Collections Turn Classics Into Mood Music

Beethoven can be found these days amid the frilly undies at Victoria’s Secret. Just go past the Lace Top Thigh Highs and hang a right.

On the counter, the German composer serves up “Love Immortal,” a tape of classical music to go with your love life. Schubert does “Passion and Pleasure.”

In the music business, the oldest kid on the block is learning lessons from the upstarts. At least as much as jazz, pop and New Age, classical music is being packaged for every mood, impulse, need and occasion.

In other stores, Mozart delivers music precisely for the morning commute. (So far, you’re on your own for the drive home.) There’s also a soothing “Baroque for Bathtime.”

You can have “Breakfast in Bed” with Grieg, Bizet, Chopin--and Martha Stewart. Or “Sunday Brunch” with Bach, Handel, Vivaldi--and Martha Stewart.

The masters provide the music. Stewart, the ubiquitous guide to crafts, gardening, food and taste, contributes recipes.

“Classical music is a language, a language of feeling,” said Peter Munves, a PolyGram senior vice president who is responsible for many lifestyle titles. “We have linked one feeling in one album.”

The traditional classical titles mean little to many people, he added. “This paints a picture for them.”

Some critics have suggested that dead European composers are spinning in their graves over this.

But Munves’ 21-title “Set Your Life to Music” series, which includes the bath, bedtime and commuting music, has sold more than 1 million recordings, impressive for a genre in the doldrums.

Before taking charge of PolyGram’s classical catalog, Munves worked on the CBS Masterworks “Dinner Classics” series, classical gastronomy that offers music and recipes for specific meals.

Now there’s IDG Books, which created the “Dummies” series of instructional publications. It has teamed with Angel Records to make the classics “fun and easy” with interactive CDs, such as “Beethoven for Dummies.”

Walk through a record store and the classical aisles are still full of albums featuring fancy old art and guys in suits. But a prominent section features classical compilations, such as “Ecstasy,” “Intimacy” and Cosmopolitan magazine’s “Seduction.” Covers depict scantily clad people who seem to be enjoying the music immensely.

“People will buy them as lifestyle products, as impulse purchases, not as classical music,” Heidi Waleson, Billboard magazine’s contributing classical editor, said of the themed recordings.

“They’re buying the music because it’s background music.”

Such marketing offers companies an economical way to package old material and sell it at reasonable prices, often less than $10.

It’s also a way to help baby boomers make the leap to classical. London Record’s “Exile on Classical Street” does this most explicitly by featuring rock stars’ favorite classical selections.

Waleson said many of the compilations are wonderfully played, but they generally offer movements or parts of movements that match the particular mood, instead of whole symphonies.

Love it or hate it, it’s a tribute to the greats.

Those who like the idea of “Mozart for Morning Coffee” or “Lease Breakers”--high-decibel classical pieces designed to get “revenge on your neighbors”--say it shows the classics still resonate in modern life.

Others say it shows the music is, despite this marketing form, indestructible.

Apart from Victoria’s Secret, with its own collection, the lifestyle classics have moved beyond music stores to bookstores and other shops.

Buyers tend to be women ages 19 to 49 who have had little or no exposure to classical music, Munves said. His “Mozart for Mothers-to-be” implies in liner notes that moms who listen may have tuneful babies.

It’s unknown what happens if someone plays “Mozart for the Morning Commute” at bedtime, or bathtub baroque during a meal.

Probably only a dummy would try such a thing.