WHO KILLED CLASSICAL MUSIC? Maestros, Managers and Corporate Politics.<i> By Norman Lebrecht</i> .<i> Birch Lane Press: 455 pp., $24.95</i>

The professional world of classical music presents itself as glamorous and pristine, unsullied by the sordid necessities of cutting deals, grubbing for money, jockeying for power and position. It seeks a more rarefied air, removed from the down-and-dirty antics of its hustling counterparts in the rock ‘n’ roll demimonde. From jewel-box concert halls and plush opera houses the world over, the public--or at least that portion of it that can afford the increasingly astronomical ticket prices--is treated to a comforting spectacle of men in black tie, women in formal gowns, straining mightily to sacrifice themselves on the altar of art.

What’s wrong with this picture?

For Norman Lebrecht, almost everything. A music critic who writes for the London Daily Telegraph and the author of a previous muckraking book, “The Maestro Myth,” Lebrecht is easily and regularly outraged. He knows what everyone knows, of course, that classical music is show business and that show business has compromise and crookedness in its bones. But Lebrecht thinks it’s become a thoroughly corrupt racket, that the world of classical music is hostage to the vulgar merchants of commerce and greed.

Lebrecht has a most-wanted list of music murderers. Most culpable are the artists’ managers whose breathtaking musical ignorance is matched only by their bottomless avarice. For example, Ronald Wilford, head of Columbia Artists Management Inc., is, according to Lebrecht, the arrogant New York super-agent who controls most of the world’s most important conductors and sets their exorbitant fees; most music directors of major orchestras in America now make at least $1 million a year for rarely more than 16 weeks of concerts. Wilford apparently cares not at all if the sums he insists be paid to his clients break the orchestral bank.

But let’s not forget star soloists. Lebrecht notes that when Jascha Heifetz or Vladimir Horowitz played Carnegie Hall in the early 1950s, the hall could expect to make a modest profit of about $5,000. Today’s superstars, with their fees of $50,000 or more, make that impossible. An American orchestra survey in 1992 revealed that orchestras’ expenses had risen eightfold in 20 years, three times the rise in the cost of living, and that most of the increase was because of the spiraling costs of employing guest artists.

Mark McCormack is another culprit. Dubbed “The Shark” by his critics, McCormack is a powerful agent who came to fame and fortune by representing such figures as Arnold Palmer and Margaret Thatcher. He now handles a growing list of famous singers (Kiri Te Kanawa, for one) and is notorious for having never seen even a single production of “The Marriage of Figaro,” but he nonetheless has forthrightly declared his intention to change the way opera is run.

Culpable too, in the world according to Lebrecht, are men like Norio Ohga, the president of Sony and closet conductor, and Peter Gelb, the head of Sony Classics, where egos and yen are said to run amok. Nor does Lebrecht neglect the music publishers (he tells, for example, how Nazi control of Universal Edition, a major Austrian publisher, affected the fate of modern music). And then there are the imperious managers of opera companies and symphony orchestras, as well as the globe-trotting peacock conductors who created a leadership vacuum that these power-mongering managers now so arrogantly and disastrously fill.

Today we have reached the point, Lebrecht asserts, at which superstar conductors have no time for careful preparation, and their agents no time to nurture the careers of younger artists not yet stars. Meanwhile, the morale of the ordinary working musician is at an all-time low. The real victim: the music itself. “Until 1970,” Lebrecht laments, “you could expect to hear a Brahms symphony splendidly performed in any major metropolis regularly and as of right. By 1990, good Brahms was a rarity and great Brahms a distant memory.”

How did this sorry state of affairs arise?

Lebrecht tells his tale of decline and fall by tracing the fascinating history of the business of classical music. He begins with Franz Liszt, the first classical superstar, and Gaetano Belloni, his savvy personal manager, whom Lebrecht credits with inventing the star system. From Belloni descended a succession of colorful and swinish managers in Europe and America. In the last century, P.T. Barnum paraded opera star Jenny Lind as shamelessly (and as successfully) as a circus act until she would have no more of it.

