And now Vivendi has tanked -- evidently because it expanded too fast and couldn't make its separate parts work together for extra profit. Mr. Messier, no surprise, is gone, writing a book called "How I Was Betrayed." Vivendi is expected to sell some, many or all of its assets, very likely including its record companies, which are known as the Universal Music Group and include pop and classical labels.
So where does this leave Mr. Roberts, the international president of Universal classics and jazz? Nowhere he hasn't been before, he says. His labels, he notes, have always been autonomous, in every corporate structure they've landed in. They've conquered more than 40% of the classical CD market, and, more than other major classical record companies, have continued "to make traditional, high-quality classical recordings." Mr. Roberts even feels secure -- and artistic -- enough to invest in difficult music by living composers, even though these CDs won't make money any time in the foreseeable future.

But there's a larger picture. Years ago, Decca, Philips and Deutsche Grammophon were separate companies, each with its own high profile. Then, in 1972, Philips and DG were merged by their parent corporations into a new company called Polygram. In 1980, Polygram, which had already bought the famous jazz label Verve, swallowed Decca.
And other changes were happening. MCA, originally a talent agency, got into the record business and acquired Universal, a major movie studio. Matsushita, a Japanese conglomerate, bought MCA. Seagram, a liquor company, bought MCA from Matsushita, and in 1998 bought Polygram, merging its record companies with MCA's. It named the streamlined record unit Universal, after the crown jewel of what all at once had become a media empire, Universal Pictures.
This merger led to major carnage at the pop labels involved. But it didn't damage the classical labels, because MCA didn't have any classical operation for Polygram to merge with. What did weaken Philips, Decca and DG, however, was a downturn in the classical record industry. To bolster profits, Decca and Philips were blended into a single division, which stressed crossover acts like Andrea Bocelli, and, more recently, the pop-babe string quartet Bond.

And then came Vivendi, the least plausible of all these media giants -- a French water company that, hypnotized by Mr. Messier, leveraged its cash to expand into cell phones and the Internet, bought Seagram two years ago, and triumphantly renamed itself Vivendi Universal. Billboard magasine quoted Mr. Messier asking "Who would have bet a dime that one day a French company would be ahead of this empire famous world-wide?" With a straight face, he announced that the music business would infallibly be profitable, and that those profits would grow and grow, "boosted by the Internet."
But we know what happened. The music business tottered; the Internet bubble popped. French stock market regulators raided Vivendi's Paris headquarters, just to be sure the company wasn't hiding any accounting fraud. Speaking on the telephone, Mr. Roberts seems calm. But of course he knows that Bertelsmann, a shaky German media conglomerate, all but closed RCA, a classical record label it acquired, a venerable operation whose heritage goes back to Enrico Caruso.
More recently, Cablevision, a New York cable company, said it would shut many stores in an appliance chain it owns, to make up for losses elsewhere. So I had one last query for Mr. Roberts. In the current economy, why couldn't Universal Classics be forced to shrink, either under Vivendi or some future corporate owner that might run short of cash?
"That's a good question," said Mr. Roberts. "And you're not the only one asking it."

Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2002