18. Beethoven: Ninth Symphony
NBC Symphony Orchestra/Arturo Toscanini
RCA: New York (Carnegie Hall), 31 March and 1 April 1952
There have been many historic Ninths on record. There was Leonard Bernstein, at the fall of the Berlin Wall, substituting the cry of Freiheit (freedom) for Freude (joy). Karajan’s 1962 Berlin LP, just after the Wall went up, is the all-time best-selling Ninth. Wilhelm Furtwängler gave a momentous performance for the post-war reopening of Bayreuth. Felix Weingartner, a friend of Brahms, engraved a truly authentic style in two recordings of 1926 and 1935.
But of all recorded Ninths, and there are around sixty, one takes precedence for its furious energy and faith in human goodness. Toscanini had been conducting the Ninth for exactly half a century when he entered Carnegie Hall for what he intended as a significant valediction. When he first conducted the work in Milan in 1902, the city had heard it only three times before. Now the Ninth was not only the most familiar of masterpieces but also the most meaningful, a signal of hope after the ravages of war. Toscanini had played it at the reconsecration of La Scala in 1946; here he presented it as a cultural jewel to be passed to future generations.
The first two movements are breathtakingly fast, the Adagio engagingly taut and gloriously warm-toned. The Robert Shaw Chorus and all-American quartet in the finale-Eileen Farrell, Nan Merriman, Jan Peerce and Norman Scott-err on the side of might, threatening to burst their lungs, but the pacing is supple and the heat intense. Amid the bombast, one hears islands of intimacy and calm. Taped in Carnegie Hall in preference to NBC’s cramped studio, the sound is vivid. ‘I am almost satisfied,’ said Toscanini at playback, adding after a moment’s reflection, ‘I still don’t understand that music’
19.Suk: Asrael Symphony
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra/Vaclav Talich
Supraphon: Prague (Dvořák Hall, Rudolfinum),
22-29 May 1952
For a small nation the Czechs are notably over-endowed with great composers, but the symphony that stirs them most comes from a minor master. Joseph Suk was a violinist who married Dvorák’s daughter, Otilie. When his father-in-law died in May 1904, Suk dutifully started a requiem, naming it after the angel, Asrael, who accompanies souls to paradise. In the middle of the fourth movement, Otilie fell sick; she died in July 1905. He tore up the Adagio and wrote a new one: To Otilka.
Asrael is a double lament, an entombment of hope. Muted in grief, restrained in rage, the symphony would embody for Czechs all that they were unable to express during two world wars and foreign occupations. In the Nazi camp of Theresienstadt and the Soviet labour camps, oppressed composers quoted themes from Asrael to sustain the doomed souls around them.
The glory of the work is that it refuses to become mired in misery and escapes quickly into the uplands of recovery. A successful soloist and chamber musician, Suk knew the classical repertoire well enough to quote deftly from Verdi, Beethoven, Brahms and, inevitably, Dvorák. But the piece avoids patchwork and its finale, a loving portrait of Otilie, reworks Brucknerian textures in wholly original ways.
Vaclav Talich, Suk’s close friend, conducted the Czech Philharmonic from 1919 to 1941. Like Wilhelm Furtwängler in Berlin, he stayed put during the Hitler years and suffered for it afterwards. The communists banished him to Bratislava, where he founded the Slovak Philharmonic. In the Stalinist darkness of 1952 he was brought back to Prague to conduct Asrael. Arrests were rife and men were hanged on trumped-up treason charges. Underplaying the work’s emotions, Talich unfolded a noble account of national suffering and hope, a performance that captures a terrible moment and preserves its solemn dignity for all time.
20. Wagner: Tristan und Isolde
Kirsten Flagstad, Ludwig Suthaus, Blanche Thebom,
Philharmonia Orchestra/Wilhelm Furtwängler
EMI: London (Kingsway Hall), 10–23 June 1952
This landmark recording was almost never made. Furtwängler, its conductor, told EMI that he would never work again with the scheming producer Walter Legge, whom he accused of sabotaging his career to promote Herbert von Karajan. Flagstad, the great Isolde, told the record company that she would not make the recording without Furtwängler, whom she trusted implicitly, or without Legge, whom she relied upon discreetly to substitute her missing two top Cs in Act Two with the voice of his wife, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. The impasse was insuperable and time was ticking loudly away. Flagstad was fifty-seven years old and had announced her retirement.
