Inside the EMI Archives
Simon Heighes visits the recording world’s Fort Knox
In 1890 the gramophone was just a toy; in 1900 a commercial possibility; by 1904 a household name. Its meteoric rise and lasting success owed everything to the pioneering Gramophone Company which, from 1898, produced the records that everyone wanted to hear. And we still can today, because they kept copies of everything they sold, from early prototypes and the launch of the HMV label in 1909, to the formation of EMI in 1931 and beyond. Today, this precious archive – documenting the first half-century of recording – is cared for by the charitable EMI Archive Trust at Hayes in Middlesex. Rightly, they guard these treasures with their lives.
I’m given directions to an anonymous culde-sac surrounded by fortified fencing with no more than a tiny EMI logo on the gate to indicate what lies beyond. I expect my instructions to self-destruct in 30 seconds, but after orders from the intercom not to take photos, the gate swings open revealing a series of unremarkable, low-slung brick buildings. The architecture may be deliberately discreet, but my welcome is genuinely warm, as I’m met by a wave of enthusiasm from the team of archivists who’ve offered to give me the grand tour.
It’s all very Tutankhamun’s tomb. As we go beyond the great double doors there’s a drop in temperature, the ceiling height soars away dramatically, and we enter a series of regal chambers, their walls lined with… conservation shelving and climate-controlled cabinets. While taking in the enormity of it all – three football pitches – head archivist Joanna Hughes intones the sacred statistics: the world’s largest collection of 305,000 pristine shellac 78s and 67,000 original metal masters, hundreds of thousands of unique photos, 300,000 sales catalogues, detailed files on all recording artists, company papers and a museum filled with ‘wonderful things’ (as Howard Carter said of Tutankhamen’s treasury): the royal microphone used by
George VI, historic recording equipment and the gramophone taken to the Antarctic by Scott in 1910 (see box, p59). Just the tip of the iceberg.
But this is no tomb; it’s a living archive kept fresh with scholarly discoveries, donations and funding from EMI’S successor – Universal Music Group. A decade ago Universal itself suffered a disastrous fire at its main archive in the US, and although their losses were kept secret until this year, the lessons learned have long been put into practice at here in Hayes. State-of-theart security and fire systems are in operation, recordings are kept at an optimal 18 degrees and a programme of digitisation and dissemination is underway. They’re precautions which also protect the hundreds of thousands of priceless recordings made since the end of World War II, still in commercial ownership and kept alongside the Archive (shhh… I’ve been told not to talk about these).
But I do have permission to explore the miles of Archive shelving stretching back to the 1890s, and where better to start than song. The first generation of singers to step in front of the acoustic recording horn learned their craft when
Verdi was at his peak and Puccini was getting into his stride. Adelina Patti first sang in public in 1851 and was almost 63 when she made her first recordings. The Archive not only has a perfect set of her 30-or-so 78s, but also many of the original metal masters used to produce the likes of ‘Voi che sapete’ from Mozart’s Figaro recorded by
Fred Gaisberg, the first great sound engineer, at Patti’s palatial residence in Wales in 1905. With diva-esque iron will, she decreed that her records should be adorned with pink labels and sell for the vast sum of £1 – and in those days 78s were only recorded on one side.
In the cool darkness of the Archive’s sensible shelving Patti’s pink-hearted discs seem to gloat
‘‘ State-of-theart security and UH V\VWHPV DUH in operation, and recordings are kept at an optimal 18 degrees ’’
over the more restrained labelling of her rivals. But though clothed in standard black and gold, Mahler’s one-time girlfriend – the magnificent Selma Kurz – boasts a metre more shelf space and a character strong enough to be seen in the very grooves themselves: her infamously long, intense trills drilling deep into the hard-black shellac. The arrival of electrical recording in 1925 captured even more character from the expansive voices of Kirsten Flagstad and Kathleen Ferrier – Flagstad’s Tristan und Isolde with Wilhelm Furtwängler surely one of the greatest operatic treasures in any archive.
But from the chorus of singers on these hallowed shelves one voice rises above all
In 1902, producer Fred Gaisberg finally cornered Caruso in his Milan hotel room
others. Enrico Caruso was the gramophone’s first superstar, uniting artist and machine in a well-timed, symbiotic relationship in which each increased the popularity of the other. In one hand I’m holding a stack of the ten small records where it all began – the absolute core of the Archive. In April 1902, the ever-persuasive producer Fred Gaisberg finally cornered Caruso in his Milan hotel room, paying him the princely sum of £100 to record ten arias. They make compulsive listening, as Caruso rattles them off brilliantly without rehearsal or inhibition, encouraging his cautious colleagues to follow in his footsteps and in one breath creating a mass market for recordings.
