The recorded century

Here an orchestra accompanies Caruso. On this Victor side the instruments can sustain a phrase beneath his voice, where Cottone’s piano had to strike each note and let it decay. Canio begins with the outburst of the recitative, then orders himself into his costume. In Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, the audience has paid and expects to laugh, and the performer must turn his own tears into the clown’s grimaces. Caruso sings the command on long vowels. The orchestra plays beneath him as the melody broadens.

On 10 November 1913, Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic recorded Beethoven’s Fifth. Recording an orchestra acoustically called for special measures. Stroh string instruments, fitted with aluminium horns, reinforced the ordinary strings and directed their sound towards the recording horn. Nikisch also had to fit the music on the disc. At his broad tempo, the exposition repeat of the first movement would have overrun the first side, so he left it out, and the exposition is heard only once.

Paderewski recorded Chopin’s F♯ major Nocturne in New York on 14 May 1917. His hands often play separately: the accompaniment sounds first and the melody follows it. Chords can be spread from bottom to top. In his essay for Henry T. Finck’s Success in Music and How It Is Won (1909), Paderewski rejected, for soloists, the rule that time borrowed in one phrase must be paid back in another: “What is lost is lost.” Chopin’s doppio movimento doubles the pace for the middle section.

Rachmaninoff recorded the Prelude for Edison in 1919; it was a piece he had brought with him from Russia. The Diamond Disc was issued to buyers in December 1920. The excerpt begins at the Agitato, where triplets carry the tune towards the return of the opening chords. The score sets that return out on four staves, although only two hands are playing. The chords then die away into the quiet coda, and the last sounds are widely spaced.

Two years later, Rachmaninoff recorded the Prelude again, for Victor. The studio still recorded through a horn. The quick central passage follows the quiet opening and drives towards the familiar chords, here recorded on another day by another company. He presses the triplets forwards and still gives the returning chords ample room. In this performance the chordal return is already close when the excerpt begins. After it, in the coda, the hands move apart and the dynamic falls to quiet.

By the time Rachmaninoff returned to the Prelude in New York on 4 April 1928, Victor had changed its machinery. A microphone turned the piano’s sound into an electrical signal, and amplification supplied the energy to drive the cutting stylus. Victor and Columbia had introduced the process commercially in 1925; it captured a wider range of sound. The issued performance was take 23. Rachmaninoff had written the piece, with its triplets and heavy chords, thirty-six years earlier. It ends with a quiet coda.

On 10 October 1921, at Hayes, Chaliapin recorded Rimsky-⁠Korsakov’s The Prophet, with Percy Pitt conducting the orchestra. Pushkin’s poem of 1826 begins with a thirsty wanderer in a dark desert. A six-winged angel opens his eyes and ears, tears out his tongue and replaces his heart with a burning coal. The bass narrates these events before delivering God’s command. The opening is measured and close to speech. At the end the score is marked con forza e maestoso, forcefully and majestically.

On 20 October 1927 Chaliapin recorded The Prophet in London with Albert Coates, six years after the acoustic side with Percy Pitt. In this electrical recording he sings Pushkin’s text again and takes more time over the whole song. There are quiet orchestral passages between the main vocal declamations. In the last section God commands the remade man to cross seas and lands and set human hearts alight with his words. Chaliapin sings this command above a busy accompaniment. After his last syllable the orchestra continues to the final chords.