A compromise was found. Legge apologized to Furtwängler in writing for any hurt caused by ‘alleged’ remarks. The conductor, for his part, acknowledged the excellence of Legge’s London orchestra and waived his demands for a Berlin or Bayreuth recording. Casting was quickly settled. The Tristan and Brangane were second choices-Lauritz Melchior was found to be past it for Tristan and Martha Modl was about to sing Isolde for the unmentionable Karajan. Furtwängler inserted Suthaus, whom he had conducted as Tristan in 1947, and Flagstad recommended Thebom, an American of Swedish extraction whom she had taken under her wing. Both acquitted themselves well; Josef Greindl and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sang a fine King Mark and Kurwenal, but the limelight belonged to soprano and conductor.
Flagstad sang an Isolde to melt an iceberg, tender rather than erotic, her love for Tristan deepened by maturity. Her sound fills space like floodwater, leaving no room for disbelief. Furtwängler, intellectually uncomfortable with the business of recording, had never conducted an opera in studio before. He disliked the basement-level hall and the noise of Central Line trains running beside it, but his performance was imbued with calm assurance and inspirational risk; his health was failing and he was anxious to leave an interpretative legacy.
When all was over, he put an arm round Legge’s shoulder and said: ‘My name will be remembered for this, but yours should be.’ Legge griped privately that this was the only compliment he ever got in forty recordings they made together. There were two hours left at the end of the final session and Legge suggested that Furtwängler should make use of the orchestra and hall to record Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer with Fischer-Dieskau. The conductor turned on him brusquely and said: ‘I promised you Tristan, and that’s all you’re getting.’ They never worked together again.
21. Verdi: Aida
Renata Tebaldi, Mario del Monaco, Ebe Stignani, Santa Cecilia
Academy Chorus and Orchestra/Alberto Erede
Decca: Rome (Santa Cecilia), August 1952
Renata Tebaldi was Nature’s antidote to Maria Callas. Restrained where the Greek raged, pure toned where Callas shrieked, she was adored by cognoscenti but never obtained equivalent celebrity. Thirty years old in this recording, Tebaldi had made her US debut as Aida in San Francisco in 1950 but was not called to New York for another five years, after which she became a Met fixture, the jewel in its crown after Rudolf Bing fired her tempestuous rival. While Callas was the media darling, Tebaldi was queen of the footlights, the serene ruler of illusion.
A year older than Callas, she never married nor slept with millionaires, she turned up on time at rehearsal and sang with relish. Her only obduracy was a refusal to sing non-Italian roles or eat foreign food, deeming lesser tongues and cuisines to be uncultured.
Callas made headlines of their rivalry, asking journalists if they did not prefer her champagne to the Met’s Coca-Cola. Tebaldi replied that she found champagne rather sour. They carved up the opera summits. While Callas ruled La Scala, Tebaldi played Florence and Rome. Callas occupied Covent Garden, which Tebaldi boycotted as ‘a Callas house’. Beyond the hostility lay a sincere mutual respect.
This Aida was Tebaldi’s launchpad, a year ahead of the coming of Callas. It was also the first recording of the opera to sound like the real thing. Although constricted by mono sound, the Santa Cecilia hall gave a cavernous dimension to Verdi’s Egyptian desert and a choking claustrophobia to the climactic entombment. Despite forty degrees of heat and no air conditioning, Tebaldi sang without strain, soaring abov
e huge choruses and dropping alternately to a whisper. She sang softer than any living spinto and although the huge Mario del Monaco was not an ideal vocal partner, the conductor, Alberto Erede, was the best balancer of singing voices. Many claim to prefer Tebaldi’s stereo Aida with Bergonzi and Karajan, but this performance has the virtues of freshness and daring. Nothing is held back and Stignani, often a foil to Callas, finds an altogether more credible persona opposite the luminous Tebaldi. Half a century later there was still no Aida (bar Tebaldi’s Karajan retake) to match this set.
