A fiftieth birthday or anniversary is obviously always a special cause for celebration. When such an anniversary is that of a remarkable and, in many ways, highly unusual Classical record company – and moreover one with a particularly high profile in the world of early music – then it is surely time for Goldberg to join the party. It is not the first time we have joined harmonia mundi for such celebrations. Back in issue No. 6, Alexandre Pham had conducted an interview with the company’s redoubtable founder and current president Bernard Coutaz on the occasion of its fortieth anniversary, an interview it seems Coutaz had forgotten when I showed it to him during the course of a visit to harmonia mundi’s headquarters just outside Arles in the south of France. Not that Coutaz forgets much. Charming and witty, everything about Coutaz at 85 seems designed to give the impression that he has discovered some secret elixir of youth. Coutaz himself is just one of the surprises that awaits the visitor to harmonia mundi; the Mas de Vert, its home since 1986 is another. Set just a few kilometres from the bustling tourism of Arles, Mas de Vert is almost a private commune in itself, set amidst the flat countryside of the Bouches du Rhône and centred around the large 18th-century mansion that serves as its administrative offices. The outbuildings of the estate of what was once a wine producer serve as storage areas for both the books and CDs distributed by harmonia mundi, for this is the heart of Coutaz’s empire, the hub of an operation whose reach extends globally and today employs over 300 people worldwide.

 

It was not always so. But the story of the beginnings of harmonia mundi have been retold so frequently that I told Coutaz to his evident relief that he would not be asked to recount it yet again. Among other places, the interested reader will find the history of those early days in the interview by Alexandre Pham referred to above (you can read it on the Goldberg website). Here a précis to set the scene will suffice. Trained as a journalist, Coutaz founded harmonia mundi in 1958, issuing the company’s first recording, “Chants from the Slavonic Liturgy” the following year. Still available, it remains to this day one of the company’s best sellers. Such unusual repertoire for an opening recording would determine the extraordinarily offbeat course taken by harmonia mundi in those early years. That was especially defined by the ground-breaking series of historic organ records and a little later the arrival of countertenor Alfred Deller on the roster of artists, a signing made after a long night of conviviality following the “kidnapping” of Deller by Coutaz and his colleagues. The full version is one of the most delightful of all harmonia mundi stories, but also one that would have important future ramifications for the company. But this is to move the story on too fast. Some five years before either the organ series or the advent of Deller, Coutaz and his tiny band of employees had made the bizarre (and potentially extremely risky) decision to move harmonia mundi from the noise and distractions of Paris to a hilltop in the wilds of the Luberon. But it is time to let Bernard Coutaz speak for himself, my surprise at the lively vitality he had already displayed providing an appropriate question with which to open our conversation. But before we do, I must acknowledge my very grateful thanks to Isabel Lecea San Roman, harmonia mundi’s charming Deputy Export Manager, who so kindly sat in the interview to act as translator.

 

Without being impolite, you are a man who has reached an age when he might fully have been expected to be in retirement. Yet, here you are, obviously still much involved with harmonia mundi. How much of the day-to-day running of the company are you still involved with?

 

Well, I have always been involved with the running of the company and remain so. In the early days, my interests were principally editorial, but in time, as the company grew and had many more employees, my role became much more one of administrator, working at the head of the company and taking all major decisions regarding proposals put to me. That’s how I understand democracy: the staff makes all the proposals, I take all the decisions!

 

When you made the move with a fledgling company from Paris to Saint-Michel de Provence in 1962, it was surely an almost crazily risky thing to do? Did you leave anyone in Paris and were you not worried that it would be difficult to run a record company from the depths of the countryside?

 

No, we didn’t leave anyone in Paris, because at that time harmonia mundi consisted of only five people and they all went to Saint-Michel. Yes, naturally I was concerned about the difficulties of being so far from the capital, but after we moved to the south I took a night train to Paris once a week, on a Sunday, to have meetings and give the illusion that we still had a presence in Paris! When we left Paris and came down here, I was certain that I was pursuing a very original and unusual way of doing things. But after some years here, I had come to realise that there were in fact plenty of artists, musicians and others pursuing cultural activities who had left Paris and were living in all sorts of strange places! It is an attitude of mind, a kind of philosophy.

 

Yes, I suppose a kind of slightly Bohemian kind of existence. But to follow that course to write or paint is a very different matter to setting up a record company in a remote place. You’re on record as having said that you founded harmonia mundi with no pretension of being a musician, yet you must surely have had an interest in music, with particular tastes?

 

As I’ve already mentioned, my principal objective was to be an editor, and as I was already a writer and a journalist, working as a series editor for a publishing company it was more likely that I would have become a publisher of the word rather than of music, but the later 1950s were the early days of the LP record, which held enormous future promise and as the result of a challenge from some friends, I started to produce recordings, initially of authors reading their own books. To this day harmonia mundi remains a company involved with the distribution of both music and books. For me editing and publishing mean sharing an enthusiasm for a literary or musical work with others.

