John Culshaw
Encyclopedia
John Royds Culshaw OBE (28 May 192427 April 1980) was a pioneering English classical
record producer
for Decca Records
. He recorded a wide range of music, but is best known for masterminding the first studio recording of Wagner
's Der Ring des Nibelungen
, begun in 1958.
Largely self-educated musically, Culshaw worked for Decca from the age of 22, first writing album liner notes and then becoming a producer. After a brief period working for Capitol Records
, Culshaw returned to Decca in 1955 and began planning to record the Ring cycle, employing the new stereophonic technique to produce recordings of unprecedented realism and impact. He disliked live recordings from opera houses, and sought to put on disc specially made studio recordings that would bring the operas fully to life in the listener's mind. In addition to his Wagner recordings, he supervised a series of recordings of the works of Benjamin Britten
, with the composer as conductor or pianist, and recordings of operas by Verdi
, Richard Strauss
and others.
Culshaw left Decca in 1967 and was appointed head of music programmes for BBC Television
, where he remained until 1975, employing a series of innovations to bring classical music to the television viewer. He later undertook several academic posts. However, he remains best remembered for his Decca records. Along with Fred Gaisberg
and Walter Legge
, he was one of the most influential producers of classical recordings. The Times
said of him that "he stood in that great tradition of propagandists from Henry Wood
to Leonard Bernstein
, who seek to bring their love and knowledge of music to the widest audience."
, Lancashire
, one of at least two children of Percy Ellis Culshaw, a bank inspector, and his first wife, Dorothy née Royds. He was educated first at Merchant Taylors' School
, Crosby
, which he despised for its snobbery and its sports-obsessed philistinism. His father then sent him to King George V Grammar School
, Southport. When he left school in 1940, aged 16, he followed his father into the staff of the Midland Bank
as a clerk, working at a branch in Liverpool
. He had little aptitude or liking for banking, failing to pass the company's examination in banking theory, and in 1941 he volunteered to join the Fleet Air Arm
as soon as he reached the minimum recruitment age in May 1942. He trained as a navigator, was commissioned as an officer, and promoted to lieutenant as a radar instructor. This post left him with a great deal of spare time, which he devoted to his passionate interest in music.
Apart from piano lessons as a child, Culshaw was self-taught musically, and had no ambitions to be a performer. The critic Richard Osborne wrote of him, "Like many people for whom music is an obsession, Culshaw was a lonely and meticulous person, jealously guarding the sense of personal integrity which his precocious interest in music had helped form and deepen." While in the Fleet Air Arm, Culshaw "wrote articles on music by the dozen and – quite rightly – they came back by the dozen." After many rejections, his first substantial article to be accepted for publication was a piece on Rachmaninov
, for The Gramophone, published in March 1945. This led to invitations to broadcast musical talks for the BBC
and to contribute articles to classical music magazines.
recording company in November 1946, writing musical analyses and biographies of recording artists for Decca's classical albums. His first book, a short biography of Rachmaninov, was published in 1949 and was well-received. The critic of The Times
praised it for its discriminating judgment, conciseness and discretion. It was followed by two further books; a popular introduction to concertos (The Concerto in "The World of Music" series in 1949), and a guide to modern music (A Century of Music in 1952).
By 1947 Culshaw had been given the chance to produce classical sessions for Decca's rapidly expanding catalogue. At Decca, the musicians whom he recorded included Ida Haendel
, Eileen Joyce
, Kathleen Ferrier
and Clifford Curzon
. In 1948 he first worked with Georg Solti
, a pianist and aspiring conductor. In 1950, after the introduction of the long-playing record
(LP), he produced the first LP versions of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company
.
In 1951, Culshaw and one of Decca's senior engineers, Kenneth Wilkinson
, were sent to the Bayreuth Festival
to record Wagner's Parsifal. For Culshaw, Wagner was an abiding passion, and he persuaded Decca and the Bayreuth management to let him record that year's Ring cycle
in addition to Parsifal. The Ring recording could not be released, probably for contractual reasons. The Parsifal recording, on the other hand, was released to great acclaim in 1952. The Decca team returned to Bayreuth to record the 1953 performances of Lohengrin
. The resultant recording was well reviewed, but Culshaw wrote of it:
. As Capitol at that time had commercial ties with Decca, Culshaw's move did not estrange him from the head of Decca, Edward Lewis
, who generally took a dim view when his employees left Decca to join its competitors. Culshaw found his attempts to build up a roster of classical artists for Capitol frustrated by bureaucracy at the company's headquarters in Los Angeles
. He was prevented from encouraging the soprano Kirsten Flagstad
to emerge from retirement, or from signing the conductor Otto Klemperer
. The latter misjudgment, as Culshaw noted in his memoirs, was not repeated by Walter Legge
of EMI
, who signed Klemperer up with great artistic and commercial success. Capitol further frustrated Culshaw by ignoring the impending introduction of stereophony which the major companies were working on. Among the recordings Culshaw was able to make for Capitol were a Brahms Requiem conducted by Solti in Frankfurt
, and what Peter Martland in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls "a series of remarkable recordings of performances by Eduard van Beinum
and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam."
In early 1955, Lewis warned Culshaw that he had heard rumours that Capitol was on the point of severing its ties with Decca. Within days it was announced that Capitol had been taken over by EMI. Capitol sessions already booked were completed, including two records of Jacques Ibert
conducting his own works, but EMI made it clear that it would put an end to Capitol's classical activity, which was regarded as superfluous. Lewis invited Culshaw to rejoin Decca, which he did in the autumn of 1955.
Culshaw hoped to record Die Walküre
with Flagstad, whom he persuaded out of retirement, as Brünnhilde. Flagstad, however, was over sixty, and would not agree to sing the whole opera. To capture as much of her Wagner as she was willing to record, Culshaw produced separate sets of parts of the opera in 1957. Act 1 was conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch
with Flagstad in the role of Sieglinde; in the other set the "Todesverkundigung" scene from Act 2 and the whole of Act 3 were conducted by Solti with Flagstad as Brünnhilde. In those early years of stereo, Culshaw worked with Pierre Monteux
in recordings of Stravinsky
and Ravel
, and with Solti in a recording of Richard Strauss
's Arabella
. He also recorded the first of many New Year's Day concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic and Willi Boskovsky
.
