One afternoon, audio recordings metamorphosed from toys into respectable and lucrative media products. The precise afternoon is easy to pinpoint. It was a Tuesday—March 18, 1902. The place was the Hotel di Milano, in (guess where) Milan, Lombardy. Present in the upper-floor room was a young American recording engineer named Fred Gaisberg, recently hired by The Gramophone and Typewriter Company, Ltd., and possibly a bit on edge: his company had forbidden the forthcoming session due to what seemed to them as an exorbitant fee demanded by the soloist. Also present were a local pianist, Salvatore Cottone, and—just to keep Gaisberg feeling the heat—the G&T Company’s local agent in Milan.
The artist was a young tenor who had made a hit in his first appearance a week earlier at La Scala in a now-forgotten opera by Baron Franchetti, Germania. Just turned thirty, he was by no means an unknown. He had already sung at the operas of St. Petersburg, Monte Carlo, and Buenos Aires, and was shortly due to make his Covent Garden debut. He was a busy guy. They had trouble finding a free afternoon to record ten single-sided discs. But they made the date, Gramophone Company squeamishness or not, and on Tuesday afternoon there they were, ready to roll.
The young tenor’s name—as if I have to tell anybody—was Enrico Caruso.
Caruso’s extortionist fee, so offensive to The Gramophone and Typewriter Company, was £100 for the ten-disc session. It’s a good thing that Gaisberg ignored the company’s objection. Caruso made the G&T Company very rich. They became HMV, then EMI. They recorded Callas and Klemperer and Casals and The Beatles, among others. Nowadays as the Warner Music Group they’re still going gangbusters, and they’ve got the mother of all back catalogs. All for £100. Money well spent, if you ask me.
Caruso made a lot of people very rich, including himself. He made over $2,000,000 in royalties over the next 19 years, in fact. And his recordings still sell.
Viewed solely as musical statements, those after-lunch discs from March 1902 aren’t all that impressive. Gaisberg et al. needed to get those sides onto wax as quickly as possible. Thus no retakes, no futzing about boo-boos. Caruso clears his throat quite audibly any number of times. Cottone—one of those tiresomely mediocre opera pianists—hits some brazen clunkers. The opening of E lucevan le stelle from Tosca (less than two years old at the time) is a shambles. Caruso cheats on the final note of Celeste Aïda. The audio quality isn’t anything to write home about, to say the least. The piano sounds ludicrously bad, a victim of early technology’s limitations.
But no matter. What makes these discs special, and accounts for their near-immediate hit status, was the perfect marriage of voice to medium. Caruso’s lowish tenor (not yet quite as baritonal as it would eventually become) landed right in the sweet spot of the narrow frequency range of the acoustic discs of the day. He sounds terrific: alive, young, filled with ardor, and unmistakable. Caruso died before microphones and electronic amplification transformed recording, but all that whizzy stuff wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Like John McCormack, he was a natural for the acoustic recording horn.
That’s the conjunction of the title: Caruso’s voice, the nascent technology of the 78rpm disc, and the emergent market for high-quality recordings. That afternoon, a pastime became an industry.
I have been revisiting Caruso’s recordings of late, thanks to a collection of about 300 shellac 78 rpm records put into my safekeeping. The collection includes a hefty assortment of Caruso discs—hardly surprising given his unchallenged eminence in classical recording from 1904 through about 1920. Starting in 1904 Caruso became an exclusive artist to the Victor Talking Machine company, the precursor to RCA Victor and already an industry titan. His “Red Seal” discs were the company’s mainstay: expensive, beautifully engineered, expertly pressed on high-quality materials, many of those century-plus-old discs sound as good today as they did when they were new. Actually a lot better, thanks to 21st-century playback equipment. In addition, I’m also enjoying Ward Marston’s exquisitely tuned remasterings via the 12-volume Naxos Historical set, a labor of love that extracts every possible nuance out of the old masters.
