record: A Memoir of Walter Legge. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-11928-X
External links
- National Portrait Gallery (one photograph)
- BBC Radio 3 Walter Legge (series of four programmes)
- BBC Radio 4 The Truth about Walter Legge