By 1958 Decca, with its pre-eminent technical team (The Times
called them "Decca's incomparable engineers") was in a position to embark on a complete studio recording of Wagner's Ring
cycle. Decca decided to begin its cycle with Das Rheingold
, the shortest of the four Ring operas. It was recorded in 1958 and released in the spring of 1959. Culshaw engaged Solti, the Vienna Philharmonic and a cast of established Wagner singers. The performance won enthusiastic praise from reviewers, and the engineers were generally acknowledged to have surpassed themselves. The Gramophone described the recording quality as "stupendous" and called the set "wonderful … surpass[ing] anything done before." To the astonishment and envy of Decca's rivals the set outsold popular music releases such as those of Elvis Presley
and Pat Boone
. The cast included Flagstad in one of her last recorded performances, in the role of Fricka, which she had never sung on stage. Culshaw hoped to record her as Fricka in Die Walküre and Waltraute in Götterdämmerung
, but her health did not permit it. His cast for the remaining three Ring operas included Birgit Nilsson
, Hans Hotter
, Gottlob Frick
, Wolfgang Windgassen
, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
and Régine Crespin
, with even minor roles sung by such stars as Joan Sutherland
.
In these productions Culshaw put into practice his belief that a properly-made sound recording should create what he called "a theatre of the mind". He disliked live recordings such as those attempted at Bayreuth; to him they were technically flawed and, crucially, were merely sound recordings of a theatrical performance. He sought to make recordings that compensated for the lack of the visual element by subtle production techniques, impossible in live recordings, that conjured up the action in the listener's head.
Culshaw took unprecedented pains to meet Wagner's musical requirements. Where in Das Rheingold the score calls for eighteen anvils to be hammered during two brief orchestral interludes – an instruction never followed in opera houses – Culshaw arranged for eighteen anvils to be hired and hammered. Similarly, where Wagner called for steerhorns
, Culshaw arranged for them to be used instead of the trombones habitually substituted at Bayreuth and other opera houses. In The Gramophone, Edward Greenfield wrote:
In 1967, after the Decca Ring was complete, Culshaw wrote a memoir, Ring Resounding, about the making of the recording. In 1999, Gramophone ran a poll of its readers to find "the ten greatest recordings ever made." The Decca Ring topped the poll.
Culshaw produced a series of Decca recordings of Britten
's music with the composer as conductor or pianist. The Times described them as "a priceless heritage for posterity." Culshaw thought that of all his recordings that of Britten's War Requiem
was the finest. Greenfield says of it, "another recording which confounded the record world not just by its technical brilliance but by the way it sold in huge quantities." The recording was made in London in 1963, the year after the premiere of the Requiem at the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral
. For the recording Culshaw managed to assemble the three singers whom Britten had in mind when writing the work, uniting Russian, German and English soloists to represent the former enemy nations – Galina Vishnevskaya
, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Peter Pears
. Culshaw wrote, "The happiest hours I have spent in any studio were with Ben, for the basic reason that it did not seem that we were trying to make records or video tapes; we were just trying to make music." Among the works Britten recorded with Culshaw were his operas including Peter Grimes
(released in 1959), Albert Herring
(1964), A Midsummer Night's Dream
(1967), and Billy Budd
(1968).
Culshaw produced many of the conductor Herbert von Karajan
's best-known operatic and orchestral sets, which remain in the catalogues four decades later. The opera sets include Tosca
, Carmen
, Aida
, Die Fledermaus
and Otello
; among the orchestral sets were Holst
's The Planets
and several Richard Strauss works including the then rarely heard Also sprach Zarathustra.
In the late 1950s Decca entered into a commercial partnership with RCA
, by which Decca teams recorded classical works in European venues on RCA's behalf. Among the recordings supervised by Culshaw for RCA were Sir Thomas Beecham
's lavishly re-orchestrated version of Handel
's Messiah
. Other artists with whom he worked for Decca and RCA included pianists such as Wilhelm Backhaus
, Arthur Rubinstein
and Julius Katchen
; conductors including Sir Adrian Boult
, Karl Böhm
, Fritz Reiner
, and George Szell
; and singers such as Carlo Bergonzi
, Jussi Björling
, Lisa Della Casa
, Leontyne Price
, and Renata Tebaldi
.
's head of music programmes. He inaugurated, and supervised several series of, André Previn's Music Night, in which Previn
would talk informally direct to camera and then turn and conduct the London Symphony Orchestra
(LSO), whose members were dressed not in evening clothes but in casual sweaters or shirts. The programme attracted unprecedented viewing figures for classical music; an historian of the orchestra wrote, "More British people heard the LSO play in Music Night in one week than in sixty-five years of LSO concerts." Culshaw also screened more formal concerts, including Klemperer's 1970 Beethoven symphony cycle from the Royal Festival Hall
. In 1973 BBC television broadcast a complete performance of Wagner's Siegfried
conducted by Reginald Goodall
, and in 1974 Verdi's Un ballo in maschera
from Covent Garden
. Culshaw also set up BBC studio productions of The Marriage of Figaro
, The Yeomen of the Guard
, The Flying Dutchman
and La traviata
.
Culshaw commissioned Britten's opera Owen Wingrave
, written expressly for television. He also persuaded Britten to conduct television productions of Peter Grimes
and Mozart's Idomeneo
, and to accompany Pears in Schubert's Winterreise
. Britten and Pears invited him to Snape
, not far from their base at Aldeburgh
in Suffolk
and he encouraged them to transform the Snape Maltings
into a concert-hall. He later initiated the Benson and Hedges music festival at Snape and was planning the fourth season at the time of his death. Some of his BBC programmes have been preserved on DVD, including films of the Amadeus Quartet
playing works by Schubert
and Britten. He took time off from the BBC to return to the recording studio, rejoining his old Decca engineering team in 1971 to produce Der Rosenkavalier
, conducted by Leonard Bernstein
.
In 1975, Culshaw left the BBC and worked freelance as a record and stage producer, writer and broadcaster. He was invited to serve on the Arts Council of Great Britain
in 1975 and was chairman of its music panel from 1975 to 1977. In 1977 he became a senior fellow in the creative arts at the University of Western Australia
, and was visiting professor at the University of Houston
, the University of Southern California
and the University of Melbourne
. He also took on the responsibility for the annual United Nations concert in New York, and acted as a music consultant to the Australian Broadcasting Commission. He frequently served as a commentator for broadcasts of
Metropolitan Opera
performances, and his 1976 book, Reflections on Wagner's "Ring", was based on the series of interval talks he gave during the broadcasts of the Met's Ring cycle in 1975.
Culshaw died in London in 1980, at the age of 55, from a rare form of hepatitis
. He was unmarried. His unfinished autobiography, Putting the Record Straight, was published after his death.
