Operas, Ethics, and Elektra: A Return to the Recordings of John Culshaw

If there is any secret about the sort of work we have been doing in Vien­na over the past few years, it has final­ly noth­ing to do with big­ger and bet­ter machines, although they cer­tain­ly increase effi­cien­cy: it has to do with try­ing to get to the heart of a score before you record a note of it, so that before you begin you have a con­cept of what the final record is going to sound like. This con­cept may, of course, be right or wrong; it may be sus­tained or mod­i­fied as things progress; but the impor­tant thing is that it should be there to start with, for the cat­a­logues are full of exam­ples to show what hap­pens when it isn’t.

John Cul­shaw, ​“Three for the Road,” Gramo­phone (March 1968): 474.

Amid the wealth of opera record­ings pro­duced in the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, the sets released by the Dec­ca Record Com­pa­ny con­tin­ue to resound with crit­ics and lis­ten­ers alike.¹ Cru­cial to their pro­duc­tion and suc­cess was John Cul­shaw, Clas­si­cal Artists and Reper­toire Man­ag­er for Dec­ca from 1956 to 1967. Culshaw’s work in opera — which includes the first com­plete stereo release of Wagner’s mam­moth Der Ring des Nibelun­gen (1959 – 1966) — blazed a pro­gres­sive trail. His aes­thet­ic as a pro­duc­er envi­sioned opera on record not as a sim­u­lacrum of a live opera house per­for­mance but as an inde­pen­dent real­iza­tion sub­ject to its own con­ven­tions. Such an approach bold­ly seized the oppor­tu­ni­ties offered by stereo­phon­ic sound and the record­ing stu­dio: ​“the ide­al stereo ver­sion of any opera must be a pro­duc­tion in its own right with­in its own medi­um [Culshaw’s ital­ics]. It is not meant to put the lis­ten­er in his favorite seat at the opera house: it should not even try. With­in its own terms, it can do much bet­ter.”² In attempt­ing to do ​“bet­ter,” how­ev­er, Cul­shaw sparked a com­plex dis­course con­cern­ing the rela­tion­ship of record­ed opera with ​“live­ness” and audio-visu­al media. Though the stu­dio record­ing prac­tices of Culshaw’s hey­day are now a dis­tant mem­o­ry, their lega­cy still rever­ber­ates in the present.

While the Dec­ca Ring con­tin­ues to attract dis­cur­sive atten­tion in this regard, sev­er­al Cul­shaw-pro­duced operas in the Dec­ca cat­a­logue remain under­ex­plored — for exam­ple, the 1967 record­ing of Richard Strauss’s 1909 opera Elek­tra, one of Culshaw’s last projects for the com­pa­ny.³ For casu­al lis­ten­ers and con­nois­seurs alike, the Dec­ca Elek­tra remains an impres­sive inter­pre­ta­tion fea­tur­ing a for­mi­da­ble group of per­form­ers: sopra­no Bir­git Nils­son as Elek­tra, the ever-ver­sa­tile mez­zo-sopra­no Regi­na Resnik as Elektra’s moth­er Klytämnes­tra, sopra­no Marie Col­lier as Elektra’s sis­ter Chrysothemis, and a tremen­dous sup­port­ing cast led by con­duc­tor Georg Solti (not yet then ​“Sir”) with the Vien­na Phil­har­mon­ic Orches­tra.⁴ No less remark­able was Decca’s vet­er­an record­ing team assem­bled for the project: pro­duc­er Christo­pher Rae­burn, who assist­ed Cul­shaw with the singers; engi­neers Gor­don Par­ry and James Brown; and tape edi­tor Jack Law.⁵

Despite such dis­tin­guished par­tic­i­pants on the Dec­ca Elek­tra, crit­i­cal response to the final record­ing was divid­ed. Some crit­ics were wowed, oth­ers were more equiv­o­cal in their assess­ment. Apart from quib­bles with the per­for­mances of the prin­ci­pal artists, Culshaw’s choic­es as pro­duc­er received the sever­est scruti­ny. He nor­mal­ly respond­ed to such crit­i­cisms in an oblique man­ner, yet on this occa­sion he was pro­voked to ​“join bat­tle” against Con­rad L. Osborne, whose review in High Fideli­ty mag­a­zine took the pro­duc­er and his meth­ods strong­ly to task. While Cul­shaw cast him as a cus­tos morum of stol­id oper­at­ic tra­di­tion, Osborne nev­er­the­less pro­vid­ed a sus­tained and insight­ful cri­tique of record­ed opera and Culshaw’s approach. Far from being a pet­ty debate, their rejoin­ders help illu­mi­nate the var­i­ous dis­cours­es of aes­thet­ic crit­i­cism that sur­round works of record­ed art, broad­ly speak­ing, as well as eth­i­cal reper­cus­sions which, though dif­fuse, are no less con­se­quen­tial.⁶

