Schnabel did not take easily to recording and the producer had to bring in his pretty niece to turn pages to give him an illusion of audience. ‘I suffered agonies and was in a state of despair,’ he reported. ‘Everything was artificial-the light, the air, the sound-and it took me quite a long time to get the company to adjust some of their equipment to music.’4 The recordings, however, are the antithesis of synthetic. They ripple with spontaneity and are riddled with wrong notes, scintillating in their contempt for precision and their search for inner meaning. Schnabel, said the Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau on his death in 1951, was the first ‘to illustrate the concept of the interpreter as the servant of music rather than the exploiter of it’.5
His record allies had no qualms about exploitation. They took Schnabel’s notion of integrity and sold it as doorstoppers to a world that furnished its homes with big boxes. If Kempff’s expletive defined music ex machina, Schnabel’s blessing put the whole of Beethoven within mundane domestic reach.
Sounds that were collected before these events are chiefly of archaeological interest. To listen through aural debris to Francesco Tamagno (1850–1905), Verdi’s original Otello, or to Alessandro Moreschi (1858–1922), the last castrato, is a fascinating experience but one that cannot be endured for much longer than holding one’s head down a wishing well. The pitch is wobbly, the static obtrusive and any impression of the singer’s musicality requires an imaginative leap on the listener’s part. Mighty Melba comes forth enfeebled, Tetrazzini underpowered, Galli-Curci unbeautiful. Mint copies of these objects fetch thousands of dollars (a prolific collector was the oil billionaire, John Paul Getty), but artistic satisfaction is hard to come by on these hand-cranked receptacles. The first recordings to overcome extraneous noise were ten arias taken by a young American, Fred Gaisberg, from a bumptious Neapolitan, Enrico Caruso, in a Milan hotel one floor above the suite where Verdi, the year before, had died. Gaisberg, as a kid in Washington DC, had hung around after school with men who tinkered in sheds. A useful pianist, winner of a city scholarship, he accompanied singers and whistlers on Edison cylinders, fretting at their inadequacy. In 1893 he met Emil Berliner, a German-Jewish immigrant who had invented a flat disc and was, besides, ‘the only one of the many people I knew connected with the gramophone who was genuinely musical and possessed a cultured taste’.6 Gaisberg, aged nineteen, offered himself to Berliner as an all-purpose factotum, playing the piano when required, raising cash, demonstrating the disc to Bell Laboratories, finding artists. He was the first professional producer of records and, a hundred years later, many still considered him the greatest.7 In the trinity of recording fathers, Edison engraved sound on surface, Berliner invented the gramophone and Gaisberg created the music industry.
Berliner joined up with Eldridge Johnson, a motor mechanic of Camden, New Jersey, to manufacture gramophones as the Victor Talking Machine Company. Gaisberg set up his first recording studio in 12th Street, Philadelphia, across the river from Camden. In 1898 Berliner sent him permanently to the London branch of his Gramophone and Typewriter Company, soon to be renamed His Master’s Voice after an emblematic painting of dog and horn was bought from a passing artist, Francis Barraud. A Berliner nephew who sailed with Gaisberg went on to Hanover, to found the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft. Twenty-five years old and full of vim, Gaisberg roamed with his brother Will as far out as the Russian Caucasus and down into India, capturing remote sounds of throat singers and wedding bands for late-imperial customers. The arch-producer never married; the gramophone was the love of his life.
At La Scala, Milan, in March 1902, he liked the leading tenor in Alberto Franchetti’s ephemeral opera, Germania. Gaisberg approached Enrico Caruso the morning after through a pianist, Salvatore Cottone, and asked if he would like to make records. The singer, alert to imminent debuts at Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera, demanded £100 for ten arias. Gaisberg requested authority from London and was curtly refused: ‘Fee exorbitant, absolutely forbid you to record.’ He went ahead regardless. Short, fat and ugly, Caruso was an unlikely star but the public was swayed in those days by what it heard, not by what it saw on stage and in dim press photographs. On record, Caruso sang with enviable ease, his baritonal quality stabilizing the recorded image and overcoming pop and crackle. The result was an instant bestseller, the first gramophone hit. By the end of the year he was world famous and fabulously rich. Within two decades-he died of pleurisy in August 1921, aged forty-eight, while mastering Eleazar in Halévy’s La Juive – he earned $2 million. Thirty years later Mario Lanza’s movie of his life took in $19 million. It was a voice that never stopped selling (CD 1, p. 160).