Among the honours given to Culshaw, The Times listed "eight Grands Prix des Disques, numerous Grammys and in 1966 an OBE", and the Vienna Philharmonic's Nicolai Medal in 1959 and its Schalk Medal in 1967.
as one of its books of the year in 1950. At the time of its publication he was working on a second novel. He gave it the title A Harder Thing, but was persuaded by his publisher to change it to A Place of Stone. It was published in 1951.
Culshaw's musical books were: Sergei Rachmaninov, 1948; The Concerto, 1949; A Century of Music, 1951; Ring Resounding: The Recording of Der Ring des Nibelungen, 1967; Reflections on Wagner's "Ring", 1976; Wagner: The Man and His Music, 1978; and Putting the Record Straight: The Autobiography of John Culshaw, 1981.
Classical music
Classical music is the art music produced in, or rooted in, the traditions of Western liturgical and secular music, encompassing a broad period from roughly the 11th century to present times...
record producer
Record producer
A record producer is an individual working within the music industry, whose job is to oversee and manage the recording of an artist's music...
for Decca Records
Decca Records
Decca Records began as a British record label established in 1929 by Edward Lewis. Its U.S. label was established in late 1934; however, owing to World War II, the link with the British company was broken for several decades....
. He recorded a wide range of music, but is best known for masterminding the first studio recording of Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
's Der Ring des Nibelungen
Der Ring des Nibelungen
Der Ring des Nibelungen is a cycle of four epic operas by the German composer Richard Wagner . The works are based loosely on characters from the Norse sagas and the Nibelungenlied...
, begun in 1958.
Largely self-educated musically, Culshaw worked for Decca from the age of 22, first writing album liner notes and then becoming a producer. After a brief period working for Capitol Records
Capitol Records
Capitol Records is a major United States based record label, formerly located in Los Angeles, but operating in New York City as part of Capitol Music Group. Its former headquarters building, the Capitol Tower, is a major landmark near the corner of Hollywood and Vine...
, Culshaw returned to Decca in 1955 and began planning to record the Ring cycle, employing the new stereophonic technique to produce recordings of unprecedented realism and impact. He disliked live recordings from opera houses, and sought to put on disc specially made studio recordings that would bring the operas fully to life in the listener's mind. In addition to his Wagner recordings, he supervised a series of recordings of the works of Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...
, with the composer as conductor or pianist, and recordings of operas by Verdi
Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century...
, Richard Strauss
Richard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems and orchestral works, such as Death and Transfiguration, Till...
and others.
Culshaw left Decca in 1967 and was appointed head of music programmes for BBC Television
BBC Television
BBC Television is a service of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The corporation, which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a Royal Charter since 1927, has produced television programmes from its own studios since 1932, although the start of its regular service of television...
, where he remained until 1975, employing a series of innovations to bring classical music to the television viewer. He later undertook several academic posts. However, he remains best remembered for his Decca records. Along with Fred Gaisberg
Fred Gaisberg
Frederick William Gaisberg was an American-born musician, recording engineer and one of the earliest classical music producers for the gramophone. He himself did not use the term 'producer' and was not an impresario like his protégé Walter Legge of EMI or an innovator like John Culshaw of Decca...
and Walter Legge
Walter Legge
Harry Walter Legge was an influential English classical record producer, most notably for EMI. His recordings include many sets later regarded as classics and reissued by EMI as "Great Recordings of the Century". He worked in the recording industry from 1927, combining this with the post of junior...
, he was one of the most influential producers of classical recordings. The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
said of him that "he stood in that great tradition of propagandists from Henry Wood
Henry Wood
Henry Wood was a British conductor.Henry Wood may also refer to:* Henry C. Wood , American Civil War Medal of Honor recipient* Henry Wood , English cricketer...
to Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim...
, who seek to bring their love and knowledge of music to the widest audience."
Early years
Culshaw was born in SouthportSouthport
Southport is a seaside town in the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton in Merseyside, England. During the 2001 census Southport was recorded as having a population of 90,336, making it the eleventh most populous settlement in North West England...
, Lancashire
Lancashire
Lancashire is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in the North West of England. It takes its name from the city of Lancaster, and is sometimes known as the County of Lancaster. Although Lancaster is still considered to be the county town, Lancashire County Council is based in Preston...
, one of at least two children of Percy Ellis Culshaw, a bank inspector, and his first wife, Dorothy née Royds. He was educated first at Merchant Taylors' School
Merchant Taylors' School, Crosby
Merchant Taylors' School, Crosby is a British independent school for day pupils, located in Great Crosby on Merseyside....
, Crosby
Crosby, Merseyside
Crosby is a town in the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton, in Merseyside, England. Historically part of Lancashire it is situated north of Bootle, south of Southport, Formby and west of Netherton-History:...
, which he despised for its snobbery and its sports-obsessed philistinism. His father then sent him to King George V Grammar School
King George V College
King George V College is a sixth form college in Southport, Merseyside, in the UK. It offers A-Level, BTEC and between 2009-2012 the International Baccalaureate Diploma. It was previously a grammar school for boys.-Brief history:...
, Southport. When he left school in 1940, aged 16, he followed his father into the staff of the Midland Bank
Midland Bank
Midland Bank Plc was one of the Big Four banking groups in the United Kingdom for most of the 20th century. It is now part of HSBC. The bank was founded as the Birmingham and Midland Bank in Union Street, Birmingham, England in August 1836...
as a clerk, working at a branch in Liverpool
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
. He had little aptitude or liking for banking, failing to pass the company's examination in banking theory, and in 1941 he volunteered to join the Fleet Air Arm
Fleet Air Arm
The Fleet Air Arm is the branch of the British Royal Navy responsible for the operation of naval aircraft. The Fleet Air Arm currently operates the AgustaWestland Merlin, Westland Sea King and Westland Lynx helicopters...
as soon as he reached the minimum recruitment age in May 1942. He trained as a navigator, was commissioned as an officer, and promoted to lieutenant as a radar instructor. This post left him with a great deal of spare time, which he devoted to his passionate interest in music.
Apart from piano lessons as a child, Culshaw was self-taught musically, and had no ambitions to be a performer. The critic Richard Osborne wrote of him, "Like many people for whom music is an obsession, Culshaw was a lonely and meticulous person, jealously guarding the sense of personal integrity which his precocious interest in music had helped form and deepen." While in the Fleet Air Arm, Culshaw "wrote articles on music by the dozen and – quite rightly – they came back by the dozen." After many rejections, his first substantial article to be accepted for publication was a piece on Rachmaninov
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music...
