The history of symphonic recording began in a Berlin box room nine months before the first world war and ended nine decades later, without fanfare or lamentation at either end. The start can be dated more precisely than the end. On 10th November 1913, the celebrated Hungarian conductor Arthur Nikisch took 40 musicians from the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra into a studio operated by the German offshoot of the London-based Gramophone Company, known as Deutsche Grammophon (DG). Arranged around the Edison horn, the musicians performed Beethoven's 5th, the first credible recording of a complete symphony. Nikisch, a master of the ironically drooped eyelid, pronounced himself satisfied with the result and endorsed the sound as "simply overpowering." The set was issued in February 1914 on four records at the prohibitive price of 48 marks, and shipped internationally, one disc at a time, the last of the four movements reaching England in August 1914.
Greater events occluded its immediate reception but, from the end point where we now stand, this box of fragile discs soars from a romantic mist, like the Caspar David Friedrich painting of the lonely mountaineer, as a peak moment in the evolution of orchestral music, its performance and, not least, its reception. Before the Nikisch Beethoven 5th, there was no objective way of assessing the qualities of an orchestra and the influence of its conductor on the art of interpretation. Critics could listen intelligently to any number of ensembles in similar repertoire on successive nights, but their judgement was subjective. Even if a critic had the opportunity to study markings in the players' scores, showing alterations and shifts of emphasis, even if he discussed philosophy with the conductor and sat through performances with a stopwatch in hand, the comparison of one Beethoven concert with another by an Eduard Hanslick or a George Bernard Shaw (London's most entertaining concert reviewer of the 1890s) is no more useful, then or now, than a pair of poetic descriptions in classical Greek of the physical attributes of Helen of Troy. Which way did her nose turn? Who really knows?
Over time, all leading conductors committed their work to recorded media with greater or lesser enthusiasm. Wilhelm Furtwängler, who followed Nikisch in Berlin, hated the idea of being trapped on disc. Herbert von Karajan, Furtwängler's successor, saw the record as his route to immortality, superior in every way to live performance. Arturo Toscanini used the record calculatingly as a means to fame and power. Leonard Bernstein exploited it for education, cultural diplomacy and personal whimsy. By the end of the 20th century, there were 276 recordings of Beethoven's 5th and 435 of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Points of interpretation were contested in sleeve notes and fanzines between literalists and contextualists, period instrumentalists and diehards of the big band sound. Every shade of musical opinion was manifest on record.
And then the music stopped. The reasons why need not detain us long; they will have a familiar ring to anyone who has ever worked in a corporate environment which values bottom line and executive time above vision and tradition. The central labels (the so-called majors), panicky before the dotcom boom, were gloom-struck by the realisation that many good things, music included, could be had for free on the internet. Midway through the 1990s, they decided with intuitive unanimity—in much the same way as they never, ever fix record prices—that classical records, at 2 per cent of their global turnover and below pop profitability, were dispensable. Production quotas were slashed and artists were despatched by the tumbrel-load to the guillotine of oblivion, their recording careers ended overnight. Two suits on telephones simultaneously sacked Vladimir Ashkenazy and Christoph von Dohnányi. Bernard Haitink received the courtesy of a personal termination at his London home.
In the decade since, most of the remaining shutters have been slammed down. Where, before the fall, six big labels produced some 700 new recordings a year of (mostly) dead white European music, by 2007 only EMI and the DG-Decca alliance persist with classical output, averaging half a dozen monthly releases each. And many of these are not classical music at all so much as crossover gimmicks and movie themes. Of the rest, Warner Classics was shut down overnight by an email from Hollywood; Sony and BMG Classics were merged, then suspended operations; Philips was abolished. A bevy of small and middling labels rushed into the vacuum, but the recent collapse of Tower Records, the largest global retailer of classics and in many towns the only outlet, left consumers bewildered and small producers on the brink of insolvency.
Since all good things come to an end, one ought to be philosophical about the decline of classical recording, assuming that a bountiful technology will bring forth a better replacement. The trouble is, it probably won't. The best the internet has to offer is downloads of live concerts and archival material, for which the DG-Decca group boasts a 1,000 per cent increase in 2006. It is true that classical consumers are switching to iTunes, orchestral websites and broadcasters like the BBC and Finland's YLE for their classical fix, whether free or paid-for. But none of these remedies comes close to replacing the record. The iTunes bit rate is less than one tenth that of a classical CD—128kbps (kilobits per second) to 1,411kbps—and even high-tech downloads from Decca and DG are more than 20 per cent below CD standard. You don't need a conductor's ears to detect the degradation.
More seriously, the act of loading music on to your computer or personal carrier is less tactile and decisive than holding it between your fingers and placing it on a playing deck. A dimension of physicality and preparation is sacrificed with downloads, as is the tacit assumption made on buying a record that others will share the same object as you own, allowing you to argue with fellow enthusiasts over Otto Klemperer's way with the finale of Mahler's 9th, as distinct from Bruno Walter's, Claudio Abbado's, Bernard Haitink's and Simon Rattle's. Such contention is less feasible (or pleasurable) when the distinctions are disembodied. A record was music made concrete, a stone bird in hand; the internet returns it to the ether. The certainties that record-lovers held in common have, for the next generation, ceased to exist.