Putting Elek­tra on Record

In a Gramo­phone essay titled ​“Three for the Road,” Cul­shaw laid out the pri­ma­ry goals for Decca’s record­ing of Elek­tra. (It remains one of his few sub­stan­tial com­men­taries on the project.) Apart from the opera being a self-pro­fessed favorite, ​“Elek­tra had nev­er been prop­er­ly record­ed in either the musi­cal or the tech­ni­cal sense, for ear­li­er ver­sions had suf­fered from cuts and from a type of bal­ance which per­verse­ly made the text audi­ble at the expense of Strauss’s music.”⁷ Here Cul­shaw tar­get­ed the only oth­er stereo­phon­ic release of the work, pro­duced by Deutsche Gram­mophon Gesellschaft (DGG) in 1960.⁸ Else­where his cri­tique was more explic­it: ​“Some peo­ple think that the orches­tra plays too dom­i­nat­ing a part in the Dec­ca Ring, and nat­u­ral­ly I dis­agree with them; such peo­ple prob­a­bly like the DGG Elek­tra, which to my ear is unbear­able because of the unvary­ing prox­im­i­ty of the voic­es and the swim­ming bath dif­fu­sion of the orches­tra.”⁹

At the end of the essay, Cul­shaw observed that, to his ears, ​“the sound of Elek­tra is as good as, and pos­si­bly bet­ter than, any­thing Dec­ca has done with the Vien­na Phil­har­mon­ic.” Dom­i­na­tion by the orches­tra was a com­mon cri­tique of Culshaw’s record­ings, and the Dec­ca Elek­tra would be no excep­tion. For many lis­ten­ers (and their equip­ment), the orches­tras on Dec­ca opera sets fre­quent­ly over­whelmed the voic­es, which were not, accord­ing to some, always ade­quate­ly cap­tured. Bir­git Nils­son was repeat­ed­ly crit­i­cal of such instances, and the company’s ear­li­er record­ing of Salome, for which she sang the title role, was her case in point: ​“On the album cov­er the pro­duc­er, John Cul­shaw, is quot­ed as say­ing, ​‘Nev­er before has one been able to hear the tri­an­gle in a per­for­mance. Here for the first time you can hear this instru­ment.’ I have noth­ing against the public’s hear­ing the tri­an­gle, but I ask myself whether the voice of Salome is not at least as impor­tant. It is always love­ly to hear one’s voice praised but it is a bit dis­ap­point­ing to hear that the sound is bet­ter live than on the record­ing. Or worse: that the voice sounds bet­ter on some pirat­ed record­ings than on takes from the stu­dio.”¹⁰ While the lin­er notes for Salome in fact con­tain no such quo­ta­tion, Nils­son nev­er­the­less iden­ti­fies the pow­er strug­gle inher­ent in record­ing: should the singers receive the advan­tage over the orches­tra?¹¹ A few years before Salome, Cul­shaw had antic­i­pat­ed such com­plaints: ​“Are peo­ple who buy com­plete operas col­lect­ing voic­es or per­for­mances? If the answer is per­for­mances, then posi­tions and per­spec­tives mat­ter (with­out them, the sys­tem is mere­ly an improve­ment in sound qual­i­ty and noth­ing else).”¹² The empha­sis on ​“per­for­mance” meant that all com­po­nents were sub­ject to the total­i­ty of the opera’s pre­sen­ta­tion on record, musi­cal­ly and dramatically.