, for The Gramophone, published in March 1945. This led to invitations to broadcast musical talks for the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
and to contribute articles to classical music magazines.
Decca
After demobilisation from the forces, Culshaw joined the DeccaDecca Records
Decca Records began as a British record label established in 1929 by Edward Lewis. Its U.S. label was established in late 1934; however, owing to World War II, the link with the British company was broken for several decades....
recording company in November 1946, writing musical analyses and biographies of recording artists for Decca's classical albums. His first book, a short biography of Rachmaninov, was published in 1949 and was well-received. The critic of The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
praised it for its discriminating judgment, conciseness and discretion. It was followed by two further books; a popular introduction to concertos (The Concerto in "The World of Music" series in 1949), and a guide to modern music (A Century of Music in 1952).
By 1947 Culshaw had been given the chance to produce classical sessions for Decca's rapidly expanding catalogue. At Decca, the musicians whom he recorded included Ida Haendel
Ida Haendel
Ida Haendel, CBE is a British violinist of Polish birth.- Career :Ida Haendel was born in Chełm, a small city in Eastern Poland. She took up the violin at the age of three and as a seven-year-old was admitted at the Warsaw Conservatory. She later studied with Carl Flesch and George Enescu in Paris...
, Eileen Joyce
Eileen Joyce
Eileen Alannah Joyce CMG was an Australian pianist whose career spanned more than 30 years. She lived in England in her adult years....
, Kathleen Ferrier
Kathleen Ferrier
Kathleen Mary Ferrier CBE was an English contralto who achieved an international reputation as a stage, concert and recording artist, with a repertoire extending from folksong and popular ballads to the classical works of Bach, Brahms, Mahler and Elgar...
and Clifford Curzon
Clifford Curzon
Sir Clifford Michael Curzon, CBE was an English pianist.-Early life:Clifford Michael Siegenberg was born in London to Michael and Constance Mary Siegenberg...
. In 1948 he first worked with Georg Solti
Georg Solti
Sir Georg Solti, KBE, was a Hungarian-British orchestral and operatic conductor. He was a major classical recording artist, holding the record for having received the most Grammy Awards, having personally won 31 as a conductor, including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In addition to his...
, a pianist and aspiring conductor. In 1950, after the introduction of the long-playing record
LP record
The LP, or long-playing microgroove record, is a format for phonograph records, an analog sound storage medium. Introduced by Columbia Records in 1948, it was soon adopted as a new standard by the entire record industry...
(LP), he produced the first LP versions of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company
D'Oyly Carte Opera Company
The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company was a professional light opera company that staged Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy operas. The company performed nearly year-round in the UK and sometimes toured in Europe, North America and elsewhere, from the 1870s until it closed in 1982. It was revived in 1988 and...
.
In 1951, Culshaw and one of Decca's senior engineers, Kenneth Wilkinson
Kenneth Wilkinson
Kenneth Ernest Wilkinson was an audio engineer for Decca Records, known for engineering classical recordings with superb sound quality....
, were sent to the Bayreuth Festival
Bayreuth Festival
The Bayreuth Festival is a music festival held annually in Bayreuth, Germany, at which performances of operas by the 19th century German composer Richard Wagner are presented...
to record Wagner's Parsifal. For Culshaw, Wagner was an abiding passion, and he persuaded Decca and the Bayreuth management to let him record that year's Ring cycle
Der Ring des Nibelungen
Der Ring des Nibelungen is a cycle of four epic operas by the German composer Richard Wagner . The works are based loosely on characters from the Norse sagas and the Nibelungenlied...
in addition to Parsifal. The Ring recording could not be released, probably for contractual reasons. The Parsifal recording, on the other hand, was released to great acclaim in 1952. The Decca team returned to Bayreuth to record the 1953 performances of Lohengrin
Lohengrin (opera)
Lohengrin is a romantic opera in three acts composed and written by Richard Wagner, first performed in 1850. The story of the eponymous character is taken from medieval German romance, notably the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach and its sequel, Lohengrin, written by a different author, itself...
. The resultant recording was well reviewed, but Culshaw wrote of it:
… the cast was only of moderate ability, and we had access to far too few performances to make up anything really worth while. It was still felt that this was the only economic way to record Wagner, for the expense involved in taking his major works to the studio did not seem to be justified by the sales potential. But after the Lohengrin experience I found myself fervently hoping that I would never return to Bayreuth, at least in a recording capacity.
Capitol
From 1953 to 1955 Culshaw headed the European programme for Capitol RecordsCapitol Records
Capitol Records is a major United States based record label, formerly located in Los Angeles, but operating in New York City as part of Capitol Music Group. Its former headquarters building, the Capitol Tower, is a major landmark near the corner of Hollywood and Vine...
. As Capitol at that time had commercial ties with Decca, Culshaw's move did not estrange him from the head of Decca, Edward Lewis
Edward Lewis (Decca)
Sir Edward Roberts Lewis was an English businessman, best known for leading the Decca recording and technology group for five decades from 1929. He built the company up from nothing to one of the major record labels of the world.A financier by profession, Lewis was professionally engaged by the...
, who generally took a dim view when his employees left Decca to join its competitors. Culshaw found his attempts to build up a roster of classical artists for Capitol frustrated by bureaucracy at the company's headquarters in Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
. He was prevented from encouraging the soprano Kirsten Flagstad
Kirsten Flagstad
Kirsten Målfrid Flagstad was a Norwegian opera singer and a highly regarded Wagnerian soprano...
to emerge from retirement, or from signing the conductor Otto Klemperer
Otto Klemperer
Otto Klemperer was a German conductor and composer. He is widely regarded as one of the leading conductors of the 20th century.-Biography:Otto Klemperer was born in Breslau, Silesia Province, then in Germany...
. The latter misjudgment, as Culshaw noted in his memoirs, was not repeated by Walter Legge
Walter Legge
Harry Walter Legge was an influential English classical record producer, most notably for EMI. His recordings include many sets later regarded as classics and reissued by EMI as "Great Recordings of the Century". He worked in the recording industry from 1927, combining this with the post of junior...
of EMI
EMI
The EMI Group, also known as EMI Music or simply EMI, is a multinational music company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the fourth-largest business group and family of record labels in the recording industry and one of the "big four" record companies. EMI Group also has a major...
