Back in my teen years in suburban Denver, when the wonders of the larger musical world seemed about a million miles away from the secure blandness of middle America, I took comfort in my occasional splurge on a Deutsche Grammophon record. I couldn’t buy them very often; my extremely limited finances generally dictated that I buy discount items such as London Stereo Treasury, Columbia Odyssey, or RCA Victrola. Sometimes I could stretch my dollars a bit for a regular-issue Columbia, RCA, or Angel (as EMI was marketed in America back then).
But the DGG records were extra-special. They were fancier than other records, with much finer cover art and thick cardboard sleeves. The discs themselves were heavy and sturdy, unlike the typically flimsy RCA Red Seal numbers or those hideously bad Angel pressings. The DGG discs invariably sounded much better as well, full-bodied and rich, and the LPs lasted a lot longer before the inevitable signs of wear started to creep in.
Even better, the DGG artists were a breed apart. They were older, more established folk as a rule. Many albums eschewed pictures of the artists so you had to guess what the guy looked like, but when the jacket biography gave a birthdate of 1894 (Karl Böhm) or 1914 (Carlo Maria Giulini), you knew you were in the hands of an elder statesman. So many of the DGG-ers were grand old masters—Kempff, Karajan, Furtwangler, Mravinsky, Bohm, Jochum. As I got a bit older I began discovering the joys of the Arkiv series, with those textured cloth-bound jackets and list of special names: Karl Richter, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Karl Ristenpart, David Munrow (one of DGG’s few younger folks.)
DGG meant maturity. It meant stature. It meant arrival. Apparently the powers-that-be at DGG insisted that a performer acquire long experience before being allowed anywhere near the sacred microphones wielded by those all-powerful Tonmeisters who called the shots in the studio. Invariably you could count on DGG to deliver something decent, even if not the most thrilling or the absolute last word in interpretative goodness. But DGG always meant high class and quality.
It’s hard to reconcile today’s youth-obsessed DGG with the Grand Seigneur yellow label of the past. Consider the second part of “111: The Collector’s Edition”, a retrospective set that pulls together DGG recordings from the WWII years onwards into a box set at a nice budget price. The focus is clearly on the performers more than the music, with those responsible for the selection (marketers, I suspect) ensuring that at least all of DGG’s current headliners are represented, together with a solid gathering of past greats.
Which brings us to the subject of the age of the performers. I cooked me up some statistics. I put the release date for each of the 56 recordings in one column. In another, the name of the primary performer, followed by that performer’s birth year. A bit of subtraction revealed the age of the performer at the time the recording was made. I was able to take median ages of the performers for each decade represented in the “111” set. The numbers tell it all:
Decade Median Age
————————————–
2000-2010: 30
1900-1999: 39
1980-1989: 45
1970-1979: 46
1960-1969: 56
1939-1959: 50
And consider this table, which gives the percentage of performers 30 or below, followed by the percentage of those over 40:
Decade <=30 +40
—————————————–
2000-2010: 67% 27%
1990-1999: 29% 57%
1980-1989: 0% 57%
1970-1979: 10% 70%
1960-1969: 17% 67%
1939-1960: 0% 83%
There’s no question about it: DGG has become a kiddy label. I find this sad. That isn’t to say that there is anything wrong, per se, with young performers. They’re the future, after all. And they look really nice on the album covers, and they can play really fast. I have no doubt that those marketers who run DGG these days are very happy about all those pretty kids on their covers.
Youth has many glories, but artistic maturity is not among them. So while the DGG albums of yore might have been lacking in sex and/or youth appeal, they had something infinitely better on offer: seasoned artistry. But that’s gone now, lost in a lust for classical-music kiddy porn. Pity.