Titles that make me feel sick: "Your Favourite Songs" "Your Hundred Best Tunes" "These you have Loved". Not me, mate! I am reminded of an early record label called Favourite - or Favorit - which featured nothing good sung by nobody in particular.
The whole question of excerpts is a puzzling one. I can see that some operas such as Charpentier's Louise produce one hit song which singers want to record. I can see the attractions that a collection of such sweet-meats may have for some types of listener. I can even see that a disc of Highlights from a particular score might be all that some would want to fork out for. Potted versions were often put out in the thirties at a medium price when complete works were prohibitively expensive. When LP became the norm, an hour of excerpts might play that same rôle or be the opportunity for collectors to choose one complete set and supplement it with excerpts discs to hear alternative accounts. The early Glyndebourne Marriage of Figaro abridged itself by a third, missing out the recitiatives. Going back further, there were the single-disc medlies or vocal gems, where just four or eight minutes would have to satisfy you.
Those of us who grew up with record libraries to hand or in the age of cheap sets will have got used to complete versions - and the more complete the better. Companies used to try to outdo each other by ungluing the pages which composers or publishers had stuck together after or even before the first night. Researchers would emerge from opera-house basements brandishing Original Versions, which promised us a closer approach to the composer's intentions before the brutal exigencies of an actual production had begun to whittle away their ideals. Now in the theatre of the head, in the privacy of our own homes we could get the whole damn thing in widescreen sound and with extra mauvais quarts d'heurs in every Act.
It could work in reverse. Sometimes we were assured that the printed scores took no account of contemporary performance practice. After all due consideration, the score was now presented with extra icing on the cake - tendrils of new ornamentation blossomed. Transpositions were uncovered which revealed how parts had been adjusted for specific singers. Original versions might also shrink - for instance the entr'actes of Pelleas et Mélisande were added to facilitate scene-changes. Now that it is all done with lights, they could be dispensed with. It could be argued that it speeded the drama but speed is not exactly the point of that opera and no one had complained that the interludes were hack-work or spoiled the atmosphere.
So collectors of Excerpts discs must have seemed a stubborn cheese-paring lot. Come the great throw-out, when buying was done by the armful for pennies not pounds, one might cheerfully pick up Highlights records but the problem remains of what to do with them. When does anyone think they feel in the mood for Don Giovanni but just for a concentrated hour it it? If you going to have an hour or so of Wagner, why not choose a complete act rather than the bleeding chunks? If you enjoy the work the fading in and out will be annoying and if you don't, then everything except the gaps will be.
Wagner himself seems to have realised that he needed to educate audiences gradually. The so-called bleeding chunks had their wounds dressed and bandaged with alternative Concert Endings. For a long time, Wagner was more often talked about than heard. Piano arrangements of morsels were the usual way to familiarise yourself with new music before the gramophone arrived. Yet everyone agreed that Wagner needed the orchestra to make his full effect. It was good to have a few voices too. It became the norm for any series of concerts to have a Wagner Night. It might include a whole act of a work or be made up of scenes. Appetites being hearty in those days, it could last two hours or more. The short length of 78 rpm sides made Wagner operas prohibitively expensive and there were usually cuts, more or less substantial. When LP and Stereo came along, Wagner became a major selling-point. Even so, old hands in the record business - notably EMI's Walter Legge - thought such large scores were uncommercial. If Furtwängler had not died in 1954, it seems likely we would have had a complete studio-recorded mono Ring Cycle from HMV. As it was, the project stopped with Die Walküre and the gauntlet was taken up and completed in the stereo era by Decca under Solti.
Way back in the seventies, the Decca company started putting out whole boxed sets made up of opera excerpts from their back catalogue. They promised with the help of accompanying booklets and separately published books to offer an introduction to the history of opera. There was a certain cunning in the fact that in this context they could plunder not just complete sets but bring in overtures from purely orchestral discs and odd arias from recital discs. So you could hear delights such as arias from La Donna del Lago or Paride ed Elena which might whet the appetite in vain - there wasn't any more of the score available. On the other hand, it might turn out that some historical necessity was represented by an inferior or ancient account. I am dubious of the education value of these compilations but they did seem attractive to the fledgling collector. Probably Decca had been inspired by EMI's The Enjoyment of Opera on two sampler discs from 1969. This was very bitty.
Still, Schwarzkopf's experiment seems to unique. No one on a single disc has essayed The Countess and Susanna and Cherubino since, I think.