To that end, one of the major sell­ing points of Decca’s Elek­tra—and the one aspect for which it was uni­ver­sal­ly laud­ed — is its unabridged pre­sen­ta­tion of Strauss’s score. The opera endured a vari­ety of cuts after its pre­mière that per­sist in record­ings and con­tem­po­rary pro­duc­tions. Pre­sent­ing operas com­plete was an implic­it aspect of Decca’s aes­thet­ic, how­ev­er, and Cul­shaw and Solti were adamant that the score be record­ed in full; for Cul­shaw, sanc­tioned cuts nev­er meant per­ma­nent cuts. Nils­son resist­ed, claim­ing the cuts amount­ed to near­ly a third of the opera. Cul­shaw timed them at a mea­ger sev­en min­utes. Even­tu­al­ly, a com­pro­mise was reached to record the exci­sions in Feb­ru­ary 1967. Yet the avail­abil­i­ty of Nils­son and the tour­ing sched­ule of the Vien­na Phil­har­mon­ic meant that an ad-hoc orches­tra had to be assem­bled to record the miss­ing min­utes, which were then spliced into the mas­ter tape. Cul­shaw under­stood that such edit­ing was noi­some to some, but to him, the artis­tic ends jus­ti­fied the tech­no­log­i­cal means: ​“What­ev­er some crit­ics may say, I feel that this is a case where tech­nol­o­gy real­ly came to the ser­vice of music, for with­out ​‘immoral’ splices, and with­out super­im­po­si­tion, there would be no com­plete Elek­tra on the mar­ket today.”¹³ His belief in the ulti­mate ​“ser­vice of music” would occa­sion sim­i­lar defens­es, which, as will be seen, abound with eth­i­cal implications.

Osborne con­tra Culshaw

Despite Culshaw’s opti­misms, High Fideli­ty crit­ic Osborne described the record­ing as an ​“inter­est­ing but, so far as I’m con­cerned, unsuc­cess­ful pro­duc­tion of Elek­tra.” His Feb­ru­ary 1968 review ​“Elek­tra: A Stage Work Vio­lat­ed? or a New Son­ic Mir­a­cle?” opens with a direct vol­ley at Cul­shaw, nev­er men­tioned by name: “’Tis a tale of the pow­ers and lim­i­ta­tions of the pro­duc­er. The pow­ers are such these days that a pro­duc­er is free to cre­ate almost any ambi­ence, any effect he wish­es. The lim­i­ta­tion is that his efforts won’t nec­es­sar­i­ly do what he thinks they will do for the work at hand.”¹⁴ Apart from ​“botched” effects, Osborne cit­ed cer­tain ​“sound envi­ron­ments” per­cep­ti­ble with­in scenes to sug­gest char­ac­ters inhab­it­ing dif­fer­ent loca­tions or worlds with­in the record­ing. (Here he focused on the opera’s con­fronta­tion scene between Elek­tra and Klytämnes­tra.) Such choic­es dis­tract­ing­ly frag­ment­ed the recording’s con­ti­nu­ity and demon­strat­ed an incred­i­ble act of license. ​“Beau­ti­ful close-ups of the but­tress­es and gar­goyles do not a pic­ture of a cathe­dral make,” Osborne observed in closing.

Osborne made sim­i­lar — though more direct and cogent — remarks on pro­duc­er intru­sions in his oth­er­wise pos­i­tive review of Decca’s set of Wagner’s Die Walküre, released the pre­vi­ous year: ​“the device gets between me and the effect the music wants to make.”¹⁵ Here, he chalked up such choic­es to ​“con­fused aes­thet­ic rea­son­ing” that strives for ​“actu­al­i­ty” over ​“emo­tion­al and psy­cho­log­i­cal ver­i­ty.” By attempt­ing to engen­der a verisim­i­lar stage atmos­phere, accord­ing to Osborne, a record­ing took the risk of being too lit­er­al, which under­mines its effect. The point is apt. As Cul­shaw stressed repeat­ed­ly, a record­ing is by its very nature dis­tinct from the stage. The acoustic con­ven­tions of the stage and effects that invoke them, how­ev­er light­ly, would seem to drag the record­ing coun­ter­in­tu­itive­ly back to the one thing it seem­ing­ly tries to avoid.

