HIS MASTER'S VOICE

How Fred Gaisberg from America made EMI into a world name and how Classical Music became popular listening.

by Glen Quick

In an earlier article in Faure News, I wrote about the origin of the Gramophone and the great legal battles between various contenders for the name of the machine that everybody aspired to own. I described how Emil Berliner, who invented the flat record eventually lost out to Eldridge Johnston, the man who made the spring motors and how the gramophone quickly defeated the Edison cylinder Phonograph. This time I want to write about Fred Gaisberg, the amateur pianist who was the first employee of Emil Berliner and who set up the first recording studio in Europe.

Now just to remind ourselves who was who and what was what, the “Phonograph” was the inspired invention of Thomas Edison who chanced across its operating principle in 1877 when he was looking for a way to speed up the transmission of Morse code. Edison’s phonograph worked by cutting grooves in a cylinder of tin-foil and his original patent was granted in February 1878. At about the same time, a French inventor named Charles Cros described a similar idea but his idea was described in a scientific paper. Although Edison was 3 months behind Cros in discovering the principle, by the autumn of 1877, Edison had actually made a crude phonograph while that of Charles Cros was still only an idea on paper. Edison lost interest in the phonograph for a time, going on to invent a form of electric lighting. He sold the idea to the Bell Laboratories and it was researchers there who converted Edison’s tin-foil cylinder to the wax cylinder.

Emile Berliner you will recall was next on the scene. He was born in Germany and arrived in the USA at the age of 19. Berliner was something of a scientific dabbler and made an improved telephone transmitter which he sold to the Bell Company for a large sum of money. He then became interested in the Phonograph and spent the rest of his life working on the development of the flat circular records that we still use as Compact Discs. One of Berliner’s first employees was Fred Gaisberg. Fred had worked for the Columbia Company making cylinder records one by one as a pianist, recordist and general rouseabout. The Berliner company went perilously close to bankruptcy but their business policies differed from those of Edison. Whereas Edison saw the phonograph as either a fairground attraction or an office Dictaphone, the Berliner company went straight away for home entertainment.

And so it was that Fred Gaisberg opened the first recording studio in 1897 in rooms over a shoe shop in Philadelphia. Later that year they had a studio in New York and William Barry Owens, a representative was on his way to start up the business in London. By December 1897, a syndicate of investors had been formed in London under the leadership of Trevor Williams; a London solicitor. They insisted that the company, at that stage called 'The Gramophone and Typewriter Company', had to sell records made in Europe by European artists. This was not what Owens and Berliner had intended. They wanted to make records and players in the USA and send them to Europe for sale. However, the London investors were insistent and in July 1898, Fred Gaisberg left the USA with a complete recording studio.

On the 8th of August 1898, Fred Gaisberg made his first record in Europe. He used the clarinettist from the orchestra of the Trocadero hotel; where he had had dinner on his first evening in London. Fred Umsbach was the clarinet player and he played Mendelssohn’s 'Spring Song'. Among Gaisberg's first recordings in London were several made by Syria Lamonte, an Australian singer working at Rules Restaurant in Maiden Lane.

The bulk of the early recordings were of music hall artists as these sold readily. However, right from the beginning, the 'Gramophone & Typewriter Company' [G & T Records] adopted the practice of recording classical music. By 1900, the G & T had a catalogue of over 5000 recordings. These were grouped into English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh and so on.

They had also bought the painting of a little dog called 'Nipper' with a gramophone from the artist, Francis Barraud. He actually had painted it with a cylinder Phonograph and came along to the London showrooms to borrow a Gramophone so that he could paint out the Phonograph and paint a Gramophone on top of it. Even then, it was obvious that the Gramophone was winning over the Phonograph. It was 1909 before G & T decided to use the painting as a marketing tool with the trade name, 'His Masters Voice' [HMV].

These early records were on seven inch masters and played for less than two minutes at about seventy-eight revolutions per minute. Back then, the English trade unions were feared by the G & T owners so the actual production plant for the records was built at Hannover in Germany where the workers were more docile. Until the plant was finished, records were sent over from America in huge quantities because the Gramophone had already become a 'must have' household item. In those early years, the company was very profitable.

Early in 1899, a representative of Edison arrived in Paris to record artists for the cylinder phonograph machines. The Gramophone & Typewriter Company could not be outdone and so Fred Gaisberg was sent to the continent to make records. In December 1901, they were recording singers of the Imperial Russian Opera in St. Petersburg and two Russian merchants had opened a very luxurious shop with potted palms and red plush chairs on the Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg. The Russians took the gramophone very seriously and until the 1917 revolution, Russia was the biggest market for records that G & T and later HMV ever had.