Today the me-me-me generation seem to be horribly satisfied with snatches from this and that so long as it is smeared over with the allure of a personality. Even worse, the listener may expect that the music is there to reflect his or her own mood, no longer to take them on a journey or an exploration. I was once assured by someone anxious to establish his operatic credentials that he was always playing Madama Butterfly on his way to work. I doubt if he meant all of it or even sections by installment. The notion of One Fine Day as a daily routine makes me queasy but I'm weird I suppose in hating all background music. Barenboim took up this theme recently in a lecture, objecting especially to the appropriation of the classics as superior lift-music.
It will annoy people who think they are doing something artistic to be told that they aren't doing it properly or not really doing it at all. Who am I to tell consumers how they should use the products they have bought? But when I see someone putting sugar in a glass of wine it does not spoil my drink at all. I do think they might have been happier with Ribena from the start. The pretention is in the way the word Classic has become worthless, applied to any trash of any era that is not up to the minute. There are many children who simply never come into contact with real classical music. Not even the names of Mozart and Beethoven are known to them, they are so enveloped in pop-culture.
The Readers Digest pioneered the mass-marketing of books in condensed form in the post-WWII period. Their own editorial practices were applied with evangelical zeal, using guidelines which had been drawn from psychology. They knew just how much the average Joe could stomach. As the name suggests, the philosophy was based firmly around the attention-span of the average reader and the underlying assumption was that writers were an indigestible lot. The stuff they came out with was henceforth to be regarded as raw material. The nasty tanins, bitter matter, bile, roughage and padding was to be mechanically filtered out, the underlying goodness was to be boiled down and the whole thing represented to the grateful mass market in convenient cube form.
Music was next. Harnessing the powers of mail-order, the RD organization would sponsor massive new recording projects, using the latest technology, in partnership with RCA. Many were more or less straight package deals, offering good value. You could buy the Beethoven Symphonies under Leibowitz, the Rachmaninov Piano Concertos with Earl Wild. They licensed existing records of Barbirolli, Toscanini. Meanwhile they employed top producer Charles Gerhardt to mastermind new sessions, producing dozens of excellent recordings in record studios in Paris, London and Vienna. These were the flagship issues and they showed a commitment to quality. These flagship issues represented the statistic of self-improvement. You could invite the majesty of Beethoven into your own lounge. Spread between your speakers would be the world's greatest orchestras. The aspiration could be filled as easily as the coupon. In ten days, the records would be yours to keep as long as you kept up the payments. Was listening to Beethoven as easy as filling in the coupon, however? Maybe not. After a few nibbles, the discs may remain untouched for years. Like religion, art was something you might find a bit heavy-going yourself but its atmosphere was good for the kids. The great thing about the family encyclopaedia was that the kids seemed to keep their grubby fingers off it.
At the same time, the company was applying its psychologiocal profiles to the middle-brow market-place. If towering masterpieces were things we might climb when we got the time and energy, our more daily needs were perceived to be something less disturbing than art was prone to be. The profilers were set to work creating Mood Music for Listening and Relaxation. Each track of a twenty-minute record side was graded to avoid jarring the consumer. You might pass through a succession of gently varied moods - tempo, rhythm, scoring would be adjusted to suit a curve. It did not preclude the lively but it made dead sure that your liveliness was manageable. This was the Piat d'Or approach: you ask why more people are not drinking red wine and you come up with the answer tanin. So you take it out.
At the time, from the way the company boasted about its work in the Mood Music field, it seems with its explicit psychology element to be both sinister and innocent. As an exercise in social engineering, it seemed to wear the striped jersey of evil enterprise with its mad professor air of boffinism and charts and tests. Were there electrodes on heads? There ought to have been, along with a stroboscope and a revolving spiral.
Now nobody bats an eyelid at the piles of pre-digested pabulum on the market. Nor is it just fodder. Fodder has no pretentions. It is piled high and sold cheap and it is essentially unsorted. There will be acres of junk but among the junk some gems. Biting into an old fish-head and finding a ring is quite an experience. You may grow teeth from grazing on fodder but never from sucking pulp through a straw. So I have more patience with the piffle in the poundstore bin than I have with the piffle at the multiplex. There is at least the chance of something half good at the poundstore. Anyway, the fun is in the hunting and gathering.
The trouble is that I think the bug does need to bite early. Late arrivals seem to stay on the nursery slopes for ever. I suspect it is the same with big books: the appetite for starting them seems to have gone. Overcoming that hurdle is difficult.