, who signed Klemperer up with great artistic and commercial success. Capitol further frustrated Culshaw by ignoring the impending introduction of stereophony which the major companies were working on. Among the recordings Culshaw was able to make for Capitol were a Brahms Requiem conducted by Solti in Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
, and what Peter Martland in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls "a series of remarkable recordings of performances by Eduard van Beinum
Eduard van Beinum
Eduard van Beinum was a Dutch conductor.-Biography:Beinum was born in Arnhem, Netherlands, where he received his first violin and piano lessons at an early age. He joined the Arnhem Orchestra as a violinist in 1918. His grandfather was conductor of a military band...
and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam."
In early 1955, Lewis warned Culshaw that he had heard rumours that Capitol was on the point of severing its ties with Decca. Within days it was announced that Capitol had been taken over by EMI. Capitol sessions already booked were completed, including two records of Jacques Ibert
Jacques Ibert
Jacques François Antoine Ibert was a French composer. Having studied music from an early age, he studied at the Paris Conservatoire and won its top prize, the Prix de Rome at his first attempt, despite studies interrupted by his service in World War I.Ibert pursued a successful composing career,...
conducting his own works, but EMI made it clear that it would put an end to Capitol's classical activity, which was regarded as superfluous. Lewis invited Culshaw to rejoin Decca, which he did in the autumn of 1955.
Stereo and the Decca Ring
Finding on his return to Decca that other recording producers were capably filling his former role, Culshaw concentrated on the emerging stereophonic recording technology, and stereo opera in particular. A year after his return he was made manager of the company's classical recording division, a position of great influence in the classical music world. The Gramophone obituarist wrote of him in 1980: "To meet John Culshaw for the first time, quiet, charming, sharp-eyed but with no signs of aggressiveness about him, was to marvel that here was one of the two great dictators of recording art. If Walter Legge in a flash had one registering extrovert forcefulness in the very picture of a dictator, John Culshaw's comparable dominance was something to appreciate over a longer span. … [H]e transformed the whole concept of recording."Culshaw hoped to record Die Walküre
Die Walküre
Die Walküre , WWV 86B, is the second of the four operas that form the cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen , by Richard Wagner...
with Flagstad, whom he persuaded out of retirement, as Brünnhilde. Flagstad, however, was over sixty, and would not agree to sing the whole opera. To capture as much of her Wagner as she was willing to record, Culshaw produced separate sets of parts of the opera in 1957. Act 1 was conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch
Hans Knappertsbusch
Hans Knappertsbusch was a German conductor, best known for his performances of the music of Richard Wagner, Anton Bruckner and Richard Strauss....
with Flagstad in the role of Sieglinde; in the other set the "Todesverkundigung" scene from Act 2 and the whole of Act 3 were conducted by Solti with Flagstad as Brünnhilde. In those early years of stereo, Culshaw worked with Pierre Monteux
Pierre Monteux
Pierre Monteux was an orchestra conductor. Born in Paris, France, Monteux later became an American citizen.-Life and career:Monteux was born in Paris in 1875. His family was descended from Sephardi Jews who came to France in the wake of the Spanish Inquisition. He studied violin from an early age,...
in recordings of Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....
and Ravel
Maurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
, and with Solti in a recording of Richard Strauss
Richard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems and orchestral works, such as Death and Transfiguration, Till...
's Arabella
Arabella
Arabella is a lyric comedy or opera in 3 acts by Richard Strauss to a German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, their sixth and last operatic collaboration. It was first performed on 1 July 1933, at the Dresden Sächsisches Staatstheater....
. He also recorded the first of many New Year's Day concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic and Willi Boskovsky
Willi Boskovsky
Willi Boskovsky was an Austrian violinist and conductor, best known as the long-standing conductor of the Vienna New Year's Day Concert.-Professional biography:...
.
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
called them "Decca's incomparable engineers") was in a position to embark on a complete studio recording of Wagner's Ring
Der Ring des Nibelungen
Der Ring des Nibelungen is a cycle of four epic operas by the German composer Richard Wagner . The works are based loosely on characters from the Norse sagas and the Nibelungenlied...
cycle. Decca decided to begin its cycle with Das Rheingold
Das Rheingold
is the first of the four operas that constitute Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen . It was originally written as an introduction to the tripartite Ring, but the cycle is now generally regarded as consisting of four individual operas.Das Rheingold received its premiere at the National Theatre...
, the shortest of the four Ring operas. It was recorded in 1958 and released in the spring of 1959. Culshaw engaged Solti, the Vienna Philharmonic and a cast of established Wagner singers. The performance won enthusiastic praise from reviewers, and the engineers were generally acknowledged to have surpassed themselves. The Gramophone described the recording quality as "stupendous" and called the set "wonderful … surpass[ing] anything done before." To the astonishment and envy of Decca's rivals the set outsold popular music releases such as those of Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley
Elvis Aaron Presley was one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King"....
and Pat Boone
Pat Boone
Charles Eugene "Pat" Boone is an American singer, actor and writer who has been a successful pop singer in the United States during the 1950s and early 1960s. He covered black artists' songs and sold more copies than his black counterparts...
. The cast included Flagstad in one of her last recorded performances, in the role of Fricka, which she had never sung on stage. Culshaw hoped to record her as Fricka in Die Walküre and Waltraute in Götterdämmerung
Götterdämmerung
is the last in Richard Wagner's cycle of four operas titled Der Ring des Nibelungen...
, but her health did not permit it. His cast for the remaining three Ring operas included Birgit Nilsson
Birgit Nilsson
right|thumb|Nilsson in 1948.Birgit Nilsson was a celebrated Swedish dramatic soprano who specialized in operatic and symphonic works...
, Hans Hotter
Hans Hotter
Hans Hotter was a German operatic bass-baritone, admired internationally after World War II for the power, beauty, and intelligence of his singing, especially in Wagner operas. He was extremely tall and his appearance was striking because of his high, narrow face, wide mouth, and big, aquiline nose...
, Gottlob Frick
Gottlob Frick
Gottlob Frick was a German bass who sang in opera. He was known for his wide repertory including Wagner and Mozart roles, as well as those of Nicolai and Lortzing.-Career:...
, Wolfgang Windgassen
Wolfgang Windgassen
Wolfgang Windgassen was a tenor internationally known for his performances in Wagner operas.-Life and career:...
, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is a retired German lyric baritone and conductor of classical music, one of the most famous lieder performers of the post-war period and "one of the supreme vocal artists of the 20th century"...
and Régine Crespin
Régine Crespin
Régine Crespin was a French singer who had a major international career in opera and on the concert stage between 1950 and 1989. She started her career singing roles in the dramatic soprano and spinto soprano repertoire, drawing particular acclaim singing Wagner and Strauss heroines...