Fred Gaisberg travelled all over Europe with a large number of boxes holding his recording equipment and lots of spare wax recording blanks. Arriving in a new town, he would take a room at the hotel and ask who were the most popular local singers, accordionists, comedians etc and they would all come in to record. They couldn't hear a playback as that would destroy the waxes so the recorded wax blanks were sent off to Hannover to be made into the brittle 78rpm shellac discs. Before he left the town, Fred would conclude a distribution agreement with a local shopkeeper, often an ironmonger [today’s hardware store] and months later, a consignment of gramophone machines would arrive together with the discs of the locally recorded artists. Everybody with money or a pretence to being socially advanced would rush off and buy a machine and all of the local discs.

Now what happens when you’ve played ten times all of the discs you’ve just bought on your expensive new gramophone? You go back to the shop and ask what else they have available. Now here’s where that catalogue of over 5000 titles came in. The most popular items in the catalogue were the short classical pieces and especially operatic arias and these were ordered in and the socially advanced acquired a new status because they could skite about their knowledge of classical music and opera. Remember, this was long before radio and TV and long before people travelled any distance more than a few kilometres from their home town.

Fred Gaisberg's first visit to Milan created an overwhelming impression on him. He saw the great tenor Francesco Tamagno; then near the end of his career; after a fine performance of 'Il Trovatore', carried to his hotel by the crowd which then demonstrated until he came out to the balcony and sang 'De quella pira' for them. Tamagno had been chosen by Verdi in 1887 to create the role of 'Otello.' In 1903, Fred Gaisberg persuaded Tamagno to come out of retirement and record fragments of “Otello” for the Gramophone. Tamagno insisted that his records be sold at the top price and they were sold for a pound each. Tamagno’s share was four shillings per record but HMV prospered and the gramophone improved its prestige.

The operatic super star of the day was without doubt, the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso who had not yet started his international career. Fred Gaisberg was in Milan in March 1902 and Caruso agreed to record 10 arias in an afternoon for the huge sum of £100.00. Fred cabled London for instructions and was told quite firmly that the company could not afford such an exorbitant amount. Young Fred Gaisberg however had so much faith in his own judgement, that he disregarded the instruction and made the records.

Fred Gaisberg and his brother, Will, who was working with him by then, carried the precious masters from that first session in their arms all the way to the to the factory in Germany. By the time Caruso made his debut at Covent Garden in London in May 1903, the next year, the records had recouped the original outlay many times over. Long afterwards, Fred Gaisberg heard that the company made a profit of £15,000.00 on the outlay of that original £100.00. Just how good was the great Enrico Caruso though? A few years ago, the American computer scientist, Dr Thomas Stockam applied the very latest signal enhancement techniques to some of Caruso’s records and those recordings are still available on CD. He was very good indeed.

Incidentally, the manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York heard Caruso in London and was desperate to get him for the Met. His board of Directors would not hear of it because of the expense. He took back to New York, a set of the company’s Caruso records and so the great tenor’s first Metropolitan season came about. By the time he died in 1921, Caruso had made over $2 million from his recordings alone.

In September 1902, Fred Gaisberg set out on the adventure of his life. The object was to establish new markets, record new artists and set up a chain of distributors in India and the Far East. Fred had a helper and there was a business manager and the manager's wife. They recorded in India, Burma, China and Japan and the trip lasted 11 months. The recorded waxes were sent back for pressing and when they came back to the country of origin, they arrived with machines to play them on. Naturally, the owners of record players moved on to buy records of western music and so the world-wide market for western music was established.

In May 1903, the English Gramophone Company reached an agreement on exchanging masters with the American parent company which was to last until the 1950's. This vastly increased the catalogue and profitability in both Europe and America.

The greatest artistic difficulty that faced the infant gramophone was the reluctance of established artists to record. Fred Gaisberg persuaded the 27 year old Conductor and Pianist, Landon Ronald to be Musical Adviser. He went on to be HMV’s and later EMI’s principal talent scout, accompanist and conductor until his death nearly 40 years later.

