There are lots of books and guides to the current Classical Scene but they deal with historic material only to the extent that it is available. How can we get information on older records that may not been reissued?
© James Beswick Whitehead, 1999, revised 2001
Publications are geared to markets and serious collectors of old records are a pretty small market. Compiling new Guides to old material is time consuming and uneconomic. There are many newsletters attached to dealerships but enthusiasts should first investigate the Classic Record Collector, previously International Classical Record Collector, a quarterly small-format publication originally from The Gramophone stable, but recently published by a company called Orpheus. Typically it prints articles by industry insiders, recalling the careers of notable performers and the histories of labels. Any given issue may seem limited in its coverage but such ongoing publications are accumulative in their effect as references.
Numerous enthusiasts produce newsletters and small publications as labours of love, normally to promote some cherished artist and his or her works. A great deal of general information about the state of the industry can be gleaned from these sources. The Internet is now the medium of choice for easy distribution of discographies, a subject that will be tackled at greater length in due course. Suffice it to say that these initiatives depend on the generosity and resources of their contributors. There are some Web resources which do much to validate the claims for the Web as an unparalleled medium for the free sharing of information. Again, the enterprise of individuals means that coverage of some areas is first rate, while vast fields remain untouched. As the cost of accessing and publishing information electronically seems to spiral ever downwards, it requires only willpower and a certain selectivity to prevent us drowning in a sea of piffle.
We look forward to the day when whole catalogues of historic material appear in searchable forms on the Web. Until then, the collector is driven back to materials contemporary with his finds to help place them in the context that has fallen away. As accompanying materials are often non-existent, sparse or downright misleading, the collector often finds himself in the position of a digger with a barrow full of interesting fragments. Hopefully not in pieces. It sometimes takes an act of imagination to see that a grubby object was once a technological miracle. With contemporary reviews, price-lists and historical data, however, the relic can be made to speak in more ways than one.
The earliest publications about the talking machine were entirely commercial and trade leaflets. Indeed the earliest methods of making and remaking titles by having the artists repeat their songs into banks of recording horns seems to have mitigated against performances becoming definitive or sought after. Not that the artists were names to conjure with. To a large extent the early gramophone parallels the film industry in its production of fodder rather than celebrities. Novelty numbers, hymns, march-tunes and dances were sold as impulse purchases from dealers, who were typically selling bicycles as their main trade. Such ephemera as survives from the pre-celebrity era documents a social phenomenon. The records themselves are the incunabula of the gramophone and endlessly curious. Like Roman lamps, however, they create no great stir when found.
The conventional date for the onset of the Celebrity Catalogue is the unauthorized offer of £100 by Gaisberg for the voice of Caruso in 1902. Then there was Tamagno, Melba, Patti, all at prices strictly for the carriage trade. Such records became fixtures: obtained at a high price, they were kept at high prices as objects of aspiration. These premium products could not help but add lustre to the long lists of bread and butter records that sold day in and day out. Publicity was the lifeblood of the Celebrity System, flattering the Talent and appetizing the public. In those early days the Star System was at its most blatant: the more celebrities on a record, the more you had to pay. Pieces such as the Rigoletto Quartet and the Lucia Sextet were the dearest records on the market. The Sextet, with a choice of two line-ups of soloists, headed the 1914 HMV Catalogue priced at 30 shillings for a single sided 12" disc. All Tamagno's records were kept at the special price of £1 each, whatever their diameter. It is well known that early 78 rpm discs were rarely recorded at that exact speed. The early catalogues routinely give the speeds at which discs were to be played. Modern experts on the voice routinely dismiss these figures as guesses. Occasionally other data in the old catalogues is helpful in giving authors of words or music, when the early labels sometimes offered neither. The quaint flavour of the prose used to describe their latest wares can be startling: I have not elsewhere found the word cloying used as a compliment.
