A Century of Recorded Music.(Review)

Timothy Day A Century of Recorded Music. Yale University Press, 306 pages, $35

A few years ago a friend played for me a tape copy of an Edison cylinder recorded by Johannes Brahms in Vienna in 1889. Edison's agent in the city, Theo Wangemann, announces the date and place of the recording and that he is with "Doktor" Brahms himself. After a short pause, the playing begins. I could not at all identify the piece, since the scratch and swish seemed to drown out everything. My friend then conducted what was playing, and it jumped out at me--a snippet from the composer's "Hungarian Dance No. 1" in G minor. What was also evident was a rambunctious, freewheeling pianism--what the young Artur Schnabel noted as Brahms's "creative vitality and wonderful carelessness." More scientifically, Jonathan Berger, of the Center for Computer Assisted Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University, after subjecting the Brahms cylinder to every conceivable scrutiny, notes a "liberal rubato, some protracted fermati, and improvisation at a number of points" and a tempo "considerably slower than any recent recording." My sense is that Brahms was the kind of player who could play a piece all over again using only the notes he missed the first time around.

Timothy Day is curator of Western Art Music at the Sound Archive of the British Library in London. He has given us, at the very least, a study of the history and implications of recorded music from the late nineteenth century to our day, beginning with an inaccurate description of that Brahms cylinder right on the first page of his study. Much of this chronological treatment of the history of recordings--from cylinders to 78 rpm discs (first acoustically, then electrically recorded) to the 33 rpm LP vinyl record (mono, later stereo) and on to the compact disc revolution (not to mention DVD)--has been well covered in such works as Roland Gelatt's Fabulous Phonograph (1955, rev. 1977) and Guy A. Marco's Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound in America (1993). Moreover, the point of view given in Day's historical overview is decidedly English, not to say provincial. He leaves out many historical developments in the Forties and the Fifties on this side of the Atlantic that deserve scrutiny. For instance: how did the long-playing record develop within the CBS labs? Any reader of the various editions of David Hall's indispensable Records (not consulted by Day) would know that, after Columbia's announcement of the LP revolution in the summer of 1948, RCA Victor, in a burst of foolish commercial effrontery, decided that they would put out their own kind of discs, playing at 45 rpm and measuring only 7", which meant that only five minutes or so of music could be contained on each side. The long-playing record, measuring 10" and later 12", and able to contain twenty-five minutes of music, triumphed. Soon realizing that they had been vanquished in this matter, RCA Victor had to eat crow in January 1950 and ask for a license from Columbia Records, the patentee, to put out LP's, which it then proceeded to do along with everyone else, and the 45 rpm record was relegated to the jukebox where it belonged. But for a while, it was a toss-up between two goliaths, William Paley of CBS and "General" David Sarnoff of RCA. There is a real story here, but Day is not interested.

Similarly, while he is careful to point out the technological advances in recording on tape brought about by Decca/London, EMI, Deutsche Gramophon, and Telefunken, both in England and on the continent, he never mentions the revolutionary recording technique of C. Robert Fine and David Hall of Mercury Records in the United States-the simple device of hanging one Telefunken microphone over the podium, resulting in a series of still stunning and still revered recordings. The idea was that it was a conductor's business to balance an orchestra, not an engineer with knob in hand after the fact.

Day is right to emphasize the role of the record producer, and he expectedly (and properly) outlines the achievements of three men--Fred Gaisberg, Walter Legge, and John Culshaw. Each is renowned--Gaisberg for his intrepid recording of Caruso in a Milan hotel room in 1902 and for recording Chaliapin, John McCormack, Mischa Elman, Kreisler, Schnabel and Casals, not to mention two great recordings made just before World War II, the Dvorak Cello concerto with Casals, Szell, and the Czech Philharmonic, and a still inimitable Mahler Ninth with Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic. If Gaisberg was saintly and self-effacing, his disciple Walter Legge was nasty and autocratic, as befits the husband of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Easily the most hated man in the business, Legge was characterized in memorable fashion by Sir Thomas Beecham as "a mass of egregious fatuity." Perhaps, but Legge was the sole creator of the Philharmonia Orchestra, the genius behind Angel Records, the discoverer of Herbert von Karajan. Against all odds, Legge certainly got things done--Tristan und Isolde with Flagstad and Furtwangler, the Karajan/Schwarzkopf Rosenkavalier, the innumerable late recordings of Otto Klemperer, the great series of Viennese operettas, the championing of Lipatti--the list goes on and on. More convivially, the scholarly and reserved John Culshaw is renowned for one of the great sonic achievements of the stereo era--Wagner's monumental Ring der Nibelungen, with the best singers of the day and the impassioned collaboration of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Georg Solti.

Day is quite justified in giving these three their due, but, as an evocative writer and a critic with insight into people, he has stiff competition from Norman Lebrecht. In Who Killed Classical Music? (1997), Lebrecht, the music columnist for The Daily Telegraph, wrote about this same trio of producers with a panache and flair that Day cannot manage. As for the same kind of visionaries in the United States, Day does mention once in passing the seminal figure of Goddard Lieberson (head of Columbia Records), but Lebrecht has more detail:

 
   [Lieberson] signed Stravinsky to record his entire musical output, 
   retrieved Charles Ives from ...