Nellie Melba was the female equivalent of Caruso. Landon Ronald had long pursued her to get her to agree to make recordings. Finally, in March 1904, she consented to make some test records in the drawing room of Melba’s mansion in Great Cumberland Place in London. Nellie Melba was to be made a Dame of the British Empire in 1918 but she was only Madam Melba when that record was made in 1904. She drove a hard bargain and she was paid £1000.00 immediately with a royalty of five shillings per record. To top it off, she had a special label which no other artist was allowed to use. Nevertheless, her records sold very well until the days of the Long Playing records and still have historical interest.

While Melba was proceeding with her prima donna performance, another young Australian, Peter Dawson from East Adelaide was starting a most unusual career. He had made a couple of cylinders for a rival company before he came to the notice of Fred Gaisberg. Even then, at first, his main studio activity was imitating the Scotsman, Harry Lauder under the name of Hector Grant. He was soon recording under his own name and for fifty-four years, his main activity was making recordings. His concert work was always secondary to his recording work because he had a voice that ideally suited the studio. The Guinness book of records estimates that he recorded at least 1300 separate titles under many different names and had sold more than 25 million discs by the start of the Long Playing era. He was one of the super-stars of the early recording industry.

Recording orchestras was very difficult in the days before electric recording methods. Because the lower frequencies didn’t record well, most orchestras were made up of the most unusual combinations and numbers of players and all standing in very awkward positions around the recording horn. In 1913, the Gramophone Company made a landmark recording in Berlin of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under its musical director, Arthur Nikisch. In spite of all the problems, this recording was considered to be a great success and in the years that followed, a lot of orchestral music came to be recorded.

Despite the success of symphonic recording, the company's major efforts went into recording singers because people could afford to buy single records. No-one but the wealthiest could afford to buy symphonies, let alone whole operas or oratorios. It was not until after the Second World War and the advent of the long-playing record that people could afford to buy long works for their own collections. As a consequence, it was the singers who had the high salaries and the super-star ratings in the first quarter of this century. It's mostly been the famous conductors who have had that position since. The soprano Adelina Patti was a star much greater than Melba and had already retired as Baroness Cederström to her castle in Wales when she recorded a number of arias in 1905. Patti was born in Madrid in 1843 and was a star for fifty years. The Gramophone Company took its equipment to Wales and recorded twenty-one titles in December 1905 and a further 9 titles in June 1906. They were sold for £0.21/- and made a huge hit for the company with special advertising saying 'Patti is here today.' Fred Gaisberg said later that she was the only real diva that he was to record.

World War 1 had a devastating effect on EMI. Not only did they lose their factories in Hannover, Germany and Riga, Latvia [which supplied the huge Russian market], they also lost their markets in Russia. It’s surprising today but, the biggest single market for records in the world before the First World War was Russia. All that disappeared in the Russian revolution. The Riga plant had been transferred to Russia and then vandalised during the revolution. After the war, the EMI German plant and all their masters in Germany were lost to the parent company in a series of complicated legal manoeuvres which saw Deutsches Grammophon or DGG use the HMV logo and HMV had to start again in 1925 and became the foreign competition under the trade name of Electrola. EMI did not get the Little Nipper logo back in Germany until they purchased it from DGG in 1949.

In addition to recording a lot of opera stars, the record industry took on the task of educating the public. Perhaps the most ambitious of all these projects was the 'Victor Book of Opera'. This was first published in 1912 in the United States and sold for 75 cents. It went through many editions and played a large part in providing the kind of educated listener who was not a trained musician. In April 1923, an English writer, Compton Mackenzie, started the magazine, “The Gramophone”. This was a new type of publication that was intended for the non-specialist listener whose involvement with music came only through the medium of the record. It’s still going and I have been buying and reading it for over 56 years now.

World War 1 brought about a lot of research into what was called 'wireless telephony.' After the war, this research turned to commercial ends and the era of radio broadcasting began. By 1924, it looked as though the end was near for the gramophone. Despite shortcomings in the quality of radio broadcasts, a live performance over the radio sounded better than the best acoustic recording. Experiments with electrical recording were under way in both England and the USA and in March 1925, the Victor Talking Machine Company signed a contract to use the electrical system patented by the Bell Laboratories. The other companies followed because by then, radio was sweeping all before it. It was agreed between the companies to keep the change secret while they recorded a new catalogue. The new recordings came on the market at the end of 1925.

Famous Recordings

Profits returned to the record companies and apart from the great depression of the early 1930's, for the next 20 years or so, the flow of records dwarfed anything before. The new electrical process allowed recordings to be made away from the studios and the acoustics of locations were captured in a way not possible before.