Caruso’s Red Labels convinced the rest of his profession that recording was more than just a gimmick. The first ten tracks offer an object lesson in good breathing and authentic verismo style. Caruso, said Luciano Pavarotti, who recorded a pop elegy to his memory, ‘is the tenor against whom all the rest of us are measured … With his incredible phrasing and musical instincts he came closer than any of us to the truth of the music he sang.’8 After Caruso, singers recorded routinely. The last Golden Ager to hold out was the thunderous Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin, whose resistance melted on witnessing the triple benefits: prosperity, publicity and a ticket to posterity. The retired Adelina Patti, living in a castle in Wales, summoned Gaisberg to perpetuate her formidable voice. ‘Maintenant,’ she exclaimed on hearing his playback, ‘maintenant je sais pourqois je suis Patti’ (now I know why I am Patti).
Other instruments were less convincing. Orchestras, shrunken and warped, sounded as if locked in a bathroom and heard through a rush of water. Fiddlers squeaked, pianists tinkled. To musical ears and an idealistic mind, the results were odious and the outcome obvious. Gaisberg, writing from Milan in April 1909, told his kid brother to cash in and get out:
Say, Will, I have been doing a good deal of thinking of late and have come to the conclusion that the Gramo business is finished. The novelty is gone and days of big profits are over. Gramophone (shares) will never see 40/- again and the Co will settle down to a basis of eight to 10% dividends … It will be better for them to liquidate right away than to drag on indefinitely … I feel very discouraged generally about the outlook of things and only warn you that this is your last chance to save money.9
Few in the business believed that recording would last any longer than such parallel gimmicks as the stereoscope and the hot-air balloon. Already there were other mechanical means of receiving music at home. Marcel Proust, repined in his Paris bed, would listen to Pelleas et Melisande from the Opera night after night down the tinny telephone. The First World War, with its portable gramophones and fevered demand for dance music, staved off the inevitable, but radio followed soon after with the first public broadcasts from Philadelphia in 1920 and live music from the British Broadcasting Company in London two years later. The Columbia label, founded in 1889 as Victor’s chief competitor, went into liquidation. The remaining labels wrote off their patents and stock and signed up in 1925 with Bell, which had developed an electrical method of making recordings, based on telephone and microphone advances. The future, as Lenin was telling the Soviet Union, lay in electrification.
Electrical recording allowed artists to stand away from the microphone and orchestras to achieve verisimilitude. ‘A whisper fifty feet away, reflected sound, and even the atmosphere of a concert hall could be recorded-things hitherto unbelievable,’10 marvelled Gaisberg. The electrical players were flatbed instruments with frontal speakers-an ignoble replacement for the magnificent horn, but the public response was enormous. In one week in 1926, Victor sold $20 million worth of Victrola players; its entire profit the year before had been just $122,998. It was as if Caruso had been born all over again. In the sleepy Austrian town of Salzburg, a teenaged inventor, Wolfgang von Karajan, rigged up a player of his own making on the town bridge and turned up the volume. Within minutes the centre of the town was thick with crowds and he was ordered by the police to take the contraption d
own. ‘Those people were dumbfounded,’ noted his brother, the conductor Herbert von Karajan. ‘The sound of music actually emerging from a box like that created a sensation.’11
It was the dawning of the age of mass entertainment and shared experience. Commentary to a world heavyweight fight between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey, relayed on radio, was released on five discs. The aviator Charles Lindbergh was recorded on landing after the maiden transatlantic flight. Fifteen glee clubs sang Adeste Fideles at the Met, a swelling of 4,850 voices. Church bells were recorded in English hamlets, birds singing in the Auvergne. The composers Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninov, refugees from the Russian revolution, found a new home on records. Bela Bartok, who had roamed Balkan villages with a recording machine, worked the folklore he had collected into his string quartets-the first masterpieces to owe their existence to the act of recording. In Germany Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill and Stefan Wolpe introduced disc playing in live recitals. Weill went so far as to compose a gramophone aria for his 1927 opera, The Tsar Has Himself Photographed.