In his review of Elek­tra, Osborne sug­gest­ed that such choic­es were indica­tive of an unavoid­able real­i­ty: the change in the medi­um of pre­sen­ta­tion — here, from the stage to the record­ing — also risked chang­ing the actu­al mate­r­i­al pre­sent­ed. (Here his focus was, again, on the implied sound envi­ron­ments.) Osborne framed a fair ques­tion that could be read as a blunt chal­lenge: ​“Can a work con­ceived and writ­ten by mas­ters of the live the­atre be trans­lat­ed in a new medi­um with­out exten­sive alter­ation?” Such alter­ation might not itself even be a con­scious choice. As a solu­tion, Osborne sug­gest­ed that, instead of record­ing exist­ing stage works, record­ing com­pa­nies should com­mis­sion new operas con­ceived specif­i­cal­ly for the gramo­phone and there­fore inher­ent­ly atten­tive to the medium’s con­ven­tions: ​“Good or bad, it will be more valid than the tech­ni­cal­ly accom­plished vio­la­tion of stage works.” He con­ced­ed, how­ev­er, that some record­ings of exist­ing works were not with­out val­ue: ​“mis­takes along the way should be indulged. This Elek­tra should be heard by every­one seri­ous­ly inter­est­ed in opera and/​or record­ings, if only to pon­der the aes­thet­ics of the ques­tions it rais­es.” By mak­ing the charge that a stage work had been vio­lat­ed, how­ev­er, Osborne cat­a­pult­ed ques­tions about the recording’s suit­abil­i­ty into an eth­i­cal sphere that ques­tioned the integri­ty of a work trans­plant­ed from its ​“intend­ed” medium.

Pro­duc­ers and Review­ers Strike Back and Strike Again

Osborne’s review pro­voked a vis­cer­al response from Cul­shaw, which appeared eight months lat­er in High Fideli­ty with the title ​“The Record Pro­duc­er Strikes Back.”¹⁶ The major thrust of the rebut­tal con­cerned the con­sis­tent com­par­isons to live the­atri­cal prac­tice; after all, Cul­shaw reit­er­at­ed, a record­ing oper­ates under total­ly dif­fer­ent sen­so­ry cir­cum­stances. After rehash­ing Osborne’s alleged ​“parox­ysms of rage” at Culshaw’s hav­ing ​“mas­sa­cred a mas­ter­piece,” he zoomed in on Osborne’s choice of the word ​“vio­la­tion” in his review. In Culshaw’s read­ing, that choice exposed the reviewer’s bias as a mem­ber ​“of that very tiny minor­i­ty of peo­ple” con­sti­tut­ing opera hous­es audi­ences ver­sus the record-buy­ing pub­lic.¹⁷

To Cul­shaw, the prin­ci­pal con­cern of the record pro­duc­er was to reach those beyond that minor­i­ty, to impact peo­ple who would like­ly nev­er expe­ri­ence live opera, ​“to make the sound of the music more imme­di­ate than it could ever be when heard from most seats in most opera hous­es.” As a result, pro­duc­ers should not pred­i­cate record­ings on live expe­ri­ence. They must instead ask, “‘will this make dra­mat­ic and musi­cal sense in domes­tic sur­round­ings to some­one who may even be hear­ing the opera for the first time?’ In a word, the record­ing has to have impact, and I use the word with­out relat­ing it to loud­ness.” Such impact was not above evok­ing ​“stage atmos­phere” for dra­mat­ic means, but such attempts held the poten­tial to echo live per­for­mances too strong­ly.¹⁸

Cul­shaw con­ced­ed that Osborne’s quan­daries about the record­ing were valid yet easy to address: ​“These are good ques­tions, but I don’t think any­one who has ever paid hard cash for opera on records would have the slight­est dif­fi­cul­ty in answer­ing them. Where are we? We are not in the the­atre; we are where music belongs: in the mind and in the emo­tions and in the imag­i­na­tion. And what is the audience/​performer rela­tion­ship? It is clos­er than it has ever been, pre­cise­ly because there is no prosce­ni­um arch when you lis­ten to records.”¹⁹ The ben­e­fit of new media tech­nolo­gies rest­ed on their capac­i­ty to fos­ter this inti­ma­cy and remove the ​“con­ven­tions and obsta­cles” asso­ci­at­ed with live per­for­mances. The pro­duc­er, fur­ther­more, also had an oblig­a­tion to har­ness the rapid­ly devel­op­ing tech­nol­o­gy of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, ​“oth­er­wise the record, as a grow­ing means of musi­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion, will die.” For Cul­shaw, the evan­gel­i­cal poten­tial of the medi­um was para­mount and should be cul­ti­vat­ed fur­ther ​“because if per­formed art doesn’t adjust to life, life won’t adjust to per­formed art.”

