A friend and fellow orchestra wonk recently directed me to several rare recordings by an almost completely forgotten conductor, Selmar Meyrowitz, an apparent suicide in 1941. Thanks to those fine folks at Pristine Classical I was able to come by a beautifully restored dub of his 1934 Schubert “Unfinished”, played by a pick-up French orchestra given the noncommittally generic name of “Grand Orchestra Symphonique de Paris.” Gave it a listen. What I heard was a marvelous, compelling, and perfectly paced rendition of an often-butchered symphony, played with transcendent sonic beauty by that unnamed French orchestra. Even the woodwinds were silky and in tune—words not usually found in proximity to “French” and “orchestra.” Had I not known better, I would have assumed the Dresden Staatskapelle or some such other acoustically gifted band. But, no: a pick-up Parisian orchestra, city of nasal squeaky winds and a, shall we say, cavalier attitude towards ensemble and intonation. The recording is dang good for 1934—in fact, it would distinguish itself as a product of the early 1950s. How the engineers (Pathé) got such good sound out of the limitations of 78 RPM shellac discs is beyond me, but there it is.
Which leads me to mulling about our recorded legacy. Vast, comprehensive, and ultimately overwhelming, it spans the globe and more than a century. To be sure, many of the very earliest products dwell more in the realm of historical curiosity, but even then, those gramophonic incunabula still retain the power to inspire, and even move us: Tamagno singing Verdi, the child Heifetz on the violin, a slightly tipsy Sir Arthur Sullivan speaking into the horn, Jean de Reszke at the Metropolitan Opera, barely audible through the veil of time and the shortcomings of Mappleson’s impromptu tech. Then there’s Nikisch and the Berliners making their courageous way through an entire Beethoven symphony (No. 5) in 1913—what a herculean task that was, positioning instruments closer or nearer the recording horn, adjusting for the woefully limited forces mandated by the fragile technology, dealing with the thousand and one things that could, and did, go wrong. But they got it more or less musically intact, albeit broken into four-minute segments. So we can hear Nikisch, however ghostly, and more to the point, we can hear those players of the 1913 Berlin Philharmonic. Some of those guys played under Wagner, remember. It’s the past come alive.
Even limiting ourselves to recordings made once a useable frequency spectrum was possible via microphones and amplification—that all starts around 1926—we are still confronted with a luxurious and bottomless haul of goodies. If the written past is all around us in the form of books and newspapers and magazines and the like, then the sonic past remains with us via recordings, some originally on disc, others captured from concerts via radio or, later on, in-house archives. Those of us who devote our lives to music are blessed with a gathered assembly of our predecessors, all of whom are ready at a moment’s notice to let us know their thoughts, their approaches, their inspirations, their successes and failures with the music they performed. I don’t have to take anybody’s word for it; I can go to the source—provided the source recorded.
Thus I can hear all those stories about Toscanini’s literalism and how razor-edged he could be even with music that wasn’t so well suited by sharp contours. But then I can listen to Toscanini’s recordings, perhaps multiple renditions of the same work but at different times and with different orchestras in different locales—the BBC Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the NBC Symphony—and find that he wasn’t anywhere near as literal or unyielding as the soothsayers would have you believe. It has become a common shibboleth that pianism isn’t anywhere near what it was in the early 20th century; maybe we have more flash-bang types and maybe more of our young pianists hit more of the notes right more of the time, but none of them have the sheer élan or artistic flair of their predecessors. I can wonder if that’s just the griping of older generations whose memory has a rose tint about it. Or I can go listen, and I find that there isn’t a pianist on the planet with the technical equipment or artistry of a Hoffmann, Godowsky, or Rachmaninoff. The old fogies are right.
Nobody will ever have to rely on hearsay about Glenn Gould’s eccentricities (and frequent flights of dazzling originality) or Renata Tebaldi’s vocal effulgence. We’ve got them, and in excellent audio.
Then there’s the literature itself. Before the age of recording, you got to know music via concerts and recitals, or you made it yourself either by playing or just silently reading the score. There’s a strong argument in favor of such self-reliance: without a shadow of a doubt our ancestors could wipe the floor with us when it comes to basic musicianship. Nowadays our Conservatory students moan and groan about being required to read in the alto, tenor, and soprano clef in addition to the usual bass and treble—but in the 18th century that was considered basic musical literacy. In an era of mostly handwritten music (engraving and printing was terribly expensive), composers sought to avoid leger lines, thus the copious use (and frequent changes) of various clefs. Not only clefs, but transposition was a common skill, given the pitch variance that was common in the 18th century—kammerton, chorton—not to mention the need for an accompanist to be able to turn on a dime for singers and instrumentalists alike. Even non-professional music-lovers were typically good sightreaders and players; they had to be.
