Walter Legge was born on 1st June 1906, and worked for EMI from 1927 to 1964. He was a legendary record producer, talent spotter, and entrepreneur. The great artists he worked with included Wilhelm Furtwängler , Arturo Toscanini , Herbert von Karajan , Maria Callas , Thomas Beecham , Otto Klemperer , and Dinu Lipatti . Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was both one of his artistes and his wife. The photograph above shows me discussing Legge's legacy with Schwarzkopf a month after his death in 1979, the occasion was an exhibition I created in his honour at the Royal Festival Hall in conjunction with the Philharmonia Orchestra . Legge founded the orchestra as a vehicle for his recordings, and later capriciously abandoned it. Today there are many record company executives that can rival him for ruthlessness, but none that come within a million miles of his artistic vision. Image credit and copyright - On An Overgrown Path . Any copyrighted material on these pages is includedin "fair use...
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This is patently tangential, but I have just to observe that as a piece of music journalism it was vastly best than that ludicrous tosh about "Jennens' Messiah" in the Telegraph yesterday. Mind you, I think there was a crossover there with another current topic, for I suspect the PR/Promotions dunderheads at the Handel Museum were behind it. And a right embarrassing hash they made of it.