The essays by Osborne and Cul­shaw occa­sioned a flur­ry of read­er respons­es for and against both. Even John McClure, an emi­nent pro­duc­er at Colum­bia Records, entered the fray. Osborne authored two con­trast­ing rejoin­ders. The first was a fake fea­ture, ​“Audiovideo in Review.” Pub­lished in the Decem­ber 1968 issue of High Fideli­ty, it pre­sent­ed a tongue-in-cheek pro­jec­tion of an issue from Decem­ber 2068. Using alter egos of the magazine’s crit­ics and a range of absurd, futur­is­tic record­ing neol­o­gisms, Osborne lam­pooned con­tem­po­rary dis­course on fusions of audio and video tech­nol­o­gy and the future await­ing the record­ing medi­um if cur­rent prac­tice per­sist­ed. Through­out, Osborne trolls Cul­shaw on his own ground. The fusion of audio and video is indeed the future, and tech­nol­o­gy will allow all man­ner of mar­vels. But left unchecked, the results could veer towards the grotesque. The high­light of this false doc­u­ment is a review of a new ​“audio­vi­su­al cap­sule” of Elek­tra con­duct­ed by ​“Cul­shaw.” Adopt­ing the pseu­do­nym Piotr G. Dupinksky — an allu­sion to reg­u­lar High Fideli­ty review­er Peter G. Davis — Osborne skew­ers this hypo­thet­i­cal cre­ation for its ​“all-out, Grand Guig­nol-style,” includ­ing the per­fect­ly caught sound of Klytämnestra’s voice com­ing through a pane of glass.

For the April 1969 issue of High Fideli­ty, Osborne authored a sec­ond, more con­ven­tion­al riposte that suc­cinct­ly sum­ma­rized his orig­i­nal posi­tions against those of Cul­shaw and McClure.²⁰ Points are con­ced­ed, false­hoods are called out, and unan­swered ques­tions are high­light­ed. Osborne end­ed with a list of three long-range ​“invest­ments” that record com­pa­nies might pur­sue instead of con­sign­ing ​“oper­at­ic moder­ni­ty” to the con­tin­ued ​“slather­ing of cen­tu­ry-old stage works with irrel­e­vant melo­dra­mat­ic sound effects.” These include 1) using record­ing com­pa­ny resources to set up a ​“clear­ing­house” for younger singers, 2) com­mis­sion­ing new operas sole­ly for phono­graph­ic record­ing, and 3) a new ​“indus­try-sup­port­ed work­shop of the audio-visu­al arts.” Osborne admit­ted that his ideas had lim­it­ed finan­cial fea­si­bil­i­ty, but he reit­er­at­ed how record­ed opera lim­it­ed its poten­tials by keep­ing itself to works con­ceived ini­tial­ly for the stage.

Cul­shaw offered no direct response to Osborne’s ​“invest­ments,” but such top­ics were not unfa­mil­iar to him. His posthu­mous mem­oir Putting the Record Straight (1981) offers fre­quent cri­tiques of man­age­ment at Dec­ca sign­ing up younger singers and promis­ing them a range of projects with­out prop­er con­sid­er­a­tion of their longevi­ty or the fis­cal worth of the reper­toire in ques­tion.²¹ Where­as Cul­shaw com­mis­sioned the opera Owen Wingrave (1971) from Ben­jamin Brit­ten for BBC Tele­vi­sion, osten­si­bly answer­ing Osborne’s sec­ond point, tele­vi­sion opera could not claim to be new phe­nom­e­non in the 1970s.²² Culshaw’s writ­ings from the post-Ring peri­od are also rife with propo­si­tions of new audio-visu­al con­ver­gences, which saw some real­iza­tions dur­ing his tenure at the BBC. One won­ders what he would make of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry phe­nom­e­non of live-stream­ing opera, some­thing he pre­saged sev­er­al times in his writ­ings.²³ Final­ly, while he main­tained an active sched­ule of lec­tur­ing and artis­tic con­sult­ing until his pre­ma­ture death in 1980, Cul­shaw lam­en­ta­bly nev­er estab­lished a rela­tion­ship with any devel­op­men­tal media enterprise.

