PERSPECTIVE — In 1926, the classical recordings industry became possible. Replacing a primitive, temperamental recording horn with microphones revealed new depth of sound amid what is now a lost-world crossroads of 19th-century giants and an emerging, new-order generation. Symphonies, operas, and star showcases were recorded with far less compromise, allowing us (with modern sound restoration) to experience music-making from a full century ago.
The electrical technology arrived in 1925 but needed time to find its legs, and it showed sound engineers that, unlike before, extra tubas weren’t needed to beef up bass lines.
Just under the wire — in the flurry of recordings between 1926 and The Great Depression — Nellie Melba was captured in her farewell concert and final studio recordings. The Rosé Quartet recorded Beethoven’s great Op. 131, echoing back to the group’s 1882 formation by Arnold Rosé, the longtime Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster, close colleague of Brahms, and husband of Gustav Mahler’s younger sister, Justine. The bells Wagner commissioned for the 1882 premiere for Parsifal — with their elemental sound somewhere between a steeple and a gong — were recorded live prior to being melted down for World War II.
The period now sounds like a parallel universe. Ravel’s La valse is a more spine-chilling reflection of World War I, opera tenors were relatively demure, and portamento created graceful note-to-note connections that turned string lines into a buoyant salt sea of sound.
The performance manner of concerts and operas were two different animals. Symphonic flow often meant lower peaks and smoother surfaces. But with modern improvements, Clara Schumann’s star student Fanny Davies (1861-1934) is captured by microphone in the Schumann Piano Concerto in a performance strongly powered from within.
In contrast, opera performances rushed toward ecstasy at every opportunity, from the 1927 Parsifal excerpts under Karl Muck at Bayreuth to the 1928 complete La bohème conducted by Carlo Sabajno at La Scala. But Feodor Chaliapin, heard live in Boris Godunov in London, gains strength from rhetorical silences that are no longer mere dead spots. After some delicate surgery, Henry Wood’s recording of Beethoven’s Eroica was relieved of an annoying hum and other blemishes, helping to revise his middle-brow reputation into that of a major artist.
Such recordings have long been monitored. Now, they can be felt.
The expanding niche of historical recordings is a long-simmering backlash to the digitization of classical music. In the 1980s, ease of modern editing smoothed performances into blandness. Artists were industrialized into recording under-realized interpretations. (Neeme Järvi, for one, produced some 500 discs over 15 years.) Then, around 1983 in the cassette section of Tower Records, the words “An Historical Restoration” appeared on plain black plastic cases on the In Sync Laboratories label with transfers by Barton Wimble. Names barely heard of sprang to life. From there, the historic subculture has evolved into high-prestige boutique labels, lavishly packaged, with more considered sound restored than the major labels that originated them — all perfectly legal because the recordings had passed into public domain.
The twin peaks of audio restoration (both based in Philadelphia until recently) are those by Ward Marston, with handsome box sets of great early-20th century singers on his Marston label (his Chaliapin set among his many achievements), and Mark Obert-Thorn, whose acclaimed wizardry with orchestra performances (many live, previously unpublished) is conveniently downloadable from Pristine Classical. In fact, the Albert Coates-conducted La valse on Pristine almost sounds modern. London’s APR issues beautiful box sets of pianists, including the long-forgotten Bach specialist Harold Samuel, who was considered unduly academic in 1926 but is now heard in some of the most poetic playing this side of Angela Hewitt.
Generally, these restorations tread fine lines between preserving the recordings with minimum intervention — and 78-r.p.m. surface noise suggesting that they were recorded near Niagara Falls — and, at the other extreme, sound so filtered that any artistic personality is barely recognizable. Both Marston and APR transfers are models of moderation with honest sound and Niagara in the distant background. Pristine sometimes adds an ingratiating touch of reverb. In British Columbia, Richard Caniell’s Immortal Performances takes restoration to heroic levels with sound sources that some might think hopeless.
Though the greatest Wagnerian soprano of her age, Frida Leider (1888-1975) recorded no complete operas, which were indeed captured with microphones after 1926 but often with B-level casts, saving stars for more lucrative, single-disc arias. But Caniell assembles surviving fragments of Leider’s live performances, the voice emerging with remarkable clarity amid so many sound sources that her early 1930s Isolde seems to pass through multiple weather fronts at the Metropolitan Opera.
Not all artists make solid transitions into new technology, and at the distance of a century, one can only guess why. Though Richard Strauss recorded his own works extensively, his Mozart and Beethoven symphony sessions began in 1926 but ended after only a few years — maybe because the results were awful? Slipshod, disinterested, and irredeemable? The prominent 1920s British violinist Arthur Catterall (1883-1943) could truly be a fin de siècle experience with playing rich in tasteful portamento. He recorded extensively but not much after 1926. After his close relationship with his recital partner, pianist-conductor-composer Hamilton Harty, fell apart, the latter went on to record extensively without Catterall, whose pre-1926 recordings quickly became obsolete. Had he recorded another 10 years, might his old-fashioned style have remained in fashion?
Charting the progression of any performance practice is slippery. Many different practices go on simultaneously — especially before 1926, when recordings didn’t really disseminate music-making from one country to another. In 1926, score-defying tempo flexibility was waning, and Coates, in his 1926 Eroica, championed Beethoven metronome markings some 60 years before Roger Norrington. Elgar’s music was recorded generously, conducted by Elgar and others, though no pattern of portamento emerges among British conductors and orchestras. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes not.
The gap between concert and operatic performance manner was closed by the swift, clean Arturo Toscanini. The rise of high-personality conductors like Willem Mengelberg made symphonic performances more eventful. Wilhelm Furtwängler and Victor de Sabata, two ecstatic opera conductors (and temperamental recording artists), were no longer active by the mid-1950s. (Furtwängler died in 1954.) And how different our world would now be if they had lived another decade?
The cutting-edge Brooklyn Rider string quartet recorded Beethoven’s Op. 131 in a manner inspired by the 1927 Rosé recording. I thought it was thrilling, but the marketplace impact was minimal. In the bird’s-eye view of performance history afforded by recordings from 1926 on, one realizes that all approaches are right at one time and place and wrong in others, with all having a place at the ever-enlarging table.