 

Over the 50 years of harmonia mundi’s existence and the production of hundreds of recordings, are you conscious of your own musical interests having developed in any particular direction or directions?

 

Despite the fact that I’m neither a musician nor a musicologist, I do have an instinct for what is tasty, either in music or books. But I’m essentially open-minded and can appreciate many different types of music. I don’t consider this to be God-given or anything to take pride in, because it is perfectly natural to see beauty in things. I used to find that when I went to recording sessions - where I was not in any sense directing the recording - when I said “OK, I’m going now, you carry on doing your thing”, the musicians would ask me stay because they liked to have my opinion. It seems they felt I was very near to what they were trying to do.

 

I suppose the classic example of feeling a natural rapport with musicians is the case of Alfred Deller, the sonority of whose voice you found such a revelation at a time when the countertenor voice was for many a strange, freakish phenomenon. I’ve noticed that sonority and timbre are things you’ve often spoken of in the past. It would seem you have a special feeling, or sensitivité for musical colour?

 

Deller is an excellent example, because although he was aware that I had no technical knowledge or experience of music, he valued my advice and came to me to ask if I thought he should start doing solo recitals and I told him he should. And from that time he started to give solo recitals. Even if one of us was a great musician and the other was not, we had a real sense of communication.

 

Apart from the extraordinary recordings, the other great development to come out of the “Deller Years” was the summer academy that Deller ran in the Luberon, a course that produced such outstanding musicians as René Jacobs and Dominique Visse, who in turn themselves became stalwarts of the harmonia mundi label. This would appear to be a remarkable of example of industry reaping the benefits of enlightened patronage. Was the academy funded by Deller or by the company?

 

The idea of the academy was something we both came up with and it was jointly funded. But there was no grand scheme behind the idea. In fact it was very simple. I found a beautiful house in the Luberon for Deller and he bought it. One day he said he’d like to spend more time here, but didn’t know how to organise his time if he did. So I told him we should found an academy at which he could do some teaching. So he did that, which enabled him to be able to spend two months here in the summer rather than one. But it was always an informal set up. And that is how harmonia mundi grew over 50 years, not by a series of structured expansions or business plans, but by taking events as they came. There was never a grand scheme or project. The attitude has always been to ask what we might do today.

 

And I think you’ve stressed in the past that this philosophy is very much driven by your artists, in whom you place great trust to record a particular repertoire when he or she feels it is the right moment?

 

That’s right. And in this connection the point should be made that harmonia mundi does not have and never has had a marketing manager on its staff. Oh, my God, that’s the last thing I want! I always tend to do things by instinct rather than intellectually and all my decisions, whether financial or artistic, are made in this way. Often this will be the result of things that happen over a period of five or ten years.

 

Anyone who has been involved with the record industry over a long period is likely to have special “harmonia mundi moments”, memories of a landmark recording and the effect it had on them and more widely when it was issued. I think that given your explanation of the way in which you work, anyone is going to be intrigued to know how some of these projects came to see the light of day. To take just one example, how did the 1987 William Christie recording of Lully’s Atys come about? That was certainly a landmark recording: the first time anyone had attempted to perform and record a Lully opera with full attention to detail in such matters as dance, the size of the orchestra and so on.

 

In fact that was a very natural and simple progression. William Christie had already recorded some harpsichord records and he started work on Atys, which he wanted to recreate on the stage for the 300th anniversary of Lully’s death. So we became involved and worked jointly on it. There is an interesting story concerning Atys, which in 1987 was recreated by a record company from Arles – it was the year after our move – some two hundred years after recently discovered historical documents have shown that it had been mounted in Arles just before the French Revolution, performances that must surely have been among the last before the 20th-century revival.

 

That’s a fascinating coincidence. Changing direction somewhat, one of the features of harmonia mundi’s recording policy has for some time been a series of debut recordings featuring rising young artists, but I don’t seem to have heard much about it recently. Does it still form part of your recording schedules?

 

Yes, indeed it does. We’re known for fostering young artists and it has always been our aim to have a judicious mix of established “house” artists with younger talent. This means that overall harmonia mundi produces more new recordings than Universal…

 

That isn’t too difficult these days!

 

… a total of some 60 new recordings a year. Because of our established track record with younger artists as well as established artists we get many outstanding performers coming to us and wanting to record. For example, this year Matthias Goerne has come to us and told us he wants to record the Schubert Lieder and we have agreed for him to do a  Schubert edition that will eventually run to 17 CDs. It is surely significant that Goerne should choose to come to harmonia mundi for this ambitious undertaking.