A typical example occurred in April 1927 when a mobile recording van made one of the best-selling records of all time. The treble, Master Ernest Lough recorded in the Temple church in London with the resident organist, Dr. George Thalben-Hall. 'Oh for the wings of a dove' from Mendelssohn's 'Hear My Prayer' made sales go through the roof. The metal master wore out in the first six months, and the record had to be made again. The Temple Church became so popular that they had to issue admission tickets for the Sunday service and royalties enabled the choir to be paid a bonus and found a scholarship.

It's curious how some records take on a life of their own. The 'Nun's Chorus', from the operetta, 'Casanova” by Strauss. Anni Frind recorded it in Berlin in 1928. Released in England in 1932, it didn't sell particularly well and disappeared from the catalogue. In 1948, the BBC broadcast it, sales took off and it still sells.

No survey of the music between the wars would be complete without mentioning the tenor, Richard Tauber. Tauber was one of those singers who was equally at home in opera, musical comedy and popular ballads. The composer Franz Lehar had had a great success in the early 1900’s with operettas such as 'The Merry Widow' and 'The Count of Luxembourg.' Lehar's career had been stationary for some years until Tauber came along with his stylish singing and Viennese accent. The record industry brought about a resurgence of interest in Lehar’s music.

With the modern popularity of Jazz and other popular music, it's interesting to note that it simply did not feature in the early history of recording. The first ever Jazz recording was not made until 1917 when a white New Orleans band called the Original Dixieland Jass Band beat all the superior Southland black bands to it. The ODJB were a raucous but lively five-piece influenced by the sound of Louis Armstrong’s mentor, King Oliver's New Orleans groups. In 1917, following a successful New York run, the band cut tracks in the Victor studios that sold massively and launched a global jazz craze.

The Great Depression and the Society Issues

In 1929, came the great depression. This devastated sales and a great many record companies disappeared or were forced to amalgamate. In England, the Columbia Company had bought control of a number of European companies in the 1920s but by 1931, Columbia was bankrupt. The only way out was to merge with the richer Gramophone Company which had been trading under the name of 'His Master's Voice” since 1909. The merger occurred in 1931 and from then on, the only competition in Europe was the German Deutsche Grammophon Company. The merged 'His Master's Voice' and 'Columbia' companies traded as 'Electrical and Musical Industries' or EMI.

In the USA, radio defeated the gramophone for some years. From about 1931 to 1936, virtually no classical records were made in the USA. This was not the case in Europe. Perhaps the smaller individual markets brought about by language barriers helped. In 1931 in England, Walter Legge was a young writer of sleeve notes for EMI. He put an idea to management that would keep classical music in the catalogues and ensured his immortality. Legge thought he could form “Societies” where members subscribed to the making and issuing of records of classical music not in the catalogue. His first project was a “Hugo Wolf” society. Each subscriber had to pay 30 shillings up front and 500 subscribers were needed to make the scheme work. Fred Gaisberg, by then the Artists & Repertoire [A & R] man for EMI supported the idea and so he commissioned the first set of recordings before the “Wolf Society Issue” was fully subscribed. Six albums of songs sung by the soprano Elena Gerhardt were recorded and issued with full texts of the words in German and sleeve notes by the great critic Ernest Newman. Improbable as it seems, the scheme worked and led to the formation of other Societies.

Another Society was the Beethoven Society that had as its goal, the recording of all of the Piano Sonatas. For this project, the company engaged the little-known German, Artur Schnabel. Schnabel was a professor at the Berlin Hochschule and had been engaged by Malcolm Sargent on the recommendation of Bruno Walter to play Beethoven sonatas for the Courtauld-Sargent Concerts of 1931 in London. The concerts were very successful with music lovers sitting in the Queen’s Hall night after night with the scores on their knees. The recording of the sonatas was wildly successful with the first volume of 7 records appearing in 1932. Three years and 3 volumes later, HMV reported that the public had spent £80,000 around the world with £24,000 being subscribed in England alone.

In 1932, Alan Blumlein, an EMI engineer invented and patented a system of stereo recording. The company made a number of experimental recordings with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham but these were never issued. There were technical difficulties and it was not possible to make recordings that were good enough with the equipment available at the time. Stereo recording was once again to cause the entire catalogue to be re-recorded when it was eventually introduced during the 1960s.

The American recording industry virtually stopped recording classical artists during the early 1930s. EMI survived the depression quite well with the society issues but many of the biggest names in the United States came to England to make records. Jascha Heifetz lost a fortune in the stock market crash and pleaded with EMI to sign him up. After that, he became an EMI artist.