The passionate amateur performer of old has been replaced by the equally passionate record collector and audiophile. It’s a decent trade, all things considered. We’ve replaced a lot of scratchy and screechy music-making with folks who have 99 recordings of the Beethoven 1st and who worship at a shrine called Klemperer or Szell or Toscanini or spit tacks at images of Klemperer or Szell or Toscanini. Those same folks get into screaming matches about vinyl vs. digital or tube vs. solid-state. They wax eloquent on the underappreciated excellence of, say, Romantic symphonist Felix Draeske. The enthusiasm, the love, the commitment, even the silliness, remains unchanged—but now it’s experienced as a listener, rather than as a player.
Recording has brought us a wide range of musical literature and then some. The possibility that any of us could hear all nine Beethoven symphonies in one single day, should we wish to do so, is a luxury that has come about only since the 1920s. That’s not very long. Nor do we have to break the bank to make that possible. Recordings were initially terribly expensive, but over the years the prices have dropped to the point where they’re easily available to all. And they’ve become even more accessible, thanks to downloads and streaming services.
I’m a bit saddened sometimes when I hear people decry older recordings: oh, it’s monophonic, they say. Oh, those horrible old pre-hi-fi recordings, they say. Oh, it isn’t digital, they say. But the mind adjusts rapidly to its sonic environment. Not only do we make a quick and usually effortless conceptual leap when listening to, say, a monophonic recording from 1935, but we make that same leap even in regards to even the highest-tech and toniest modern digital recording. The plain fact is that recorded audio cannot match live music, so our mind is obliged to adapt. And it does: before long we’re just focused on the music, just as a black & white movie from 1935 can engage us in the story equally as well as the latest whiz-bang high-tech extravaganza from Hollywood or New Zealand. If the playing is compelling, we stop noticing whether it’s monophonic or stereo, analog or digital, old or new, full-frequency or limited to a range of 5000 some-odd hertz.
I freely admit to being addicted to recorded sound in almost all its forms. That doesn’t make me indiscriminate; a stereo system with a severe low-treble blare (as I was obliged to endure recently) is not going to give me the same pleasure as my own home system with its beautiful Bowers & Wilkins speakers and posh electronics. But recently I was captivated by a luminous performance of the slow movement of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony on that very stereo with the nasty low-treble blare; the playing spoke eloquently anyway. I enjoy LPs, especially heard on my lovely VPI turntable with Grado cartridge, and I enjoy 78s, even the ritual of jumping up every four minutes to change sides or discs. I’m keen on digital recordings and keep the bulk of my collection on a server, whence I can hear music in the living room or my home office or, really, just about anywhere I have access to my home network. High definition digital: bring it on. CDs: bring them on. I just enjoy it, period.
That enjoyment is tinged with gratitude. Just think of all that industry, all those dedicated people who made those recordings happen. The studios, the engineers, the performers, the distribution centers, even the record-pressing and CD-plating plants. All that time, that money, that hard work. Klemperer painfully perched on his stool, conducting mostly with his left hand given the near-immobility of his right arm; the Vienna Philharmonic collectively returning to the Sophiensaal after an exhausting all-day recording session and an evening full service at the Staatsoper, just to have another go at the Rheingold prelude—and utterly nailing it for posterity as a result; Pierre Monteux and the San Francisco Symphony fighting to stay alert at 3:00 AM, as the telephone lines that carried the microphone feed to Los Angeles could sustain an uncompromised signal only during such low-traffic times; Kathleen Ferrier valiantly carrying on with her last recordings even as cancer was destroying her body from within. Or it doesn’t have to be that dramatic: just all those people showing up, doing their best, and giving their all. Some were in it for the money, but many were inspired by a desire to leave at least part of their work to posterity.
So I listen to Elly Ameling sing Brahms lieder with the most melting beauty imaginable; I listen to Klemperer conduct the Philharmonia, one year after I was born, in a simply glorious Beethoven 7th; I listen to Selmar Meyrowitz work witchcraft with a ragtag group of Parisian instrumentalists. I listen to Stravinsky bungle his way through a 1929 Sacre du Printemps or Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony absolutely blow the root off in the late 1990s with the same piece; I hear Benjamin Britten conduct his own works; I listen to Toscanini and Iván Fischer and Claudio Arrau and Kirsten Flagstad and Georg Solti and all the rest. What a glorious gift it all is, wealth beyond imagination, effulgence beyond calculation, opulence beyond price. And all for a modest entrance fee…or even no fee at all. Our modern world has its share of problems—terrible ones at that—but this isn’t one of them.