I finally got around to watching Steven Spieberg’s Lincoln, with Daniel Day-Lewis. As is my usual practice, I waited until it was available on home video. What with the advent of big, hi-res flat-screen televisions and Blu-Ray, I’m less inclined than ever to subject myself to the inconvenience, smells, noises, and discomfort of a movie theater. Not to mention the lack of a Pause button. Oh, I know that for some folks the big-screen experience, going to the theater, buying tickets, finding a seat, etc., is considered an essential part of movie viewing. For me, the comforts of home trump all. If movie patrons were as well-behaved as symphony or opera patrons, I might think differently. But they aren’t so I don’t.
It’s an excellent movie, no two ways about it. I was particularly impressed by the level of detail—lighting, sounds, rooms, wallpaper, carpets, furniture, all that. I’m no expert on the look and feel of 1860s America, but it sure came off to me as well-nigh perfect. In particular I was struck by the look of Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln; there was an aspect of her design that sets Lincoln apart from all those Civil War-era movies of the past, no matter how meticulously researched they might have been.
Consider Gone With the Wind, the apex of the Hollywood studio system and still a compelling portrait of Civil War America—allowing for hefty helpings of sentimentality and sanitation. I read somewhere that Selznick had a team of fact-finders who researched every aspect of the set design and props. Thus when somebody objected to Ashley Wilkes riding off to war on a horse with a cropped tail, Selznick staffers quickly produced documentation that Southern gentlemen typically rode their show horses to war. That loving detail shows up everywhere in the movie, all the more after its careful modern restoration.
But 1930s movies demanded a certain amount of glamour, no matter what the history books said. Both Tara and Twelve Oaks were upgraded to Bel Air mansions. Hair stayed combed. Teeth were straight and white. And Vivien Leigh, as Scarlett O’Hara, was spectacularly misrepresented in that she wore heavy and obvious makeup. Mascara and eyeshadow, pancake foundation and rouge and lipstick. To be sure, it was all carefully calculated not to look too much like makeup—goody two-shoes Melanie Hamilton’s was even more careful—but there is no question that Scarlett O’Hara was as much a creation of 1939 as of 1860. Even in her dirtier scenes, as she works in the fields or staggers back to Tara from Atlanta, she’s meticulously and carefully made up. Mascara, eyelashes, eyebrows, you name it.
Sally Field’s Mary Todd Lincoln, on the other hand, looked as though she had no makeup on at all, which would have been only right and proper for a genteel woman of a time when only trollops and hussies wore face paint. Her skin is mottled, with creases and folds under her chin, her eyes are often rimmed and bloodshot, and so forth. I’ll bet Sally Field has much better skin in real life. Like the real Mary Todd Lincoln, Sally wore expensive dresses to parties. In private scenes with her husband after said party, she was often just in her slip, and her hair wasn’t neat.
We’re living in an era of heightened expectations as to realism. We expect our film battles to show blood and gore and limbs being hacked off and people shrieking in agony. The stylized sex of the 1930s just looks quaint; we require naked bodies flopping around. That isn’t to say that we don’t have our own tropes, preferences, and quiddities: most film music is as routine and predictable today as were those faux-Straussian orchestral sweeps of the 1930s and 40s; women tend to be downright flinty; men tend to be passive and adolescent; a sheen of political correctness counteracts the decidedly non-PC world of 1930s screwball comedy and gangster flicks. I note that even Lincoln, despite its careful design, took pains to distance the filmed Abraham from the real Lincoln, who would be viewed as irredeemably racist by modern standards. In short, no film can ever divorce itself from the manners and morés of its own time.
Which leads me down a different pathway, or perhaps the above was mostly warmup. I sense a connection between my movie-makeup lead and my real topic that follows, but maybe I’m just kidding myself. Anyway: we are living in a golden age of audio reprints. The record labels are ransacking their back catalogs and bringing out copious box sets. Complete this, complete that. Prolific recording artists of the past are being mined for new profits—Rubinstein, Heifetz, Horowitz, von Karajan, Klemperer, among others. As an enthusiastic and utterly unashamed devotée of such massive shelf-busting sets, I note two overall approaches taken by the record labels.
