"Why on earth," a friend asked me the other day, "are you so fascinated by all these historical recordings?" He'd arrived at my flat to find me absorbed in a performance of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, recorded live at London's Mermaid theatre in 1951 and featuring Kirsten Flagstad as Dido. Through the hiss and crackle of tape or acetate, the great soprano's voice soared into the room, intoning Dido's lament with a combination of stately gravity and tremendous emotional veracity. In an age of fierce demands for authenticity, the performance itself - slow, grand and deploying a large-ish orchestra of anything but period instruments - would be considered by some to be hopelessly old-fashioned. Yet the beauty and truth of Flagstad's singing, as far as I was concerned, was sweeping such fashionable considerations aside.
The classical CD market is, at present, awash with issues of historical live recordings. All over Europe, the US and South America, sound archives are being opened and their contents are being placed before the public. Some of those performances are already familiar from the years when many classical music fans, myself included, went bootleg hunting, acquiring rare treasures at what were often bank-breaking prices. Others, like that Dido, are finally obtaining their first commercial release. At a time when so many critics are arguing that the major classical recording companies are in crisis, labels such as Naxos Historical, Walhall, Andante and Music and Arts are finally allowing us to hear performances that previous generations of listeners considered legendary.
If you want to know why the Bulgarian soprano Ljuba Welitsch was considered as definitive as Strauss's Salome, you can now hear her in the role in its entirety, whereas before all you could get were commercially recorded extracts. If you want to know what the great German conductor Erich Kleiber got up to during his long wartime exile in Argentina, you can now find out. Think of a dream Wagnerian cast assembled from the mythical greats of yesteryear, and the chances are you can now find something that approximates it, somewhere.
On many occasions, of course, you have to make allowances, above all when you're dealing with performances from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. The sound quality can vary from the adequate to the barbaric, and some will doubtless consider it not worth their while to battle with tape hiss, distortion, pops and crackles in order to get to listen to examples of past greatness. Ideas of authenticity and completeness were also comparatively rare at the time, and it sometimes comes as a shock, particularly with operatic issues, that many of the performances that sent previous generations of listeners into a frenzy were drastically cut, Wagner's operas included.
Is it all simply an exercise in nostalgia? Are we hankering after a putative "golden age" of performance in the belief, mistaken or otherwise, that standards in classical music are in decline, and that "they simply just don't make them like that any more"? In some respects, perhaps we are, but in others, I think not. Some standards have unquestionably declined in the past few decades, Wagner singing above all. In other areas, notably the 17th and 18th century repertoires, modern recordings have unquestionably opened our ears and minds to remarkable music that many of us never even knew existed, let alone heard.
Yet I find myself returning to many of these historical issues more and more. They allow us, it is true, to re-evaluate musical history. Above all, however, they uniquely capture the thrill of live classical music-making with all the risk and danger that implies, all of which is something that no studio recording, however exciting, can ultimately replicate. I wouldn't want to be without Erich Kleiber's Wagner or his Beethoven, or without Fritz Reiner conducting Strauss's operas, and countless other recordings that continue to amaze me. Am I alone in this? And, if you've been bitten by the historical recording bug, which performances make you feel the same way?