Here, at the top of my Caruso pile, is the first record to sell a million copies – ‘Vesti la giubba’ from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. I own a copy myself, though it’s completely worn out. The grooves of the Archive copy look freshly minted, and they could be again, direct from the original metal stampers which have survived here for so many of Caruso’s recordings. There are virgin labels too, supplying vital information long rubbed off commercial copies. The label of Caruso’s 1902 ‘Amor ti vieta’ from Giordano’s Fedora reveals that the accompanist is none other than Giordano himself, and that Caruso first sang this aria when he ‘created’ the role of Loris at the opera’s premiere in 1898.
The Archive is full of ‘creator’ recordings like this which offer extraordinary insights into performance history. Among the earliest I’ve found, from around 1901, are several tiny seven-inch records of Tchaikovsky’s favourite tenor Nikolay Figner and his wife Medea singing arias he wrote for them in The Queen of Spades. But greatest of all is Francesco Tamagno – the original voice of Verdi’s Otello – dying exquisitely in ‘Niun mi tema’ recorded just 16 years after the opera’s first performance. The emotion of Otello’s cry ‘Ah morta, morta, morta’ has never sounded so elemental: tortured on the second ‘morta’, hollow and lingering on the third. Recognised on its release in 1903 as one of the most important records yet made, it remains one of the Archive’s most evocative gems. But
not the most curious. That accolade belongs to Alessandro Moreschi, recorded by Fred Gaisberg at the Vatican in 1902. Moreschi was the last castrato, who sang his way into extinction with the ‘Crucifixus’ from Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle, combining the power of a man with the range of a woman and purity of a boy.
While voices generally recorded well with the simple acoustic techniques used before electrical recording arrived in 1925, the piano was always problematic. I’ve found a Gramophone Company catalogue of 1899 which freely admits that ‘One of our greatest difficulties… has been to get a satisfactory piano record’. Leafing through the comprehensive collection of record catalogues, it’s fascinating to read plugs for ‘new’ and ‘improved’ techniques for capturing the piano’s elusive harmonics. The effort clearly paid off, as pianists were soon signed up in their droves – today the Archive’s shelves are fat with the artistry of Edwin Fischer and Alfred Cortot, plus Ignacy Jan Paderewski in his great Chopin performances of 1911.
Like pianos, orchestras were also hard to record, but that didn’t stop German conductor Artur Nikisch from attempting the impossible in 1913 when he made the first complete recording of Beethoven’s Fifth with a major orchestra – the Berlin Philharmonic. In my hands it certainly feels like a weighty achievement: I’ve pulled eight heavy 12-inch shellac records off the shelves, and from the dates on their sleeves it seems that in 1913 Beethoven lovers had to be very patient indeed, as the records were dribbled out at the tortuous rate of one a month.
From the mid-1920s onwards, with electrical recording and sensitive microphones, orchestral recordings by major orchestras became the record industry’s mainstay, and the Archive
‘‘ Elgar’s final act was to surprise a recording of highlights from Caractacus by telephone from his death bed ’’
holds a priceless trove of the finest European and US orchestras recording the great orchestral warhorses – many for the first time – under the batons of an international roster of conductors: from Nikisch, Toscanini, Koussevitsky, Böhm and Furtwängler to the home-grown talent of Boult, Barbirolli and Beecham. The Archive even preserves early experimental stereo recordings made by Alan Blumlein in 1934 during Beecham’s mono sessions for Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony with the LPO. As I lift them from their padded box, they’re not the heavy shellac of a 78 but a revolutionary light plastic of sorts – decades ahead of the vinyl LP.
This is an archive of reputations: democratic shelves on which the great rub shoulders with the mediocre and forgotten. Inevitably some names endure above all others, and coming face-toface with them along these chilled halls of fame is thrilling. Meet Grieg in 1903 dashing off his piano miniature Au Printemps, and Brahms’s violinist Joachim playing his friend’s second Hungarian Dance. In 1904 we come across Debussy accompanying his Mélisande, Mary Garden, in the Ariettes Oubliées, while in another studio Saint-saëns gives us his Second Piano Concerto. In 1932 we can join Prokofiev and the LSO for the first recording of his Third Piano Concerto; three years later Rachmaninov is the soloist in the premiere of his Paganini Rhapsody; and in 1941 Richard Strauss presides over the first complete performance of his Alpine Symphony.
Composers conducting their own works will always fascinate, and no other composer of his time so fully embraced the studio as Elgar. For 20 years from 1914 to 1934 he worked with Fred Gaisberg and the Gramophone Company to record (and re-record) all his major orchestral works. Indeed, his final act was to supervise a recording of highlights from Caractacus by telephone link from his death bed. From the Pomp and Circumstance Marches of 1914, Gerontius live in the Albert Hall in 1927, through to the legendary recording of the Violin Concerto with Yehudi Menuhin in 1932, Elgar’s recordings are preserved here at the EMI Archive –perhaps their single most precious legacy.