Awesome-ness!

Each recorded from this copy I grabbed from our clearance bin on my way out the door last night. It’s been there – priced 50¢ – for weeks.

The Victor Talking Machine Company is inseparable from the history of recorded sound and records. They were not the originator of flat records (that would be the Berliner Gramophone Company), but they were an influential technological innovator. The records they made included some of the earliest “super hits” as well as recordings that are still enjoyed by millions today. The company was purchased by the Radio Corporation of America in 1929, creating the RCA/Victor label you’re familiar with because of your large collection of Ames Brothers recordings.

6 – The first million-seller!

In 1904 Enrico Caruso recorded an aria from Ruggero Leoncavello’s opera Pagliacci which became the first record to sell a million copies. One must have found its way into the home of William “Smokey” Robinson, who twice made reference to Pagliacci in classic Motown hit (his own “Tears of A Clown” and “My Smile is Just a Frown Turned Upside Down,” which he wrote for Carolyn Crawford).

This is an example of early acoustic recording, predating the use of electric microphones. As a a result the frequency range is greatly limited compared to recordings Caruso would make later in his career.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

5 – Fritz Kreisler is a great composer as well as a performer

Violinist Fritz Kreisler is commonly regarded as one of the greatest violinists of all time, and his encores were said to be sublime. Three of his original pieces, collectively called Alt-Wiener Tanzweisen, remain popular today, especially “Libenfreud” (heard here) and “Leibesleid.” Kreisler originally attributed them to Austrian composer Joseph Lanner. In September 1910 he copyrighted them in his own name.

It was not until 1935 that Kreisler claimed credit for the many encores he had attributed to other composers. In response to criticism, he said, “the names changed. The value remains.”

Kreisler recorded with famed composer Sergei Rachmaninoff in 1928 (performing Beethoven’s Sonata no. 8 in G Major). Rachmaninoff transcribed two of Kreisler’s Alt-Wiener Tanzweisen melodies for piano and recorded them himself in 1931.

The performance of “Leibenfreud” you hear below was recorded in 1915.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

4 – Sergei Rachmaninoff himself performing his famous prelude

Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude in C Sharp Minor” is so popular as to be recognizable far outside the world of classical music. Paul Revere and the Raiders and Ekseption based classic rock tunes on it. The Beastie Boys and Blackalicious sampled it. Charles Mingus weaved it into the jazz standard “All the Things You Are” in his composition “All the Things You C#”. Harpo Marx played it with such passion in A Day at the Races that the piano explodes.

Rachmaninoff first performed the prelude in 1892 at the Moscow Electrical Exhibit. He was nineteen years old. He recorded it for Victor thirty-six years later, which is the recording you are hearing below.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

3 – Harry Belafonte introduces America to Jamaican music

In a performance that he would follow him for the rest of his life, folk singer Harry Belafonte sang “The Banana Boat Song” with its distinctive “Day-O” chorus on NBC’s Colgate Comedy Hour. The following year his third album for RCA/Victor, Calypso, became the first LP to sell more than a million copies. Although “Day-O” (as it was called on the original album) was a traditional Jamaican song and not a calypso number, the balance of the album introduced Americans to a favorite new form of music.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

2 – Arturo Toscanini brings the classics right into America’s living room

Arturo Toscanini was born in Italy but beloved in the United States, where he was one of the most famous conductors of his time. The notes to 60 Years of “Music America Loves Best” says that Toscanini was initially adverse to “mechanical music” (ie recordings), but he became, through television and radio, one of the most innovative classical performers of his generation by introducing the classic repertoire to millions in an accessible way without compromising integrity.

Toscanini made all but a handful of his recordings for RCA/Victor, who last spring issued an astounding 84-disc box set compiling his work (actually an affordable $120 on Amazon). He is known for his precision and many of his recordings are still highly regarded. This writer is particular fond of his recordings of Beethoven’s symphonies and of the great 19th century operas, especially Verdi. Many of his recordings lack the warmth of concert hall recordings because the NBC studio where they were made was intended primarily for television broadcast, not classical music (this is true of his Beethoven’s 9th for sure), but the performances are outstanding. Toscanini performed the premiere of many operas, notably the 1892 debut of Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavello, which was discussed in our first selection up above.

In the late 40s, Toscanini pioneered the performance of lengthy pieces on live television. These performances were simultaneously broadcast on the radio. Included in his series of ten productions for NBC were the first televised presentation of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, and a complete performance of Guiseppe Verdi’s Aida (featuring Herva Nelli and Richard Tucker). This recording of Wagner’s Prelude from Act III of “Lohengrin” was the first of these televised specials, an all Wagner program broadcast on March 20, 1948. For many people all over the country, this was the closest they would ever come to enjoying a world class performance of the classics.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

1 – Marian Anderson defies the Daughters of the American Revolution

Marian Anderson, born in 1897 in Philadelphia, is often misrepresented as an opera singer. While she did often include arias in concert, she was almost entirely a concert performer. She was the first African-American to perform at the Metropolitan Opera, sang at two Presidential inaugurations, and christened a nuclear submarine.

In 1939 the Daughters of the American Revolution refused Anderson permission to perform to an integrated audience in their Constitution Hall (in Washington DC), bringing Anderson into an unexpected international spotlight. President Roosevelt and Walter White, the secretary of the NAACP, orchestrated a performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, 1939. The performance attended by 75,000 people and heard by millions over the airwaves. Anderson began the program with “My Country tis of Thee.” Also performed was this recording of Schubert’s moving “Ave Maria,” one of the seven songs the twenty-eight year old Schubert based on Walter Scott’s epic poem, The Lady in the Lake in 1825.

An alternate scoring of this piece (for a full chorus) was recorded by Leopold Stokowski the next year and used by Walt Disney in Fantasia, and has become one of the most familiar recordings, but Anderson’s performance that Easter Sunday was surely remembered by each of the millions who listened.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(The famous image of Nipper the dog looking into the cone of a Victor Talking Machine is itself the subject of a long history. Nipper was an actual dog who lived in Bristol, England and bit the ankles of visitors (hence the name) and died in 1895. Francis Barraud, his owner, painted a picture of him looking into an Edison-Bell cylinder phonograph. After being rejected by the Edison-Bell company as a potential logo (actual quote: “Dogs don’t listen to phonographs”) the painting was purchased by the Victor company and their English counterpart, HMV, and registered as a trademark in 1900.

I am entirely done trying to get Irene to pose like this.)