Record Producer. Over a span of around 40 years he gave the world a large catalog of classical recordings, many of which remain best-sellers. Born Harry Walter Legge, he was raised in London and did well in school but quit at 16; after teaching himself to read music and German, he was hired by HMV (later called EMI) in 1927 to write liner notes as well as articles for the company's monthly magazine. During the 1930s he worked as music critic for "The Manchester Guardian" while taking on progressively larger responsibilities at HMV; Legge pioneered subscription recordings, discs for which customers pre-pay, and produced Elena Gerhardt's Hugo Wolf song cycles and Artur Schnabel's complete recording of Beethoven's piano music. In 1937 he supervised Sir Thomas Beecham's complete preservation of Mozart's "The Magic Flute", a recording which has remained continually in print. Impressed with Legge's work, Beecham hired him as assistant artistic director at Covent Garden where he was successful in bringing numerous noted artists to London. After arranging ENSA concerts for the British troops during World War II, in the process meeting his first wife, alto Nancy Evans, he moved to Vienna and obtained the services of several out-of-work German artists for EMI recording projects. Josef Krips, soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, whom he married in 1953, Ludwig Weber, Herbert von Karajan, and others were to produce some of their finest work in these years. He also spotted the then-unknown Maria Callas and during her fairly short career proved able to handle her notoriously difficult temperament while supervising production of virtually all of her records. In 1945 he formed the Philharmonia Orchestra for the express purpose of making recordings; Sir Thomas conducted the first concert for one cigar but soon found it difficult to work for his former employee. From the late 1940s thru the early 1960s, such conductors as von Karajan, Otto Klemperer, Furtwängler, and Toscanini were to record, under Legge's supervision, what are still considered the definitive renditions of a number of classical compositions both standard and esoteric, including virtually the entire canon of Sir William Walton. EMI's owners and Legge each found the other progressively difficult over the years leading to his 1964 retirement, after which he and Schwarzkopf gave joint master classes all over the world; appointed director of the Wexford Festival in 1967, he had to resign after a heart attack. Though he continued to produce his wife's EMI recordings thru the mid 1970s, he was to supervise her 1977 and 1979 final efforts with EMI rival Decca. His memoirs were edited by Madame Schwarzkopf and posthumously published in 1982. Not an easy man to like or to work for, Legge was still respected, even by rivals such as Decca's John Royds Culshaw, and still continually produced masterpieces that to this day form the major portion of EMI's classical sales, with his German repertoire generally considered the "gold standard". Of his work, he said: "I am convinced that in the arts, committees are useless...Democracy is fatal for the arts; it leads only to chaos or the achievement of new and lower common denominators of quality".