Playing a 78rpm disc, especially one from before the 1925 introduction of electric recording, is a humbling and downright moving experience. The thing is so basic, so straightforward, and yet it can produce a living, breathing musical performance. The sound comes pouring out of a wavy line carved by the fundamental principles of mechanics and etched in dried insect secretions. A 78rpm disc’s grooves stir the stylus to so much energy that you can actually hear the sound just by getting close to the disc—no amplification needed at all. That’s why old-time gramophones didn’t need any electricity. You wound up the spring-powered turntable, then plopped on a tonearm equipped with a steel or thorn needle. The sound went round and round through tubes and out via a horn (either visible on the outside or tucked inside a cabinet), picking up reflections and acoustic nuance the while, before emerging into one’s listening room. Nowadays we play those old discs with lightweight tonearms and precision-tracking cartridges with diamond stylii, sophisticated amplification circuits, speaker systems with elegant crossover networks. But none of it is absolutely necessary. Our civilization could suffer a horrendous conflagration that devolved us to pre-industrial revolution status. But axes would still chop, scythes would still cut, and Victrola gramophones would still play.
The earliest recordings were made on cylinders, the grooves moving across the coated surface like the threads on a screw. Emile Berliner’s flat discs were a commercial improvement over Edison’s cylinders, given that a flat disc can be plated and then used as a stamper for copies. Fortunately for posterity, Caruso was a flat-disc guy from the get-go.
But flat discs imposed a rat’s nest of problems. For one thing, the playback arm is pivoted from a single point and is therefore only occasionally truly tangent to the groove that it’s tracking, even though the cutting stylus travelled along a rail and was always precisely tangent to the groove. So the tracking is almost always a bit off.
Even more troubling is the diminishing amount of groove that comes under the needle as the grooves spiral inward. A bit of simple arithmetic makes clear why that would be. The disc rotates at a single speed—78 revolutions per minute. So if you’re on the outer grooves of a 12” disc, then every minute the stylus travels the circumference of a circle with a 6-inch radius. The formula for the circumference is simple: twice the radius times pi. For the outer grooves that’s (6×2)x3.14, or 37.68 inches worth of groove passing underneath the stylus in a minute’s time.
But then begin the spiral inwards. By the midpoint of the disc you have a radius of about 4 inches. That becomes (4×2)x3.14, or 25.12 inches worth of groove passing underneath the stylus in a minute’s time.
Get to the innermost grooves, and you have a radius of about 2 inches. Thus: (2×2)x3.14, or 12.56 inches worth of groove.
Since the same amount of music needs to emerge from the disc per minute (it isn’t as though the music is going to slow down), it follows that there is actually less information coming off the disc per minute as the tonearm travels inwards.
Think of it as a photograph that becomes progressively less detailed as your eye travels from the edges to the center, and you get the general drift.
Careful engineering was able to deal with some of that limitation, but inner-groove distortion is a fact of life on all flat discs; on the wide grooves and fast spin of 78rpm discs, the problem is exacerbated. Even the best playback equipment in the world can’t compensate for this one essential shortcoming.
It’s a liveable imperfection. 78 rpm discs remained the medium of choice until the late 1940s when microgrooves and tape mastering brought about recordings that could capture pretty much the entire frequency range of human hearing. Then came stereo (mid-1950s with saleable discs in 1958) and cassette tapes (late 1960s) then the whole digital revolution leading to today’s audio blizzard.
And through it all, Enrico Caruso. The man died in 1921, but his legacy lives on, right there in every record, LP, tape, CD, DVD, or download. Presumably the recording industry would have come about, eventually, without his stellar success. But it was Caruso who was the first true gramophone superstar, the artist who above all gave those flat spinning discs an aura of class and made the whole idea of recording respectable to artists throughout the world. That’s quite a gift.
And the records are still fascinating. Man, could he sing. And what a sensitive and intelligent musician he was! You don’t have to take anybody’s word for that, either: he’s still there in those old wiggly grooves, his irrepressible vitality, imagination, and superb tone production intact. Maybe we’ve had tenors since who can match him vocally (Pavarotti in his prime) but Caruso remains sui generis: the tenor of tenors, the most celebrated singer of his age and probably of all time. He is a legend, but his place in music history was truly and honestly won.
And his place in the history of recordings? He’s the patron saint, pure and simple.