, with even minor roles sung by such stars as Joan Sutherland
Joan Sutherland
Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, OM, AC, DBE was an Australian dramatic coloratura soprano noted for her contribution to the renaissance of the bel canto repertoire from the late 1950s through to the 1980s....
.
In these productions Culshaw put into practice his belief that a properly-made sound recording should create what he called "a theatre of the mind". He disliked live recordings such as those attempted at Bayreuth; to him they were technically flawed and, crucially, were merely sound recordings of a theatrical performance. He sought to make recordings that compensated for the lack of the visual element by subtle production techniques, impossible in live recordings, that conjured up the action in the listener's head.
Culshaw took unprecedented pains to meet Wagner's musical requirements. Where in Das Rheingold the score calls for eighteen anvils to be hammered during two brief orchestral interludes – an instruction never followed in opera houses – Culshaw arranged for eighteen anvils to be hired and hammered. Similarly, where Wagner called for steerhorns
Steerhorn
The steerhorn is an extremely long medieval bugle horn. The instrument has been used both orchestrally and in war....
, Culshaw arranged for them to be used instead of the trombones habitually substituted at Bayreuth and other opera houses. In The Gramophone, Edward Greenfield wrote:
It was thanks to Culshaw's devotion to Wagnerian intentions – ever encouraged by the engineer who was at his right hand through the whole project, Gordon Parry, himself a devoted Wagnerian – that in the Solti Ring cycle one is able to hear the scores in a way literally impossible in the theatre. Siegfried's voice made to sound like Gunther's, the voice of Fafner from his cave, not to mention the splendour of anvils and rainbow bridge harps in Rheingold, all transcend what is heard in the opera-house.
In 1967, after the Decca Ring was complete, Culshaw wrote a memoir, Ring Resounding, about the making of the recording. In 1999, Gramophone ran a poll of its readers to find "the ten greatest recordings ever made." The Decca Ring topped the poll.
Britten, Karajan and others
Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...
's music with the composer as conductor or pianist. The Times described them as "a priceless heritage for posterity." Culshaw thought that of all his recordings that of Britten's War Requiem
War Requiem
The War Requiem, Op. 66 is a large-scale, non-liturgical setting of the Requiem Mass composed by Benjamin Britten mostly in 1961 and completed January 1962. Interspersed with the traditional Latin texts, in telling juxtaposition, are settings of Wilfred Owen poems...
was the finest. Greenfield says of it, "another recording which confounded the record world not just by its technical brilliance but by the way it sold in huge quantities." The recording was made in London in 1963, the year after the premiere of the Requiem at the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral
Coventry Cathedral
Coventry Cathedral, also known as St Michael's Cathedral, is the seat of the Bishop of Coventry and the Diocese of Coventry, in Coventry, West Midlands, England. The current bishop is the Right Revd Christopher Cocksworth....
. For the recording Culshaw managed to assemble the three singers whom Britten had in mind when writing the work, uniting Russian, German and English soloists to represent the former enemy nations – Galina Vishnevskaya
Galina Vishnevskaya
Galina Pavlovna Vishnevskaya is a Russian soprano opera singer and recitalist who was named a People's Artist of the USSR in 1966.-Biography:...
, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Peter Pears
Peter Pears
Sir Peter Neville Luard Pears CBE was an English tenor who was knighted in 1978. His career was closely associated with the composer Edward Benjamin Britten....
. Culshaw wrote, "The happiest hours I have spent in any studio were with Ben, for the basic reason that it did not seem that we were trying to make records or video tapes; we were just trying to make music." Among the works Britten recorded with Culshaw were his operas including Peter Grimes
Peter Grimes
Peter Grimes is an opera by Benjamin Britten, with a libretto adapted by Montagu Slater from the Peter Grimes section of George Crabbe's poem The Borough...
(released in 1959), Albert Herring
Albert Herring
Albert Herring, Op. 39, is a chamber opera in three acts by Benjamin Britten.Composed in the winter of 1946 and the spring of 1947, this comic opera was a successor to his serious opera The Rape of Lucretia...
(1964), A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream (opera)
A Midsummer Night's Dream is an opera with music by Benjamin Britten and set to a libretto adapted by the composer and Peter Pears from William Shakespeare's play, A Midsummer Night's Dream...
(1967), and Billy Budd
Billy Budd (opera)
Billy Budd is an opera by Benjamin Britten, from a libretto by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier, was first performed at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London on 1 December 1951. It is based on the short novel Billy Budd by Herman Melville....
(1968).
Culshaw produced many of the conductor Herbert von Karajan
Herbert von Karajan
Herbert von Karajan was an Austrian orchestra and opera conductor. To the wider world he was perhaps most famously associated with the Berlin Philharmonic, of which he was principal conductor for 35 years...
's best-known operatic and orchestral sets, which remain in the catalogues four decades later. The opera sets include Tosca
Tosca
Tosca is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. It premiered at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 14 January 1900...
, Carmen
Carmen
Carmen is a French opéra comique by Georges Bizet. The libretto is by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, based on the novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée, first published in 1845, itself possibly influenced by the narrative poem The Gypsies by Alexander Pushkin...
, Aida
Aida
Aida sometimes spelled Aïda, is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni, based on a scenario written by French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette...
, Die Fledermaus
Die Fledermaus
Die Fledermaus is an operetta composed by Johann Strauss II to a German libretto by Karl Haffner and Richard Genée.- Literary sources :...
and Otello
Otello
Otello is an opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Arrigo Boito, based on Shakespeare's play Othello. It was Verdi's penultimate opera, and was first performed at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan, on February 5, 1887....
; among the orchestral sets were Holst
Gustav Holst
Gustav Theodore Holst was an English composer. He is most famous for his orchestral suite The Planets....
's The Planets
The Planets
The Planets, Op. 32, is a seven-movement orchestral suite by the English composer Gustav Holst, written between 1914 and 1916. Each movement of the suite is named after a planet of the Solar System and its corresponding astrological character as defined by Holst...
and several Richard Strauss works including the then rarely heard Also sprach Zarathustra.
In the late 1950s Decca entered into a commercial partnership with RCA
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
, by which Decca teams recorded classical works in European venues on RCA's behalf. Among the recordings supervised by Culshaw for RCA were Sir Thomas Beecham
Thomas Beecham
Sir Thomas Beecham, 2nd Baronet CH was an English conductor and impresario best known for his association with the London Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic orchestras. He was also closely associated with the Liverpool Philharmonic and Hallé orchestras...
