R. Peter Munves, a record company executive who revolutionized the marketing of classical music, died on Aug. 19 in Glen Cove, N.Y. He was 97.
His death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by his son Ben.
Mr. Munves carved out a moneymaking niche in what for much of its history has been a low-margin, struggling industry, selling classical music to mass audiences by applying the techniques of pop music marketing.
In the 1960s, while at Columbia Records, he created a series called “Classical Greatest Hits” that packaged bits of Brahms, Mozart, Bach and other composers onto single LPs. In 1968 he signed the electronic musician Wendy Carlos to record “Switched-On Bach” — pieces by Bach on the Moog synthesizer.
Both ideas were big hits, commercially if not with the critics. Time magazine reported in a 1971 profile of Mr. Munves that the “Greatest Hits” series “scored a solid bull’s-eye in the market and rang up $1,000,000” in revenues. The “Switched-On Bach” album, Time said, was Columbia’s “all-time best classical seller.”
Mr. Munves went on to produce an album called “Themefinder” — a compilation of 222 well-known themes from classical music that the New York Times music critic Edward Rothstein called a “marketing masterpiece” upon its release in 1981, adding that Mr. Munves was “an inspired producer.”
The album, Mr. Rothstein added, “is a speedy musical education. In but five minutes we hear ‘Aida,’ Albinoni, ‘Alborada del gracioso,’ ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra,’ ‘An American in Paris,’ ‘Anvil Chorus,’ ‘Appalachian Spring,’ ‘Ave Maria,’‘ ‘Bacchanale’ from ‘Samson and Delilah,’ and Bach’s ‘Air on the G String.’”
The “Greatest Hits” series was particularly valuable to Columbia because it was inexpensive to produce. Mr. Munves simply repackaged tracks from existing recordings — on the Brahms album, for instance, he combined parts of the First and Third symphonies with the Hungarian Dances and Waltzes.
He “had an encyclopedic knowledge of the whole Columbia and Victor catalogs,” his son said in an interview. And he had an easy rapport with musicians like Glenn Gould, Vladimir Horowitz and Jascha Heifetz, according to Seth Winner, an associate and a recording studio owner who has produced numerous historical reissues.
“He did crossover,” Mr. Winner said, “getting people who knew nothing of classical music to discover it. He essentially was a shot in the arm for the record companies. He made a lot of money for them.”
In later years Mr. Munves assembled collections of great works under titles that made the professional critics cringe but that sold well, among them “Liszt for Lovers,” and “Puccini and Pasta.”
“Simply put, Peter Munves was the master salesman of classical music, both for Columbia Records and RCA Records, in the last quarter of the last century,” Clive Davis, the former president of Columbia Records and chief executive of RCA Music Group, said in a statement. “He packaged them under a ‘Greatest Hits’ umbrella and sold them to a far greater public than classical music had ever known.”
Despite describing himself as a “peddler” and never hiding his origins as a record-store salesmen, Mr. Munves also had a connoisseur’s interest in music. He produced valuable packages of historic Rachmaninoff and Heifetz recordings, and he signed the great Cuban-born pianist Jorge Bolet in the 1970s, after moving from Columbia to RCA.
In a video interview two years before his death, Mr. Munves described his enthusiasm for the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical “West Side Story,” which gives a hint about his own approach to music. “Lenny was a classical composer,” he said, “but he brought all this technique to creating ‘West Side Story,’ which contained a lot of music that was not classical.”
Robert Peter Munves was born on May 15, 1927, in Manhattan to Alexander Munves, who owned a printing company and Helen (Schreiber) Munves.
He attended the Storm King School in Cornwall-on-Hudson and graduated from Syracuse University. He worked in a record store before his father helped him secure a job in 1953 at Columbia, where he worked as a producer. In 1970, he joined RCA as director of classical music. After working for Pickwick and Quintessence Records from 1975 to 1979, he returned to Columbia, where he remained until 1992.
In addition to his son Ben, he is survived by another son, Mike, and a daughter, Chrystie.
Mr. Munves “brought classical music to the masses,” Ben Munves said. “And he was really into the music. That’s why the artists liked him.”
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