Towards a ​“Cul­sha­vian” Eth­ic of Record­ed Opera

Con­struct­ing an eth­ic for record­ed opera on Culshaw’s behalf remains com­pli­cat­ed. Though eth­i­cal con­cerns abound in his writ­ings, he made no attempt to cod­i­fy such mat­ters explic­it­ly. The Osborne exchanges rep­re­sent an attempt in that direc­tion, and one won­ders how, if he had respond­ed to Osborne’s sec­ond response, Cul­shaw would have pro­vid­ed fur­ther ques­tions or clar­i­fi­ca­tions. Fur­ther mud­dy­ing mat­ters is the extent to which Culshaw’s aes­thet­ic and eth­i­cal approach­es can be seen to vary from record­ing to record­ing. While he stat­ed over and over that stereo, as a medi­um, was what one made of it, Cul­shaw open­ly con­ced­ed that the bound­aries of artis­tic judg­ment were not def­i­nite: ​“the ques­tion of how far to go in pro­duc­ing an opera for stereo is a tricky one.”²⁴

Despite these ambi­gu­i­ties, cer­tain eth­i­cal threads in the debates on the Dec­ca Elek­tra war­rant reflec­tion. They are most­ly con­cerned with the pol­i­tics of medi­a­tion: for exam­ple, the rela­tion­ships between human and mechan­i­cal ele­ments, the ten­sion between live per­for­mance and record­ing, or even the polit­i­cal appor­tion­ing of the son­ic space between voice and orches­tra. But an ethics of opera record­ing must first con­tend with the space with­in which that sys­tem is to be ground­ed. Any con­struct of ethics must be ground­ed in a plane of social inter­ac­tion and cir­cu­la­tion, since ethics by its very nature depends upon the orga­ni­za­tion of a social group to inform what prin­ci­ples of behav­ior and/​or belief are val­ued (or deval­ued) as well as how those prin­ci­ples are con­veyed.²⁵ In the case of opera record­ings, the social plane would appear to com­prise those who make records and those who con­sume them. How­ev­er, the divi­sion between mak­ers and con­sumers is blurred by the fact that all of them, through cir­cu­la­tion, con­tribute in one way or anoth­er to the col­lec­tive assign­ing of val­ue to the record­ing and/​or any of its sub­sidiary components.

Per­haps the most preclu­sive eth­i­cal com­po­nent of opera record­ing is the act of lis­ten­ing, and, with it, the ethics and pol­i­tics of lis­ten­ing. As Col­in Symes observes, ​“as dis­tinct from hear­ing, lis­ten­ing is not a nat­ur­al process [Symes’s empha­sis] but one that is social­ly con­struct­ed, pro­duced through pow­er­ful dis­cours­es asso­ci­at­ed with sound, such as those con­cern­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion of music.”²⁶ For the mak­ers of records, lis­ten­ing involved active­ly scru­ti­niz­ing what was accept­able and what was not accept­able. For the audi­ence of a record, lis­ten­ing was osten­si­bly more pas­sive, though more than once Cul­shaw enter­tained the idea of a tech­nol­o­gy that would give the lis­ten­er more con­trol over what was aural­ly pre­sent­ed. He also addressed the seri­ous eth­i­cal quan­daries that a wide­spread ​“do-it-your­self” tech­nol­o­gy could inspire: ​“A whole new scale of val­ues would emerge, and a method of mea­sure­ment would have to be invent­ed. Assum­ing the medi­um to be tape, would two and a half feet of Nils­son be worth more or less than the same length of Callas?”²⁷ In this way, the eth­i­cal aspect of lis­ten­ing would ulti­mate­ly hinge on alle­giances and assign­ments of val­ue. Cul­shaw did not pro­vide a final judg­ment on the DIY issue. He mere­ly declared that such a tech­nol­o­gy had great val­ue in invest­ing the lis­ten­er with an inti­mate knowl­edge of the music as a ​“per­former” of sorts, and that such a devel­op­ment, in what­ev­er form it may take, is part of an inevitable progress towards a more par­tic­i­pa­to­ry listener.

