The George Martin called “the most beautiful pieces of love music”
If you look at the resume George Martin had before The Beatles, no one would have expected him to become one of the best pop producers of all time.
Half of what he had done was all about making comedy recordings, and while Brian Epstein had thought he had hit rock bottom by sending the Fab Four to a comedy label, they had the perfect rapport when they walked into the room and started testing what their music could do with Martin as their translator. He was the one who could make the songs that everyone wanted to hear, but he also felt that the best tunes went well beyond what he could have done with the lads from Liverpool.
Then again, a lot of the musical knowledge that turned up on Beatles records all came from Martin knowing the ins and outs of what the music was supposed to be. He didn’t want to make average rock and roll every time he worked with the boys, and when they presented some of their tunes, it wasn’t out of the question for him to throw in some ideas of his own, like testing his own physical endurance working on ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’ or suggesting the right classical instruments when working on tracks like ‘Penny Lane’.
Even when he parted ways with the group, though, he was still looking for artists that had a lot more going for them than a bunch of rock and roll tunes. Cheap Trick was when they started working with him, but Jeff Beck seemed to be one of the few people who managed to give the Fab Four a run for their money in the studio. Martin knew that he was a genius, and all he needed to do was capture what he was doing whenever he worked.
But despite being one of the greatest producers that rock and roll had ever seen, Martin’s first love was always classical music. The Mahavishnu Orchestra may have given him an outlet to work on more sophisticated material than what turned up on the hit parade, but compared to everything else that he was producing, he felt that he was much more comfortable listening to music that had more going on than the traditional blues formula.
Which probably explains why you were bound to find a lot more Bach than Chuck Berry in his record collection back in the day. He was smitten by what he heard in some of those classical symphonies, and even when recording some of the greatest romantic tunes that the Fab Four ever made, Martin felt that Tchaikovsky had some of the most moving songs that anyone had ever come up with.
When asked about some of his favourite records, Martin still stood by Tchaikovsky’s work as an example of what touched his heart the most whenever he turned it on, saying, “Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture is one of the most beautiful pieces of love music I think has ever been written. It’s an outpouring of emotion and frustration and the love theme is extraordinary. You can’t analyse the notes and say ‘How’s it work?’ It’s an enormous emotion.”
You’d expect nothing less from a song that’s meant to depict one of the most celebrated doomed romances of the 20th century, but Tchaikovsky wasn’t known to be subtle, either. Some of his best work involved percussion being played by cannons, and some of the best moments of his career came from him taking chances that no other classical composer would have tried in his prime.
The lion’s share of rock and roll fans would have written off classical music as soon as they heard ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, but Martin wasn’t about to discount the music he grew up on. These were masters at work, and had Martin not internalised that style of music, chances are he wouldn’t have been able to arrange a song like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ to sound as achingly beautiful as it is.