These losses, sad as they are, are outweighed by the impact of record cessation on the art of symphonic interpretation. Before recording, conductors did much as they saw fit. Mahler, in a famous injunction about his music to Otto Klemperer, exhorted: "Make it work. If it doesn't suit the acoustics of the hall, change it." Recording made conductors subject to pedantic scrutiny. Some, led by Toscanini, claimed fidelity to the score and claimed (often falsely) an impeccable accuracy. Others, such as Furtwängler, continued to improvise creatively.
Records served conductors in many practical ways. They created a professional hierarchy that was founded largely on merit and could be measured in size of discography. They offered an indispensable calling card for newcomers. Neville Marriner, a rebellious player in the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) in the 1950s, formed an ad hoc ensemble in a church beside Trafalgar Square, the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields. On the strength of a Four Seasons LP, he was inundated with invitations and found himself perpetually on tour, winner of an export award. Managers of halls and orchestras cannot spend their lives on the road searching for conducting talent or they would never get a show on stage. Records allowed them to sit in their office and listen to the latest release, knowing that this wheat had been sifted from a great deal of chaff by sharp-eared producers in Hamburg, London, Amsterdam and New York. Recording made the symphonic world aware of its resources.
It also enabled artists to listen to one another—whether in admiration, disdain or plagiaristic temptation—and to themselves. In 1906, the retired diva Adelina Patti was visited in her Welsh castle Craig Y Nos by the pioneering EMI producer Fred Gaisberg. No sooner had she sung an aria than she demanded to hear it played back, ruining the wax for production. "Maintenant," she declared when it was over, "je sais pourquoi je suis Patti." Before records, an artist had no objective perception of how he or she sounded, whether singer, soloist or conductor. The record added a dimension of self-distance and appreciation.
Records established a benchmark for what was and what was not acceptable in a professional performance. The wobbly woodwinds, disunited strings and cracked horn notes that infiltrate early recordings by London and Paris orchestras are practically gone by the mid-1930s, eliminated by peer pressure, market forces and the urge to please. Conversely, records wiped out many delicate distinctions. A young musician travelling in Germany in 1918 heard a different Beethoven sound in Bremen from the one he had heard the night before in Bochum. Both were rooted in some local tradition (or misapprehension) that went back to the lifetime of the composer himself, and both were peculiar to the place. Once records achieved general circulation, these provincial timbres disappeared forever; records were a homogenising force. A brash and rather beautiful Englishman, Leopold Stokowski, rearranged the seating in his orchestra to create and trademark the "Philadelphia sound." The reception was ecstatic. Before long, every US band was trying to out-Philadelphia Philadelphia in gloss and glamour. Half a century later, every US orchestra was trying to play louder than Georg Solti's head-splitting Chicago sound and every German ensemble aspired to match Herbert von Karajan's Berlin Philharmonic. Much quirk and character was sacrificed to the demand to produce a "perfect" performance, in the best available sound. It was a record-driven illusion of perfectibility that drove Glenn Gould, the most original pianist in memory, off the concert stage at the age of 31 and into the deep, deep darkness of a record studio where he spent the rest of his solitary working life.
But these losses and controversies are minuscule when set beside the two greatest benefits bestowed by classical records—first, the introduction of western musical culture to the remotest corners of the earth, fulfilling the same elevating role as the public library, the paperback book and the municipal museum. With the advent of recording, no Arctic fishing station was beyond reach of a decent Beethoven performance and, correspondingly, no pentatonic melody in outer Mongolia was beyond capture and dissemination to the towers of Manhattan.
Second, and of equivalent intrinsic importance, records awoke the world to the role of creative interpretation, the difference an individual sensibility can make to a musical masterpiece and the infinite diversity of approaches that could be attempted. The first recordings of Brahms symphonies, conducted by Felix Weingartner with London orchestras in the 1930s, have the stentorian authority of a musician who knew the composer, but not the warmth of Thomas Beecham, the sly wit of Karl Böhm, the dry precision of George Szell. A veteran who played under Weingartner told me that they received his comments from the rehearsal mount as holy writ, only to discard them when Toscanini arrived with a totally different perception. These insights, once the province of professional musicians, became transparent through the window of recording.
In order to draw the listener at home into these refinements, the record industry gave the varied interpretative approaches the full star treatment. Toscanini was the prototype, promoted on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) radio network in the 1930s as "the world's greatest conductor" and recognised in his time by two out of five Americans. Toscanini's image was one of fanatical accuracy, inspirational performance and philosophical profundity. Much has been made of Toscanini's grip on the American mind, yet even at the height of his dictatorship (as in Karajan's later in Europe), rivals such as Stokowski, Koussevitsky, Mitropoulos, Monteux, Beecham and the young Bernstein worked their way on to record and into the public perception with interpretations that vehemently contradicted the maestro's writ and fomented intellectual debate. There was a feeling that the masterpieces of classical music contained, like the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita, bottomless depths that were being revealed in ever-greater clarity. And it was the interpretation of those depths that fostered the illusion that classical music was alive and well long after its most successful composers were dead, buried and out of copyright. In that respect, the record helped keep classical music alive.