22. Strauss: Four Last Songs
Lisa della Casa, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra/Karl Bohm
Decca: Vienna (Musikverein, Grosser Saal), June 1953
The four last songs of Richard Strauss-a fifth turned up after the edition went to print-were premiered at the Royal Albert Hall on 22 May 1950, eight months after the composer’s death, by the phenomenal Kirsten Flagstad, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler (a radio tape can be found on the Norwegian label, Simax). Confusion and controversy set in. Flagstad had sung the songs in the order Strauss wrote them, as falling leaves from a wintry oak. Boosey & Hawkes, the publishers, shuffled the order to open with upbeat Fruühling (Springtime).
Sena Jurinac sang the first commercial recording for EMI (Fritz Busch conducting in Stockholm) following the published order and with some interpretative uncertainty. Decca’s was the second recording, and it had extra merits. The orchestra was once Strauss’s own and the Swiss soprano Lisa della Casa possessed a vocal serenity which, more than Flagstad’s steely magnificence, evoked the singing voice of Strauss’s wife, Pauline, his lifelong inspiration. The conductor was Karl Bohm, a card-playing chum of the composer’s, and the mood was more sunny than commemorative. Tempi were brisk, the breathing natural.
Most conspicuously of all, the order in which the songs were sung differed both from Flagstad and from Boosey, beginning logically with Beim Schlafengehen (On Going to Sleep), a farewell by an uncomplicated artist looking back on a life he had relished to the full and was ready to relinquish with a smile. September came next, followed by Fruühling and finally Im Abendrot (At Dusk). Della Casa sang without operatic affectation, as if she were privately recalling a beloved grandfather, and the solos of the Vienna concertmaster, Wolfgang Schneiderhahn, have the sweetness of fond regret. The Decca producer was Victor Olof on the verge of a scandalous defection to EMI, and his balancing was exemplary for a late mono recording. Many singers have subsequently shone in this cycle-Schwarzkopf (Szell), Lucia Popp (Tennstedt), Jessye Norman (Masur), Karita Mattila (Abbado)-but Della Casa was first on record to give the songs credence and joy.
23. Puccini: Tosca
Maria Callas, Tito Gobbi, Giuseppe di Stefano, Chorus and
Orchestra of La Scala/Victor De Sabata
EMI: Milan (La Scala), 10–21 August 1953
It may be the most perennial of operas but in the public mind there is only one Tosca. Never the sweetest of voices or natures, Maria Callas brought veracity to a grubby plot and ferocity to its apotheosis. Groped by the sleazebag Scarpia, who has arrested and tortured her artist husband, Tosca grabs a fruit knife and stabs him dead. Callas, on stage, would strike so hard with the plastic prop knife that she drew blood from Gobbi, her regular partner, and gasps from the audience, who thought she had really killed him.
Their recording, with Giuseppe di Stefano a heroic Cavaradossi and the La Scala team under its austere music director Victor de Sabata, was made early enough in her career for Callas to take guidance from a conductor. De Sabata drilled her for half an hour in the end aria of the second act, making her sing the final line thirty times until she emitted a low growl that lay far beneath her register, a sound so ominous it chills the marrow. The Te Deum scene took six hours before De Sabata expressed satisfaction. EMI’s Walter Legge sat back and let events take their course, selecting the best takes from miles of tape when the musicians had dispersed.
The Callas voice, never conventionally beautiful, possessed a theatrical dimension that was felt more on record than on stage. Her Vissi d’arte, on her knees before Scarpia, goes squally with stress but the listener is made to believe in her agony more than in the tonal perfection of other heroines. Callas on record always lives out her characters. The portrait may not be lovely, but it is brutally real.
Tosca was the last role that she sang on stage before retiring in 1965, hurt in pride and heart when the Greek shipowner Aristotle Onassis left her to marry Jacqueline Kennedy. No artist would ever match her recorded appeal. In the twenty-first century, three decades after her death, Callas stills sells more records than any living soprano.