Symphonies and string quartets continued to resist the medium. Discs could carry only four minutes of music and musicians had to plan side breaks. When Edward Elgar conducted his own works for Gaisberg, the set carried a health warning: ‘The tempi on these records do not necessarily represent the intentions of the composer.’ Richard Strauss, though, had no such qualms and professional conductors took to the studio, some reluctantly but almost without exception. A music industry photograph of 1929 traps five glowering maestros at a celebratory dinner in Berlin-Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Erich Kleiber; all were famed far beyond their cities as a result of making records.
Toscanini, artistic director at La Scala, premiered a work by Ottorino Respighi, The Pines of Rome, which interpolated a nightingale’s song-the first recording to be incorporated within a concert work. In America, Leopold Stokowski arrayed his orchestra in a ‘Philadelphia Sound’, a benchmark for luxuriant precision. The repertoire grew more adventurous. Columbia, back in business for the 1928 centenary of Schubert’s death, launched an international competition for composers to finish off the Unfinished Symphony, the result to be recorded. This was a medium ravenous for novelty, indiscriminate of taste. A label might put out jazz one day, a symphony the next. It was the era of anything goes.
And then it crashed. In the Wall Street aftershock, record sales in the US dropped from 104 million in 1929 to just 6 million the following year. In the UK, HMV and Columbia sales dropped from 30 million to 4.5 and the labels were forced into a merger as Electrical and Music Industries, Ltd. It was thirty years before EMI recovered its 1929 sales volume. Decca, a new record label, was taken over by a resourceful young Welshman called Edward R. Lewis, who bought part of US Brunswick and kept Decca afloat on Bing Crosby and Al Jolson imports.
In America, classical recording ceased and stars were fired by the dozen. ‘I remember coming back to my office after lunch to find a cable reading “Dropping De Luca and Horowitz. Any interest?”’ recalled Gaisberg’s assistant, David Bicknell. ‘And not only cables-the artists started to arrive in person. [Jascha] Heifetz was one of the first. Fred invited him to lunch.’12 Gaisberg, in his circumspect way, rose above the panic. Nearing sixty, he held no executive title and earned less than the EMI directors, but he understood better than any man alive the dynamics of the industry. Gaisberg repeated his warning that recording could come to an end at any time. Its best hope was to preserve the best art of its time. ‘He had wonderful instincts regarding the direction in which the whole gramophone industry was moving,’ said Bicknell. ‘And one of the decisions he took was to switch from recording small pieces-which had been the lifeblood of the record business since it started: that is, operatic arias, single piano pieces and so on-to building a library.’13
For Gaisberg, Schnabel’s Beethoven cycle (CD 7, p. 167) was the cornerstone of a strategy that would remove classical recording from relative triviality to a plane of curatorial responsibility and economic tranquillity. Flimsy showpieces might sell well in times of plenty, but when the going got tough the world needed Beethoven as never before. By 1939, when the world again went to war, the Schnabel cycle had raked in profits of half a million dollars and Gaisberg was revered as a latter-day saint. To the Victorian mansion that EMI had bought on Abbey Road, in residential St John’s Wood, Gaisberg brought the great and the good to inscribe an immortal legacy. Elgar conducted the teenaged Yehudi Menuhin in his violin concerto; Jascha Heifetz introduced the Sibelius concerto (CD 9, p. 170); Pablo Casals recorded Bach (CD 11, p. 172); Gigli, Supervia and Chaliapin sang their hearts out; and Paderewski, lion of Poland, inscribed his final testament. Gaisberg treated all artists with deference, yet without him few would have passed into history. Although British by acculturation, he embodied, in the view of his assistant Bicknell, ‘many of the greatest American virtues, namely: first: his fearless interest in dealing with difficult, celebrated and formidable people, never hesitating to tell the truth whenever it was necessary, however unwelcome it might be. Second, his approachability. Finally, his youthful outlook which he retained right into old age.’14 Gaisberg, who died, aged seventy-eight, in September 1951, had accompanied the industry of recording from toolshed beginnings to corporate establishment, shifting its centre of operations from inventor’s America to investor’s Britain. It would take a second world war and a brutal dictator to reverse the trend, placing classical records in the heart of a mass consumer market and the home of the brave.