In our own time, Lebrecht skewers the conflicts of interest of Arthur Judson, the legendary agent who both managed the New York Philharmonic and represented the conductors and soloists he hired to perform with it. He denounces Sol Hurok’s unrefined musical tastes. Still, he realizes that the damage such men could do was limited. The economic ante simply wasn’t then what it is today. Even the most adoring fans of Luciano Pavarotti must realize that he didn’t amass his estimated $100 million fortune simply through selfless devotion to his art.

Lebrecht bravely exposes many of the significant abuses that abound in the world of classical music but that, although they are the stuff of backstage gossip, are almost never broached in polite print. But Lebrecht is, alas, a manic exaggerator. The crisis affecting classical music is far more complex and interesting than Lebrecht believes. Yes, there are men and women gutting once-great record labels with their lust for so-called “crossover” booty. Yes, there are men and women selling the store to pay for all that less than great Brahms that big-name conductors still insist on recording.

In fact, the record business has never seemed more foolhardy, what with the mind-boggling glut of standard repertoire. There are close to a hundred versions of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” on the market. Equally staggering are the numbers of renditions of anything else on the classical Top 40. The public, of course, neither needs nor wants every rendition of a Beethoven symphony nor Strauss tone poem by Abbado or Levine or Maazel, recordings that might cost $100,000 to make and that sell at best 5,000 copies worldwide. Operas, many of them also vanity projects, can cost upward of a half-million dollars to record, with no hope of ever breaking even.

Meanwhile, the record companies have tasted blood with unprecedented numbers of CDs sold by the Three Tenors or by David Helfgott, and some executives have foolishly decided to abandon the classics in favor of making big bucks on dubious bestsellers. It is a business in complete disarray, Lebrecht tells us, and for him the salvation is in the small British labels that serve the conservative British connoisseur with conservative obscure British music.

But Lebrecht notes not at all such record executives of vision as Robert Hurwitz, who has not only made Nonesuch Records profitable but who has done so by promoting new music. To Lebrecht, the phenomenal popular success of Gorecki’s Third Symphony is a fluke. But it was no fluke at all. Hurwitz fell in love with the piece and, convinced it was something great, made it his mission to get the word out. His recording of it on the Nonesuch label has sold nearly 1 million copies over the last four years, and it still sells strongly.

Composers may have it hard; they always have. But Lebrecht exaggerates greatly the difficulty of making a name or a living in serious music today. The facts are otherwise: More music is being made and more money being paid for it than ever before. In 1970, it was rare to hear new orchestral pieces in America. It was rare to hear new operas. A quarter of a century later, such composers as Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, John Corigliano, Arvo Part and Michael Torke, to name only a few, are genuinely popular. Moreover, the amount of music new and old performed live and available to millions of people on compact disc and on videotape is absolutely staggering compared to what was available on vinyl and tape a generation ago.

Lebrecht is also sloppy. He hurts his case with mistakes and misapprehensions. Some errors may just be carelessness, such as his referring to the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra as St. Paul’s, as if it were the resident ensemble of a church. But he is seriously misinformed when he roots the musical conservatism of the Metropolitan Opera in James Levine, its musical director, who, Lebrecht says, “never dabbled in modernism--let alone the avant-garde--even for curiosity’s sake.”

Just the opposite happens to be true. Throughout his career, Levine has championed modernism and the avant-garde, even befriending such composers as John Cage and Milton Babbitt, and he still does. He has long made a specialty of Cage’s most radical orchestral work, “Atlas Eclipticalis,” the score based on star charts. It took Levine’s considerable clout with Deutsche Grammophon, his record label, to record it with the Chicago Symphony, and last season he performed it at Carnegie Hall with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra.

But Lebrecht is too busy indulging himself with innuendo of the Monty Python wink-wink, nudge-nudge sort to bother about the real complexities of administering the Metropolitan Opera or the nuances and contradictions of the classical music world.

What grates most, however, and deforms an otherwise provocative and necessary book, is his unabashed snobbery. One example will suffice: He characterizes Ernest Fleishmann’s accomplishment as executive director and general manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic as having “given the Dream City a better orchestra than it deserved.” Such know-nothingism masquerading as sophistication probably does as much damage to classical music as the buccaneering agents and avaricious artists. Despite Lebrecht’s doom and gloom, there is too much important music being created and performed, and the public is too avid and tenacious, for all the knaves and snobs together to get rid of it all.

Reports of its death are premature.