24. Brahms: First Piano Concerto (D Minor)
Arthur Rubinstein, Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Fritz Reiner
RCA: Chicago (Orchestra Hall), 17 April 1954
Beaten by CBS to the LP, RCA got in first with stereo. After experimental sessions in New York with the audio-aware Leopold Stokowski, the engineers went to Boston to tape a Berlioz Damnation of Faust with Charles Munch. The results were spacious but swoony beside good mono sound. The engineers moved on to Chicago, where the orchestra had a tough new music director in Fritz Reiner, and the label’s top-selling pianist, Arthur Rubinstein, was down to play the first Brahms concerto.
Conductor and soloist had a blazing row over Reiner’s casual remark that Chopin was an effeminate composer and probably gay, an insult that Rubinstein took personally and nationally, being Polish by birth. In a frigid atmosphere the two professionals set about performing the warmest of concertos, a richly coloured tapestry of romantic sound. Rubinstein reined in his usual exuberance and played with limpid precision, the piano set realistically centre-left, instead of far to the front as he preferred. Reiner summoned gorgeously lyrical playing from the orchestra, opening the Adagio with velvety strings and tartly spiced winds and maintaining the tightest imaginable control of line throughout three-quarters of a very short hour. Recordings by Curzon, Solomon, Brendel and Gilels will all have their advocates, but the tempering of a wilful soloist by a strong-minded conductor provides a taut backdrop for music of sublime beauty and awesome structure.
The producers Richard Mohr and Jack Pfeiffer, with engineers Lewis Layton and Leslie Chase (all legendary names to audiophiles), limited themselves to three microphones, each wired to a separate channel, giving a precise image of left and right and an overview of centre. This was stereo’s coming-of-age recording, the session where it proved its worth, and the team returned jubilantly to base. Much to their dismay, the record was not issued for another four years, while labels wrangled over a unified stereo format and the public was persuaded to invest in new systems.
25. Bach: Goldberg Variations
Glenn Gould
Columbia (Sony-BMG): New York (30th Street studio),
10 and 14-16 June 1955
The Canadian pianist made his first major-label recording in a goldfish bowl of a studio, his every eccentricity gawked at by media. ‘Gould spurns the sandwiches sent in to the recording crew, subsisting instead on arrowroot biscuits washed down with his special spring water or skimmed milk,’ reported the Herald Tribune. Few legends have been observed so intently in the making.
Gould was a feature writer’s dream. In hot sunshine, he turned up in coat, beret, muffler and gloves, carrying his own piano stool. He soaked his arms in boiling water before playing and popped any number of pills for migraine, eczema or ennui. He sang as he played, in a grumbling basso, and insisted on as many retakes as it took-eighteen in the twelfth variation-before he signed off. ‘Let him sing,’ said producer Howard H. Scott. ‘He played like a god.’
The record was issued in a cover consisting of thirty tiny photographs of the pianist in action, one for each variation. ‘We couldn’t agree which was best,’ said Scott, ‘so we compromised and used them all.’ The playing was like nothing on earth. It brought a delirious freshness to an austere work, playing excitable riffs on music that had never been made to smile. Unbothered by the
occasional wrong note, Gould searched for mood and metre. This, he said, was music that ‘rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind’.
His personal sound is flinty, slightly brittle, but from the opening phrases he does for the Goldbergs what Casals did for the cello suites, diverting them from Bach’s intended purpose-to lull an insomniac count to sleep-into a realm of rapt spirituality. Gould’s touch commands attention, evoking a numinous parallel world into which he alone possesses the password. From start to finish, the playing is unexpected, sometimes helter-skelter (second variation), sometimes so slow and quiet (twenty-sixth) that one wonders whether his mind has not drifted momentarily elsewhere until the sheer concentrated effort of communication surges through. No one on record had ever treated a piano, or a piece of music, in any comparable way. Gould burst onto the scene like a fiery angel, a comet from another constellation.
Nine years later he gave up public appearances to spend the rest of his working life in a record studio, usually at night, working obsessively over an eclectic range of music that embraced Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss and several Canadians of no great merit. The Goldbergs were central to his artistic make-up. In 1981 he had a second stab at the set, more comprehensively but less revealingly. A year later, he was dead, aged 50.
26. Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra/Erich Kleiber
Decca: Vienna (Redoutensaal), June 1955
The Life and Death of Classical Music Page 20