Dealers' Literature increases with the size of the catalogues, which are now available to the public. The Trade has its Numerical Lists for stock-keeping and reordering purposes. When they turn up, these are useful to ascertain which records were routinely stocked and which obtained to special order. We are here in the area of ephemera and survival of such materials in good order is against all odds. More likely to survive were the lavishly bound publications such as the Opera at Home handbooks, published in the UK by HMV, but based on the Victor originals. This weighty item turns up in various editions with moderate frequency as it was unlikely to be thrown out. It says a lot for its sound conception that it is still useful today, when listening to miscellaneous operatic recitals. It gives synopses of the operas and describes the chief arias and purple patches, giving numbers of the relevant records to order. It is a pleasing thing to note when the list includes the very Tetrazzini or Chaliapine you are playing. Such a handbook went some way to answering the needs of the listener in those days when records were mainly supplied in plain cardboard covers. This division between supply of recordings and supplying a context for them is a theme that echoes down the years. Today we have the phenomenon of libretti costing more than the CDs and only rarely have manufacturer's experimented with supply of scores.
Independent surveys of available records emerge in America, where the diversity of makers made an overview more necessary. In the UK, after the depression, there was really only one game in town for the classical collector, even if EMI was divided into competing HMV, Columbia & Parlophone-Odeon catalogues. Darrell's Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia, several editions, 1936 onwards, came as the name implies from The Gramophone Shop, a New York dealership. More monumental, David Hall's 1,400 page The Record Book International Edition came out of New York in 1948. Offering comment and assessment as well as listings of current and deleted material, it set the model for The Record Guide, its UK equivalent, which first came out in 1950, in time to list the earliest LPs in an appendix. The body of the first edition Record Guide is entirely given to 78s. Year Books in 1952 and 1953 cover the rapid filling out of the LP catalogue, while the second edition of 1955 is pretty much the standard and very substantial reference for the mono LP. Modern readers may be surprised by some of the comments and the lack of our own fixation with the past. Out with the old, was the cry and the industry responded with an avalanche of issues which overcame the best efforts of The Record Guide and The WERM compilers to keep abreast. Handling them now, both these publications appeared to assume that a more or less permanent body of post-war material would establish itself as firmly as the standard 78 rpm sets of the 1930s. In retrospect, for collectors, they were indeed documenting a rich harvest, whose full value could hardly be appreciated at once. But by the time of the last WERM in 1955 and the slim 1956 supplement to the second Record Guide, the companies were already gearing up to remake their catalogues for the Stereo Age.
When a Stereo Record Guide emerged in 1960, out of the background of Ivan March's Long Playing Record Library, comments were restricted to the performances and recording quality, leaving aside the relative merits of the works recorded. In various formats this standard team of reviewers led by the industrious Edward Greenfield have awarded three stars to more or less every recording ever made. These days the catalogue could be viewed as an ever shifting ocean made up of hardy perennials in their latest digital incarnations together with issues of the blink and you miss them variety. The industry is painted as a confused fur coated dame, learning to enjoy life without knickers. Enterprising independents have used the dearth of undisputed premium Talent to reimpose repetoire-led marketing of fodder at pocket-money prices. It is beginning to look as if the collector was never altogether taken in by the Celebrity system, but tolerated it so long as there were real stars.
The voice of the collector has seldom been solicited. The question of what on earth people actually do with all the records they buy is one we shall get around to in due course. Periodicals hardly pretend to champion the collector as a being with needs in any way opposed to the Industry. Securing expensive paid advertising takes precedence over frankness in reviewing to such an extent that a quizzical eyebrow is likely to be raised at expectations of anything other. Even so, there is no substitute for back issues of magazines as documenting the character of the Industry at any given time. Long runs of The Gramophone or Records & Recording etc. can often be obtained for little more than the cost of arranging to collect them. To house them, you will need files or binders, as they will not survive in decent condition for long if well used. Avoid, if possible, the versions bound without advertisements, as these lose much of the period flavour. Essential as a guide to finding reviews is a parallel run of the Gramophone Classical Catalogue. Recent versions are accurate but fairly expensive to buy new. Older issues were notorious for their errors and omissions, often falling down when most needed. The best way to date new acquisitions is by finding closely related serial numbers you have already dated, but this is a tall order until a good start has been made. The Vinyl Dating Assistant is currently in development and will be expanded over the next year to include landmark issues from as many companies and series as possible.