The rise of fascism brought Italy’s new Duce, Benito Mussolini, and its most important musician, Arturo Toscanini, into instant conflict. A totemic figure since he conducted the Requiem at Verdi’s funeral, Toscanini was a fanatical precisionist in a land of lazy sunshine, a fundamentalist interpreter who preached fidelity to the letter of the score while making textual adjustments as he saw fit. Irresistibly propulsive, his performances of Italian opera and German symphonies were imbued with revivalist fervour. Trim, short and coal-eyed, Toscanini joined the 1919 fascist parliamentary list out of patriotic zeal but grew disillusioned with black-shirt violence. On the eve of Mussolini’s March on Rome in October 1922, Toscanini said there was no man he would rather murder. He refused to let the Fascist Hymn be sung, or the Duce’s portrait hung, in La Scala. A tyrant to musicians, physically assaulting those who failed to meet his exacting expectations, Toscanini was resolute in defending his opera house from political indoctrination and from any authority greater than his own.
In April 1923 Mussolini visited La Scala and had his picture taken with its glowering music director. An uneasy truce ensued until, in 1929, Toscanini left La Scala to head the New York Philharmonic. Returning home in summer, he was roughed up by Party thugs and confined to house arrest. His anti-fascism crossed borders when Hitler came to power in Germany. Toscanini walked out on Bayreuth over a ban on Jewish artists and, at no small personal risk, sailed to Palestine to conduct an orchestra of refugees. Dismayed at the state of the world, he told his mistress in January 1935 that ‘I would like to end my career next year, once I have finished my fiftieth year of conducting.’15 He advised the New York Philharmonic to replace him with the Berlin conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who was having a rough ride with the Nazis. When Furtwängler decided to stay in Germany, Toscanini never spoke to him again.
Word of Toscanini’s frustration reached David Sarnoff, founder of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which owned the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and Victor Records. Sarnoff, a Russian-born cigar-chomper with a reverence for high culture, sniffed an opportunity. He despatched Samuel Chotzinoff, brother-in-law of the violinist Jascha Heifetz, to offer Toscanini an NBC orchestra comprising the best musicians in America. His fee would be $40,000, tax free, for twelve concerts-four times Philharmonic rates. Record royalties would provide a welcome nest-egg for the grandchildren. Toscanini signed on the line.
His return to America was heralded with a hyperbole
worthy of the second coming (it was, in fact, his third). An opinion poll in Fortune magazine showed that two out of five Americans knew his name. Sarnoff introduced him on air as ‘the world’s greatest conductor‘. Twenty million tuned in on Christmas night 1937 to his inaugural concert, comprising Vivaldi’s Concerto Grosso in D Minor, Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor and the first symphony of Brahms. Toscanini was called back seven times to take his bows. The reviewers were awestruck. The New York Times called him ‘predominant in his art’. The Tribune acclaimed ‘a peak of unexampled popular success’. Chotzinoff informed Cosmopolitan readers that, for each nation, Toscanini was the ‘supreme’ interpreter of its music: for Germans in Beethoven and Wagner, for Austrians in Haydn, Mozart and Schubert, for the Italians in everything, the French in Debussy, the English in Elgar. He was the only conductor anyone would want to hear, which is exactly what Sarnoff wanted everyone to read.
When Pearl Harbor brought America into the war, Toscanini’s anti-fascism made him a national hero. ‘Your baton,’ said President Roosevelt, ‘has spoken with unmatched eloquence on behalf of the afflicted and the oppressed.’ Everybody called him ‘The Maestro’ as if there were no other. ‘He quite candidly believes that he is not merely the greatest conductor in the world, but the only good one,’16 observed RCA Victor’s musical director, Charles O’Connell, himself a part-time conductor.
The Life and Death of Classical Music Page 2