One aims at a matched look and feel. That’s EMI’s route, EMI with its solid-gold back catalog extending all the way back to Caruso in his Milan hotel room in 1902. EMI typically puts out sets with a unified design, such as the continuing “Icon” series that incorporate all, or most, of the EMI recordings of a particular artist. The “Icon” sets have the same shiny-black box design, shiny-black cardboard sleeves, shiny-black disc labels. They’re library collections, in other words, invaluable to research-y types such as myself who love to explore the music-making of the past: early Bruno Walter, non-RCA Toscanini, early Colin Davis, Carl Schuricht and Eugen Jochum and Guido Cantelli and Hans Hotter and Yehudi Menuhin and so forth. EMI has also dedicated special sets to Herbert von Karajan—two gigantic boxed sets of his complete EMI recordings—and is in the process of a handsome series of boxed sets of Klemperer’s legendary work with the Philharmonia Orchestra, all unified throughout to a single look and feel. Decca had a similar “Original Masters” series, which appears to evolving.
The alternate approach is the “Original Jackets” style in which the CDs are packaged to look like the original LPs (or 78 RPM sets) from which they were taken. That has been the favored approach of the Universal Music Group labels such as Sony (RCA Victor and Columbia), Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, and Mercury Living Presence. Philips followed suit with a fine “Original Labels” of their own.
“Original Jackets” series come in several varieties. Some are devoted to single performers (complete Rubinstein, Heifetz, Horowitz, Glenn Gould) or subsets (Karajan in the 1960s), whereas others might be broad selections from a performer’s catalog, such as the sets of Szell/Cleveland (Beethoven Symphonies and Mozart), Bernstein/New York (one of Bernstein’s music, another of bestsellers), Ormandy/Philadelphia, Walter/Columbia, and the like. Alternately, some labels have been putting out retrospective samplers of their best work (Mercury Living Presence Volumes I and II, The Decca Sound, RCA Living Stereo, Philips Original Jackets).
At the same time, Sony has also been putting out its own version of EMI “Icon” sets in the form of various retrospectives: Ormandy-20th Century Music, several sets of Munch/Boston, Stokowski sets, Levine conducting Mahler, Leinsdorf/Boston doing Prokofiev, and more. They’re inexpensively made, but they’re jim-dandy bargains.
All of these are apparently cash cows for their labels. People are snapping them up. I’m snapping them up. To be sure, I’m not a typical record consumer; because I make part of my living as a music commentator and teacher, my record purchases qualify quite properly as deductible research and education expenses. Nonetheless, while I might represent an extreme fringe of the classical music record market, I’m not in a separate category of my own. And I just love those big box sets.
They scratch a number of itches all at once, one of which is simple acquisitiveness; those reprint boxes offer significant bang for the buck, acres and hours of music for typically about $2.00 per disc or less. Another itch is nostalgia; I grew up with a lot of those recordings, after all, and it’s wonderful to have them all in one place, without chips and scratches and wear and tear, to be revisited and enjoyed again. And yet another is the simple pleasure of revelling in the recorded sound of a bygone era, sound that in surprisingly many cases compares quite well to modern digital recording. Heck, some of those recordings trump all but today’s classiest engineering, such as those glorious Decca and EMI sessions in London’s drafty old Kingsway Hall. There is no gainsaying the orchestral splendor of Karajan’s 1970 Der Meistersinger in Dresden’s Lukaskirche, or Philips’ ace engineers capturing the glow of the 1960s Concertgebouw in all its radiance.
I’ll be the first to admit that some of those virtues are overstated. Mercury Living Presence records were way too bright, a virtue back in the days of mushy record players but a liability with today’s crystal-clear reproduction. Quite a few RCA Living Stereo jobs are cottony and mid-range-y to the detriment of clarity. Well, any number of today’s oh-so-pristine digital recordings are thin, or too distant, or harsh. Good ears are just as rare in audio today as they were then.
Just now I caught a glimmer of the subconscious forces that led me to begin an article on record reprints with Spielberg’s Lincoln. It has to do with our current fascination with authenticity and the past: get it right, show it as it is, but only within certain limits. In the Spielberg, a Lincoln divested of his actual, documented opinion of black people as a race; in audio, grand old recordings subjected to modern-day digital remastering and presentation. Maybe that’s it. Or maybe not. Maybe I just wrote a monster-mash article; Frankenstein Meets the Wolf-Man at House of Dracula; Lincoln and Movie Makeup and Audio Reprints. Given this morning’s lack of decisiveness, I’ll let the question stand unresolved.