The list of famous artists goes on and on. Just think of Feodor Chaliapin, the most famous Russian bass of his day. He occupies a position similar to that of Caruso in the galaxy of tenors. There were outstanding violinists recorded. You have only to think of Josef Szigetti, Nathan Milstein, Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz, David Oistrakh and so on. One of the most enduring is without doubt, Yehudi Menuhin. A child prodigy, he was 16 years old when he recorded the Elgar violin concerto in 1932 with the 75 year old Elgar conducting in the new Abbey Road Studios of EMI, later to achieve fame when the Beatles appeared on a record cover walking across the zebra crossing in front of the Abbey Road studios. These studios in St. John’s Wood in London were the first in the world to be built especially for recording and in 2010, were granted Grade 2 listed protection status when the financially troubled EMI put them up for sale.

More Gramophone Triumphs

In England, Mozart was regarded as something of a museum piece until the Mozart Society recordings came along. The Glyndebourne Opera opened in 1934 and set extraordinarily high standards. EMI made the first ever complete recordings of Mozart operas The rediscovery of the harpsichord came with the rediscovery of Bach. Wanda Landowska was born in Poland in 1879 and passionately pursued 17th and 18th century performing traditions. She recorded Bach's 'Goldberg Variations' in 1934 bringing the harpsichord once again to a world-wide audience. Albert Schweitzer performed a similar act for the Bach organ.

Arturo Toscanini is still a legendary conductor. Very short-sighted, he had to learn his scores by heart enhancing his concentration on the composer's intentions. He was intolerant of sloppy playing and hated the recording process with its 4minute takes. The late Joan Hammond is regarded as an Australian although she was born in New Zealand. She was a great favourite with English audiences and her most famous record, 'O My Beloved Father' from Puccini's opera, 'Gianni Schichi' was recorded as a filler to 'Love and Music' from 'Tosca' on the other side. Its sales earned her a gold record.

The Long Playing Record

The end of the Second World War brought about great changes to the record industry. The Germans had developed tape recording to a high level in the late 1930’s and allied intelligence officers were astonished throughout the war when they heard hours of high quality classical music broadcast by German radio that was not live and not coming from 78rpm records. In England, the Decca Company profited from its wartime Admiralty research into recording and reproducing high audio frequencies [ffrr recordings].

In the USA, the Columbia Record Company had been working on the Long Playing Record and launched it in early 1948. RCA Victor tried to launch the 45 rpm record but by 1949, the new standards were in place. The 45rpm record became the standard for pops while classical music, recorded on tape recorders in long takes, was then sold to the public on Long Playing Records running at 33 1/3 revs per minute.

This in turn led to the rise of a new generation of Hi Fi constructors, equipment companies and listeners. It also led to the recording of hitherto neglected composers whose works were very long such as Mahler and Bruckner and to the recording of many more operas. The public bought them in large numbers and played them on their new high fidelity systems.

Astonishingly, EMI decided to have nothing to do with the new LP system. Encouraged by Walter Legge and Sir Compton Mackenzie in the 'Gramophone' magazine, they stayed with 78 rpm records until 1952. In England, the much smaller Decca Company had grown to rival EMI because of its ffrr sound superiority and new artists. By then EMI’s sales had fallen and the innovative companies such as Decca had taken a large market share.

Although EMI recorded on tape from about 1949 onwards, they issued their records on 78 records. In 1951, they went to the first Bayreuth Festival after the war and recorded Wagner’s “Die Meistersingers” on tape and issued it in the largest set of 78’s ever released. It came out on 34 separate records. Not surprisingly, they changed to Long Playing records shortly afterwards.

And what of Fred Gaisberg and his pioneering efforts?

Well Fred eventually retired in 1939 and having never married because he travelled so much, lived with his sister in Hampstead doing occasional recording projects right up until he died. Having had a bad heart for more than fifteen years, Fred Gaisberg died in his sleep on the second of September 1951, aged 78. He befriended artists and coaxed them through their fears, illnesses and tantrums without ever getting stressed. He was the first ever Artist & Repertoire Manager and an EMI company man without peer; one on whom all later aspirants for the role of A & R man should model their career.

Glen Quick

With acknowledgement to 'A Matter of Records' by Jerrold Northrop Moore and 'The Fabulous Phonograph' by Roland Gelatt.

 

Return to list of Glen Quick's Musical Notes