 

Well, there is, of course, the case of the famous countertenor that left you for a multi-national company, but has now returned to harmonia mundi. His name escapes me for a moment…! [For anyone unaware of the story, it was Andreas Scholl, who went to Decca, but later returned to harmonia mundi.]

 

For me Alfred Deller was the ultimate master, because he was such a wonderful artist and musician in addition to being a marvellous man. Among countertenors, Andreas Scholl is the one who for me most closely approaches Deller.

 

Isn’t it interesting that all roads seem to lead back to Deller? I think there is a widespread and of course mistaken perception that harmonia mundi is an early music record company. Does that bother you?

 

No. People always like to put labels on others and of course over the years harmonia mundi has been a great champion of early music. But it’s not a problem for me. Today it is very different and we record contemporary music and things like Bruckner. It is interesting that although the first record we put out was the Slavonic Chant, the second was an LP of C. P. E. Bach concertos under Pierre Boulez. That’s now out of the catalogue and it won’t ever be re-issued because it is horrible!

 

For me, another noteworthy feature of harmonia mundi is that there never seems to have been any specific agenda to record French music, something that might have been expected from a French record company in a country capable of being, shall we say, a little chauvinistic. I note, for example, that among a list of best sellers recently published on your website, only one disc features French music, the Faure Requiem under Philippe Herreweghe.

 

No, it has never been our intention specifically to favour French music. That is probably because our director of recording is Eva Coutaz – and she is German. So German musicians and repertoire are conspicuous in our catalogue. Then in America, the recording director is Robina Young, who is British, so she provides an Anglo-Saxon element that is important and also contributes to that the fact that 20% of harmonia mundi’s sales are outside Europe, in America, Australia and the Far East. Finally, of course, there is harmonia mundi ibèrica, based in Barcelona, which produces recordings of Spanish repertoire.

 

The other innovative step you took was the creation of your own chain of retail shops. What inspired this move and are you happy with the results?

 

In the 1990s many Classical specialist dealers in France, as elsewhere, were disappearing so it seemed a positive step to take. The first was opened in Arles in 1995 and there are today 44 retail shops in France and three in Spain. They account for around 23% of our turnover in France, so, yes, we are very satisfied with them.

 

How is it that you can run successful Classical retail shops when so many have found it is no longer possible to do so?

 

The retail market is certainly shrinking by about 10 and 15% every year, while harmonia mundi’s shops are increasing turnover annually by around 7%. One of the reasons why it has been difficult to maintain decent sales figures is the lack of a fixed price structure. So we have seen prices go down and down to the point where margins are not big enough to survive. One of the reasons we can get round this is that our shops stock only the product we distribute ourselves. The other point is that despite what one sometimes hears to the contrary, the audience and taste for good music is growing, with more and more people looking to enjoy it. And that’s one reason why our shops are working. It is also a proven fact that people who enjoy listening to music want to buy CDs of it – whenever we sell discs at a concert given by one of our artists we find that people want to buy the music to take home with them. That applies to some 10% of the audience.

 

So looking to the future, do you see a secure future for the CD as a format given there are those who think it is threatened by downloading from the Internet and that kind of thing?

 

Yes, I do. We are not just Martians with two big ears. We have our sensory faculties, too, and we take pleasure from physically handling objects such as books and CDs. In 1995 Norman Lebrecht, an English colleague of yours, wrote that there would be no more CDs by 2006 because all the music business would be done on the Internet. Well, we are now in 2008 and the Internet is responsible for 5% of the music business and for Classical music the figure is just 2%.

 

And how about the DVD. Do you see that as having a major future as a medium for Classical music?

 

No. Sales are decreasing, because of illegal copying. Also, apart from opera or ballet, it is not interesting to have a film of, say, a solo recitalist, because apart from zoom in and out there is not a lot the cameraman can do.

 

When we first started talking, you made it clear that you are not someone who likes to dwell on past achievements, but a man who is more interested in today and what you will do next. Obviously, we can’t talk about the next 50 years of harmonia mundi, but how would you like to see the company develop in the next 5 years? What would you like to do that you have not yet done?

 

At a meeting of the major economists in Davos one man was asked how he would predict developments for the coming years and he said that looking at the way the world is going he might make a prediction for one year ahead, but not longer. That’s also my philosophy; I can think about the direction of harmonia mundi for six months to a year, but not more.

 

But you must surely still have ambitions for the company, because even after 50 years you remain so obviously hugely enthusiastic about it?

 

My ambitions are for today – and that is the way I want things to continue.

 

Bernard Coutaz might restrict his personal ambitions to today, but there seems little doubt that tomorrow will continue to bring fresh delights from harmonia mundi, a company that for the past 50 years has successfully put artistic integrity before quick or obscene profit. Many congratulations to M. Coutaz and all at harmonia mundi and let’s raise a glass to the next half century!