's lavishly re-orchestrated version of Handel
George Frideric Handel
George Frideric Handel was a German-British Baroque composer, famous for his operas, oratorios, anthems and organ concertos. Handel was born in 1685, in a family indifferent to music...
's Messiah
Messiah (Handel)
Messiah is an English-language oratorio composed in 1741 by George Frideric Handel, with a scriptural text compiled by Charles Jennens from the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. It was first performed in Dublin on 13 April 1742, and received its London premiere nearly a year later...
. Other artists with whom he worked for Decca and RCA included pianists such as Wilhelm Backhaus
Wilhelm Backhaus
Wilhelm Backhaus was a German pianist and pedagogue.Born in Leipzig, Backhaus studied at the conservatoire there with Alois Reckendorf until 1899, later taking private piano lessons with Eugen d'Albert in Frankfurt...
, Arthur Rubinstein
Arthur Rubinstein
Arthur Rubinstein KBE was a Polish-American pianist. He received international acclaim for his performances of the music of a variety of composers...
and Julius Katchen
Julius Katchen
Julius Katchen was an American concert pianist, possibly best known for his recordings of Johannes Brahms's solo piano compositions.-Early career:...
; conductors including Sir Adrian Boult
Adrian Boult
Sir Adrian Cedric Boult CH was an English conductor. Brought up in a prosperous mercantile family he followed musical studies in England and at Leipzig, Germany, with early conducting work in London for the Royal Opera House and Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company. His first prominent post was...
, Karl Böhm
Karl Böhm
Karl August Leopold Böhm was an Austrian conductor. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest symphonic and operatic conductors of the 20th century.- Education :...
, Fritz Reiner
Fritz Reiner
Frederick Martin “Fritz” Reiner was a prominent conductor of opera and symphonic music in the twentieth century.-Biography:...
, and George Szell
George Szell
George Szell , originally György Széll, György Endre Szél, or Georg Szell, was a Hungarian-born American conductor and composer...
; and singers such as Carlo Bergonzi
Carlo Bergonzi
Carlo Bergonzi is an Italian operatic tenor. Although he performed and recorded some bel canto and verismo roles, he is above all associated with the operas of Giuseppe Verdi, including a large number of the composer's lesser-known works that he helped revive...
, Jussi Björling
Jussi Björling
Johan Jonatan "Jussi" Björling was a Swedish tenor. One of the leading operatic singers of the 20th Century, Björling appeared frequently at the Royal Opera House in London, La Scala in Milan, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City as well as at other major European opera...
, Lisa Della Casa
Lisa Della Casa
Lisa Della Casa is a Swiss soprano most admired for her interpretations of major heroines in major operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Strauss, of German lieder, and for her great beauty. She was dubbed “the most beautiful woman on the operatic stage”...
, Leontyne Price
Leontyne Price
Mary Violet Leontyne Price is an American soprano. Born and raised in the Deep South, she rose to international acclaim in the 1950s and 1960s, and was one of the first African Americans to become a leading artist at the Metropolitan Opera.One critic characterized Price's voice as "vibrant",...
, and Renata Tebaldi
Renata Tebaldi
Renata Tebaldi was an Italian lirico-spinto soprano popular in the post-war period...
.
Later years
By 1967 Culshaw wished for a change. He was growing disenchanted with the top management of Decca, which he believed had lost its pioneering enthusiasm. He moved from the record industry to become BBC TelevisionBBC Television
BBC Television is a service of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The corporation, which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a Royal Charter since 1927, has produced television programmes from its own studios since 1932, although the start of its regular service of television...
's head of music programmes. He inaugurated, and supervised several series of, André Previn's Music Night, in which Previn
André Previn
André George Previn, KBE is an American pianist, conductor, and composer. He is considered one of the most versatile musicians in the world, and is the winner of four Academy Awards for his film work and ten Grammy Awards for his recordings. -Early Life:Previn was born in...
would talk informally direct to camera and then turn and conduct the London Symphony Orchestra
London Symphony Orchestra
The London Symphony Orchestra is a major orchestra of the United Kingdom, as well as one of the best-known orchestras in the world. Since 1982, the LSO has been based in London's Barbican Centre.-History:...
(LSO), whose members were dressed not in evening clothes but in casual sweaters or shirts. The programme attracted unprecedented viewing figures for classical music; an historian of the orchestra wrote, "More British people heard the LSO play in Music Night in one week than in sixty-five years of LSO concerts." Culshaw also screened more formal concerts, including Klemperer's 1970 Beethoven symphony cycle from the Royal Festival Hall
Royal Festival Hall
The Royal Festival Hall is a 2,900-seat concert, dance and talks venue within Southbank Centre in London. It is situated on the South Bank of the River Thames, not far from Hungerford Bridge. It is a Grade I listed building - the first post-war building to become so protected...
. In 1973 BBC television broadcast a complete performance of Wagner's Siegfried
Siegfried (opera)
Siegfried is the third of the four operas that constitute Der Ring des Nibelungen , by Richard Wagner. It received its premiere at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus on 16 August 1876, as part of the first complete performance of The Ring...
conducted by Reginald Goodall
Reginald Goodall
Sir Reginald Goodall was an English conductor, noted for his performances of the operas of Richard Wagner and conducting the premieres of several operas by Benjamin Britten.-Biography:...
, and in 1974 Verdi's Un ballo in maschera
Un ballo in maschera
Un ballo in maschera , is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi with text by Antonio Somma. The libretto is loosely based on an 1833 play, Gustave III, by French playwright Eugène Scribe who wrote about the historical assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden...
from Covent Garden
Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The...
. Culshaw also set up BBC studio productions of The Marriage of Figaro
The Marriage of Figaro
Le nozze di Figaro, ossia la folle giornata , K. 492, is an opera buffa composed in 1786 in four acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, based on a stage comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro .Although the play by...
, The Yeomen of the Guard
The Yeomen of the Guard
The Yeomen of the Guard; or, The Merryman and His Maid, is a Savoy Opera, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. It premiered at the Savoy Theatre on 3 October 1888, and ran for 423 performances...
, The Flying Dutchman
The Flying Dutchman (opera)
Der fliegende Holländer is an opera, with music and libretto by Richard Wagner.Wagner claimed in his 1870 autobiography Mein Leben that he had been inspired to write "The Flying Dutchman" following a stormy sea crossing he made from Riga to London in July and August 1839, but in his 1843...
and La traviata
La traviata
La traviata is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi set to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave. It is based on La dame aux Camélias , a play adapted from the novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils. The title La traviata means literally The Fallen Woman, or perhaps more figuratively, The Woman...
.
