I knew when I went to see Goddard Lieberson, retiring president of the CBS Records Group I was going to meet a piece of musical history, so in a sense I was surprised to meet such a dapper, youthful man, about as far removed as can be from an ageing, or passé executive. Yet Lieberson is old enough to have worked with Bartók, to have known Schoenberg and Ives, and what is even more important to have got some of their music on to record when anyone else in the business would have said that that way lay commercial suicide. 

Lieberson is in fact English by birth – he comes from Hanley in Staffordshire – though in appearance, in aplomb you would guess that his upbringing was American. And you would be right. In fact, he went to the States as a boy and undertook his musical training at the University of Washington (the State not DC) and the Eastman School of Music at Rochester. He wanted to be a composer and looked all set to be one when he was caught by the record industry but he is still proud of the fact that 'I am the only person to attain my present status who started off as a serious musician'. 

He was interested in jazz just before the war and it was through a jazz convention – 'Spirituals to Swing' in Carnegie Hall, 1939-40 – that he was persuaded by a friend to join CBS. He began as an assistant to the director of the Masterworks Division, soon becoming director himself, graduating to executive vice-president in 1949, and to president in 1956. As he graphically points out, 'Thirty years ago, the retail turnover was about 48 million dollars today it's a 1.5 billion dollar business'. But Lieberson is as interested in the music as much as the money – and the serious music at that, always realising that a Streisand must be balanced by a Stravinsky. 

In his early years he much preferred working with Bartók than with Schoenberg, whom he described as 'a very difficult man. If I didn't do anything for him, he complained that he was being neglected. But if I did try to help him he took it as his due and gave me no thanks. Perhaps he was justifiably embittered because of all those years when he was absolutely ignored. We recorded Pierrot Lunaire under his supervision in Californla with a group that had just done a public performance in New York. 

'Bartók I admired as much as a man as a musician. He was very dear to me, and I was connected with him right up to his death. I admired him for standing out against the Germans and Italians even when he had no need to. 

'We recorded Mikrokosmos together, also Contrasts with the composer, Benny Goodman and Szigeti. In those days – that is just before the war – it was a little risky, or considered so, to record Ravel, so you can imagine how revolutionary it was to put Schoenberg and Bartók on disc. Personally, Bartók was quite charming and down-to-earth, as keen to tell a dirty story as talk about Wittgenstein's theories. Another work we did together was the Third Piano Concerto; in fact Gyorgy Sandor learnt the piece in my apartment'. 

I asked him how long he had known Stravinsky. 'I knew and worked with Stravinsky for nearly 30 years. At a certain period in his career he faced the terrible irony of deriving no income from his most popular pieces. From that period on except for a very short interval CBS Records continued a programme to record the entire oeuvre of Stravinsky as interpreted by him with the inestimable assistance of Robert Craft. I remade all the early great works with him so that he could derive some remuneration from these world-famous pieces which had gone into public domain'. 

Lieberson wrote an article on Ives as early as 1937. 'At that time he was unknown except to other composers. I met him two or three times and recall that he was a generous, charming old man who talked rather a lot. There was no copyright in his music – it was simply available to anyone who'd perform it. He didn't care about the money because of what he had made in insurance. He was a real New England intellectual, rooted in Emerson and the like. You know, we made the first-ever record of his Concord Sonata'. 

Then Lieberson returned to discussing Bartók, particularly in connection with him as an interpreter of his own music. 'He was very calm, very calm as compared with Schoenberg when it came to the studio, and he took his music slower than it is marked. I think all composers tend to take their own music slowly in performance in order to explain it, if you see what I mean. Conductors, on the other hand, like excitement so they tend to take things too fast'. 

We talked of the days of 78s and the coming of tape. He remembered experimenting, prior to the advent of tape, with 33 1/3 rpm discs of 16-inch diameter and spoke of the future possibilities of cassettes of one kind or another. 'Before the days of tape we were doing everything to get more sustained recording, hence the large discs'. Of present trends in America he commented: 'Today the emphasis there seems to be towards avant-garde music, away from the heavy Romantics. The music from Beethoven onwards to the end of the nineteenth century is not doing so well, and it's no accident I think, that a modern composer like Boulez who has turned conductor is making the running in the projection of the new music. I think we are at a critical moment of changing tastes, but I don't know how radical it is or whether old composers will eventually be forgotten'. 

He said that Britain was 'one of the last bastions of the concert hall' and lamented the passing, as he saw it, of the Lieder recital. 'After all, no songs are being written of any consequence to carry on the tradition. The last composer who is performed today in this field is, I suppose, Poulenc. Without a new literature it may die as an art form. To be replaced by what? The key to the whole of the future, of course, is the immense growth in population and the changing social structures. What the young people will go for is anybody's guess'. 

Lieberson led the industry in recording plays and the like, beginning with Paul Robeson in Othello in 1949 and including Hamlet with Richard Burton. His lists of 'musicals' credits include My Fair Lady, South Pacific, West Silk Story and the recent big successes, A Little Night Music and Billy. 

We moved naturally on to the discussion of opera. 'There you have the problem of maintaining a roster of singers, either as an opera house or a record company. So many so-called opera-lovers are no better than bull-fight lovers watching the latest matador. They want Caballé or Sutherland, or whoever's the latest star and never mind what the opera may be. It's a sort of half-world of music to me, a big sale based on names alone. As far as our company is concerned we are proud to have been the first to record Wozzeck and The Rake's Progress, proud to have done a Pelleas that is an integrated, fully rehearsed performance drawn from the opera house'. 

Back to the old days and reminiscences of his own time at the controls recording Adolf Busch, Serkin, Walter, Mitropoulos, the Budapest, the excitement of doing the Hammerklavier with Petri. 'I think our relationship then was closer with the artists and there was inevitably more sense of excitement that we were doing something new; today everybody tends to be rather blasé. Besides, as techniques have advanced – and it was bound to happen – the engineer has inevitably become more important. Also, we are all aiming at mistake-free performances, which is ridiculous when you come to think of it. Is it more soulless, more cut-and-dried? I don't know, but I suppose something has been lost in spite of all the gains along the way. Personally, over the years I've missed being away from the creative side of the business, though I try to make my job as creative as possible, and a record business like any other is bound to express the personality of the man who runs it'. 

He is greatly interested in the pop picture, too, of course, attends pop festivals, signs up artists, watches them rise and fall. 'I like to listen to the changing shape of music, the followers of Gershwin' – John Culshaw told me not long ago how seminal had been Lieberson's recording of Porgy – 'the influence of Dylan. One of the most important changes had been in the form of the pop song. You used to have a 36-bar form divided into four strictly categorised eights. Now the form can be ABCADB or any other permutation. And now that this new look has been established for some time, a whole fresh nostalgia is building up for the past of pop. The musical took a long time to catch up but Hair has, of course, done it – and the sales there are fantastic'. 

A Lieberson interview is far from being formal or cut-and-dried. A bizarre phone call from a friend, the interviewee lounging elegantly in his London suite (Ciaridges, of course), a sense of material as well as spiritual well-being are its possible appurtenances. But when he wants it to end, as other interviewers have testified, he makes sure you know, though in the politest, most gracious way. And that's not inappropriate to an executive whose incoming correspondence often begins 'Dear God'. 

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