Other publications that have been found especially useful for identifying records and dates are as follows:
Voices of the Past, from the Oakwood Press, numerous volumes devoted to full listings of issues from the main companies of the 78 rpm period. Photographically reproduced from typescript pages and erratic with dates, these are indispensable when compiling discographies. Artist Indexing is included.
The Gramophone Book, W. W. Johnson, 1954. Issued by the National Federation of Gramophone Societies, contains full listings of recording artists in the early days of LP and many curious facts.
Music on Record, 4 vols, Hutchinson, 1963. A less well known guide to the recorded repertoire in the LP and early stereo era. Written by Peter Gammond with Burnett James and Malcolm Rayment, rather along the lines of the Record Guide, though with less gravitas. Approximate dates of issue are given, though these can be misleading as to recording date.
Company Catalogues. Especially useful are the thick pre-war HMV catalogues that represent the state of play before the deletions axe began to fall. The Historic Catalogue Supplement gives many dates but, like speeds, they have often been considered very approximate in the light of better information. Quite why a company should be wrong about its own products I do not know. Modern discographers prefer to take their data from logs of recording activity, where they survive. Artist portraits and brief biographies were included in the pre-war editions.
Gramophone Records of the First World War. Catalogues from the First War period are not commonly found, but an essential volume for the shellac addict must be the reprinted Wartime HMV Catalogues, edited by Brian Rust and issued by David & Charles, 1974, as Gramophone Records of the First World War. This is now something of a rarity in itself. The contemporary puffs for the new records in the Supplements bring home just how foreign the past can be. Some fragrant gems of this prose will appear in due course on this site as we get established.
WERM. 3 vols, 1950 - 1955, Referred to above is properly the World's Encyclopedia of Recorded Music. By the solicitor-clergyman combination of Clough and Cuming. Essentially a vast scissors and paste undertaking from company lists and catalogues. Listings in WERM famously do not mean that the records ever saw the light of day. An extraordinary number of typological symbols made WERM a happy hunting ground for errata. Quixotic but strangely appealing, considering it is just a listing of works, performers and numbers. It is a much rarer bird than the Record Guide and I have only the third volume, 1953 - 1955, called the Supplement. The main body of the work covered electrically recorded 78s. Connoisseurs of the ever-so-slightly mad have long prized the tabular analyses of the various records of the Tchaikovsky Ballets as a joy in themselves, quite regardless of their usefulness. Even at the time, I imagine that was minimal.
Old sheet music may help supply dates of works, and those who neglected their piano practice will understand the strange allure of the lists of other titles on the backs and inside covers. Musicological data can be derived from such famous assemblies of programme notes as those by Tovey, Rosa Newmarch and others. More specialized publications devoted to recorded artists include such well known volumes as The Toscanini Legacy by Spike Hughes and The Grand Tradition by John Steane. More often, discographies are included as supplements or afterthoughts to biographies of singers and conductors. Some are excellent, others so incomplete as to be nearly useless. A complete discography of Maggie Teyte was more than I expected from her biography, but Barbirolli deserved better than a listing of just his HMV discs. The gap between records and their contexts remains often as wide as ever. As this site develops I hope to give a jump-list to the best discographic efforts on the Web. First rate resources exist for many of the conductors we would expect, such as Furtwängler and Bruno Walter and some we might not, such as the complete concerts of Celibidache. Huge gaps remain and inside knowledge is at a premium in this field. The really monumental efforts on the Web seem to have been established early and diligently pursued. Anyone who has acquired an opera without a libretto will have reason to thank the contributors to the Opera Glass page, while Emily Ezust's astounding collection of Song Texts and Translations will restore anyone's faith in the power of this new medium to spread the best as well as the worst things our culture has to offer.
© James Beswick Whitehead, 1999, rev. 2001