Culshaw commissioned Britten's opera Owen Wingrave
Owen Wingrave
Owen Wingrave is an opera for television in two acts with music by Benjamin Britten, his Opus 85, and a libretto by Myfanwy Piper, after a short story by Henry James....
, written expressly for television. He also persuaded Britten to conduct television productions of Peter Grimes
Peter Grimes
Peter Grimes is an opera by Benjamin Britten, with a libretto adapted by Montagu Slater from the Peter Grimes section of George Crabbe's poem The Borough...
and Mozart's Idomeneo
Idomeneo
Idomeneo, re di Creta ossia Ilia e Idamante is an Italian language opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The libretto was adapted by Giambattista Varesco from a French text by Antoine Danchet, which had been set to music by André Campra as Idoménée in 1712...
, and to accompany Pears in Schubert's Winterreise
Winterreise
Winterreise is a song cycle for voice and piano by Franz Schubert , a setting of 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller. It is the second of Schubert's two great song cycles on Müller's poems, the earlier being Die schöne Müllerin...
. Britten and Pears invited him to Snape
Snape, Suffolk
Snape is a small village in the English county of Suffolk, on the River Alde close to Aldeburgh. It has about 600 inhabitants. Snape is now best known for Snape Maltings, no longer in commercial use, but converted into a tourist centre together with a concert hall that hosts the major part of the...
, not far from their base at Aldeburgh
Aldeburgh
Aldeburgh is a coastal town in Suffolk, East Anglia, England. Located on the River Alde, the town is notable for its Blue Flag shingle beach and fisherman huts where freshly caught fish are sold daily, and the Aldeburgh Yacht Club...
in Suffolk
Suffolk
Suffolk is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in East Anglia, England. It has borders with Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south. The North Sea lies to the east...
and he encouraged them to transform the Snape Maltings
Snape Maltings
Snape Maltings is part of Snape, Suffolk, U.K., best known for its concert hall, which is one of the main sites of the annual Aldeburgh Festival....
into a concert-hall. He later initiated the Benson and Hedges music festival at Snape and was planning the fourth season at the time of his death. Some of his BBC programmes have been preserved on DVD, including films of the Amadeus Quartet
Amadeus Quartet
The Amadeus Quartet was a world famous string quartet founded in 1947.Because of their Jewish origin, violinists Norbert Brainin, Siegmund Nissel and Peter Schidlof were driven out of Vienna after Hitler's Anschluss of 1938...
playing works by Schubert
Franz Schubert
Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer.Although he died at an early age, Schubert was tremendously prolific. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies , liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music...
and Britten. He took time off from the BBC to return to the recording studio, rejoining his old Decca engineering team in 1971 to produce Der Rosenkavalier
Der Rosenkavalier
Der Rosenkavalier is a comic opera in three acts by Richard Strauss to an original German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. It is loosely adapted from the novel Les amours du chevalier de Faublas by Louvet de Couvrai and Molière’s comedy Monsieur de Pourceaugnac...
, conducted by Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim...
.
In 1975, Culshaw left the BBC and worked freelance as a record and stage producer, writer and broadcaster. He was invited to serve on the Arts Council of Great Britain
Arts Council of Great Britain
The Arts Council of Great Britain was a non-departmental public body dedicated to the promotion of the fine arts in Great Britain. The Arts Council of Great Britain was divided in 1994 to form the Arts Council of England , the Scottish Arts Council, and the Arts Council of Wales...
in 1975 and was chairman of its music panel from 1975 to 1977. In 1977 he became a senior fellow in the creative arts at the University of Western Australia
University of Western Australia
The University of Western Australia was established by an Act of the Western Australian Parliament in February 1911, and began teaching students for the first time in 1913. It is the oldest university in the state of Western Australia and the only university in the state to be a member of the...
, and was visiting professor at the University of Houston
University of Houston
The University of Houston is a state research university, and is the flagship institution of the University of Houston System. Founded in 1927, it is Texas's third-largest university with nearly 40,000 students. Its campus spans 667 acres in southeast Houston, and was known as University of...
, the University of Southern California
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
and the University of Melbourne
University of Melbourne
The University of Melbourne is a public university located in Melbourne, Victoria. Founded in 1853, it is the second oldest university in Australia and the oldest in Victoria...
. He also took on the responsibility for the annual United Nations concert in New York, and acted as a music consultant to the Australian Broadcasting Commission. He frequently served as a commentator for broadcasts of
Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts
The Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts are a regular series of weekly broadcasts on network radio of full-length opera performances. They are transmitted live from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City...
Metropolitan Opera
Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera is an opera company, located in New York City. Originally founded in 1880, the company gave its first performance on October 22, 1883. The company is operated by the non-profit Metropolitan Opera Association, with Peter Gelb as general manager...
performances, and his 1976 book, Reflections on Wagner's "Ring", was based on the series of interval talks he gave during the broadcasts of the Met's Ring cycle in 1975.
Culshaw died in London in 1980, at the age of 55, from a rare form of hepatitis
Hepatitis
Hepatitis is a medical condition defined by the inflammation of the liver and characterized by the presence of inflammatory cells in the tissue of the organ. The name is from the Greek hepar , the root being hepat- , meaning liver, and suffix -itis, meaning "inflammation"...
. He was unmarried. His unfinished autobiography, Putting the Record Straight, was published after his death.
Among the honours given to Culshaw, The Times listed "eight Grands Prix des Disques, numerous Grammys and in 1966 an OBE", and the Vienna Philharmonic's Nicolai Medal in 1959 and its Schalk Medal in 1967.
Publications
A lesser-known part of Culshaw's work was writing fiction. He published two novels in the early 1950s; the first, The Sons of Brutus (1950) had been inspired by what he had seen during trips to ruined German cities in the aftermath of the war. It was chosen by The ObserverThe Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
as one of its books of the year in 1950. At the time of its publication he was working on a second novel. He gave it the title A Harder Thing, but was persuaded by his publisher to change it to A Place of Stone. It was published in 1951.
Culshaw's musical books were: Sergei Rachmaninov, 1948; The Concerto, 1949; A Century of Music, 1951; Ring Resounding: The Recording of Der Ring des Nibelungen, 1967; Reflections on Wagner's "Ring", 1976; Wagner: The Man and His Music, 1978; and Putting the Record Straight: The Autobiography of John Culshaw, 1981.
External links
- Link to talk by Culshaw on Die Walküre An audio file from a Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast intermission feature (scroll to "From The Archives - March 1, 1975 - John Culshaw discusses Die Walküre; you will need Real Player to hear this)