The American composer Gunther Schuller sat down some years ago and laid, end to end, every obtainable recording of Beethoven's 5th, from Nikisch to the squeakily authentic periodicist Roger Norrington. Schuller's aim was a noble one: to ascertain which of 160 openings came nearest to what the composer intended for the trickiest passage in the entire literature, the four-note motif that announces the work and contains its structural code da-da-da-DUMMM. Three short notes and one long one, three Gs and an E-flat: that shouldn't be too difficult, you'd think. Yet, working in laboratory conditions with a metronome of Beethoven's era, Schuller was dismayed to find that "very few conductors… passed the test of these opening measures." Nikisch does pretty well with the opening theme but he then "holds the fermatas much too long" (possibly echoing a dream of Wagner's, who heard Beethoven telling him to do just that). Unforgivably, and perhaps in response to the primitive box room conditions, he inserts two extra bars after the fifth one. The performance as a whole, Schuller allows, is utterly convincing.
Only three batons obey the composer's metronome marking (crotchet=108) strictly and they are the period-sticklers Norrington, John Eliot Gardiner and Frans Brüggen. Close behind them at 104 come Toscanini, Karajan (1984 recording), Fritz Reiner, Dohnányi and Richard Hickox; next in line at 100 are Solti, William Steinberg, Hermann Scherchen, Carlo-Maria Giulini and Carlos Kleiber, whose Vienna Philharmonic recording of 1974 is widely regarded as the most perfect in tempo and conception. At the opposite extreme, the modernist Pierre Boulez is measured at 74 and the showman Stokowski at a self-serving 40.
What are we to learn from such minutiae? Not a great deal, beyond the suspicion that, through recording, the art of music became a spectator sport. Nowhere outside a commentary box at a major international fixture would you encounter such nerdish bandying of meaningless statistics. The idea that a Roger Federer can be ranked statistically against a Rod Laver, a David Beckham against a Duncan Edwards, is too absurd to warrant formal examination. Each is a competitor, supreme in his time.
Nevertheless, what the statistics achieve is a very modern aspiration—the participation of spectators in something they cannot possibly achieve. It is fantasy time, and it is exactly that element that recording brought to the art of symphonic interpretation. We could, each and any one of us, put on a record, wave our arms and imagine that we were the greatest maestro that ever lived. Hands up those music lovers who have never done it unwatched in the privacy of a bedroom mirror? I thought as much.
So what are we to make of our music now that the commentary is gone? In the decade since the Schuller survey, there have been Beethoven cycles on record from Daniel Barenboim, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, David Zinman, Simon Rattle, Claudio Abbado, Riccardo Muti, Charles Mackerras, Jaap van Zweeden, Bela Drahos and Gianandrea Noseda and more. What is almost certainly the last Beethoven cycle on record is presently being completed in Minnesota by the interesting Finnish conductor Osma Vanskää for the esoteric Swedish label Bis. And then, finito.
Those who pretend at some form of continuity of classical recording after the collapse of the central producers point to the Naxos label as their beacon of hope. Naxos was founded 20 years ago in Hong Kong by a German luxury goods salesman, Klaus Heymann, who decided that classics could work at an impulse price, £5 a disc, if he used unknown orchestras and artists. He has more than half the classical market now in many countries and has made some treasurable recordings, none more so than the nine symphonies of the British composer Malcolm Arnold, who died last year shunned by his nation's institutions. Heymann's is a simple transaction. He pays artists $1,000 a record and no royalties. To maintain the successful formula, he never spends a penny on artist promotion because to do so, he argues, would indulge their vanity and prompt them to demand star treatment. What you get on Naxos is what you see—pure music, without personality. Twenty years of Naxos has added much to the public enlightenment but nothing to the chain of interpretation, which depends on original, personalised input. That chain has been ruptured by the events I have described, and cannot be repaired.
Some orchestras, led by the LSO, San Francisco and Philadelphia, have taken to releasing their concerts on record. Some, such as the Colin Davis LSO Berlioz cycle, are the result of a lifetime's preoccupation, a valuable record of understanding. But these records will never have the allure of the real thing because they are self-produced without the editorial discrimination of an external commercial force. They amount, in effect, to vanity publishing and the profits thus far have been so meagre that LSO players earn in a year from their own label royalties less than they could make in a morning's work at Abbey Road. In time, I expect, these efforts will go on to the website and vanish altogether from the record.
The music goes on—it always will—but maestros will find it harder to make themselves known and almost impossible to resume the dialogue of creative interpretation from the point where it was disrupted. This is a minor cultural tragedy, to be mourned by thousands rather than millions. The greater tragedy, akin to the drowning of Venice, is the loss of the classical record itself—an item that brought the world together around the crucible of its musical civilisation. No means has been conceived to replace the record as an object of cultural transmission. Classical music, in the years ahead, will stumble like Samson in the darkness, eyeless in Gaza, in a helpless search for hearts and minds. A line has been drawn in the sand of history between what is on the record, and what is not.