Anoth­er aspect of this eth­i­cal con­struc­tion, hint­ed at pre­vi­ous­ly, con­cerns the trans­porta­tion of opera from a sole­ly the­atri­cal space into a pure­ly acoustic space. A ful­ly staged opera required, and still requires, a venue for col­lec­tive gath­er­ing, even if it is not a con­ven­tion­al the­atri­cal space. One con­se­quence of phono­graph­ic records was a cer­tain democ­ra­ti­za­tion of opera by lib­er­at­ing it from its tra­di­tion­al location(s) of per­for­mance. As Cul­shaw observed, ​“the sick­ness of opera has been, and is, that it is a very expen­sive and exclu­sive closed shop.”²⁸ One also gets a sense that his respons­es to Osborne are a response to his per­cep­tions of a wider elit­ism in opera cul­ture, an elit­ism more detri­men­tal than beneficial.

These ele­ments cul­mi­nate in per­haps the most politi­ciz­ing com­po­nent of the ethics of opera record­ing: the ten­u­ous rela­tion­ship record­ed opera main­tains with live per­for­mance. Crit­ics of mid-cen­tu­ry stu­dio opera record­ings had no qualms about deem­ing them ​“immoral” in com­par­i­son with live per­for­mances. Though stu­dio record­ings could impress, their ​“arti­fi­cial” nature placed them in direct con­fronta­tion with the tran­si­to­ry and spon­ta­neous expe­ri­ence of the opera house, which car­ried an implied ​“moral” author­i­ty. Cul­shaw him­self saw the two as cohab­iters, but his view­point was only one of many. The philoso­pher and com­pos­er Theodor Adorno, con­ven­tion­al­ly seen as the arch-neme­sis of the ​“cul­ture indus­try,” saw much laud­able poten­tial in opera on record: ​“It allows for the opti­mal pre­sen­ta­tion of music, enabling it to recap­ture some of the force and inten­si­ty that had been worn thread­bare in the opera hous­es. Objec­ti­fi­ca­tion, that is, a con­cen­tra­tion on music as the true object of opera, may be linked to a per­cep­tion that is com­pa­ra­ble to read­ing, to the immer­sion in a text.”²⁹

Many oth­ers, how­ev­er, took a hos­tile stance. Sadler’s Wells Opera admin­is­tra­tor Nor­man Tuck­er described stereo opera as ​“an enor­mous men­ace.” Harold Rosen­thal, edi­tor of the jour­nal Opera, qual­i­fied begrudged praise for Decca’s 1962 release of Salome with a caveat: ​“I am stag­gered. I am bowled over. And yet I feel there is some ele­ment of cheat­ing in that one has got some­thing one would nev­er get in the the­atre.”³⁰ New York Times crit­ic Harold C. Schon­berg took Culshaw’s col­leagues at oth­er com­pa­nies to task in 1968: ​“So what comes out is a glossy, superbly engi­neered prod­uct that has no rela­tion to life or to the music actu­al­ly made in the con­cert hall. It is some­what dis­con­cert­ing to hear Vic­tor and Colum­bia engi­neers admit that they are Cul­shaw­ites. They are inter­est­ed in sound, not con­tent: in fre­quen­cy response, not hon­est repro­duc­tion. In short, they are begin­ning to traf­fic pri­mar­i­ly in gim­micks, many of those gim­micks, such as ​‘added stereo,’ thor­ough­ly dis­hon­est.”³¹

Cul­shaw took to the offen­sive regard­ing such com­ments, tak­ing the mak­ers of live opera to task for, in his view, mis­tak­ing the prob­lem: ​“Peo­ple will always go to hear good per­for­mances and pay good mon­ey for them. What they will no longer tol­er­ate is the third-rate, the shod­dy, the apolo­getic reper­to­ry per­for­mance. Why should they, when they can hear the first-rate at home?”³² Part of this push for per­fec­tion was the nature of the medi­um. A record was a thing to be played with a degree of rep­e­ti­tion, and, as such, was not a place to enshrine errors. Cul­shaw addressed this con­cern fre­quent­ly: ​“Flaws which float by in a con­cert are heard once and for­got­ten. Even in a live broad­cast, when acci­dents can hap­pen they pass in one ear and out the oth­er. But on a record such flaws would become a major irri­ta­tion on the sec­ond or third time of play­ing, so they have to be as far as pos­si­ble elim­i­nat­ed.”³³ Fur­ther­more, though pre­oc­cu­pa­tions with sound were unavoid­able with a pure­ly aur­al medi­um, Cul­shaw arguably strove for an ide­al bal­ance between the acoustic and dra­mat­ic con­tent in his record­ings. This was exem­pli­fied in Decca’s con­tro­ver­sial ​“Son­ic­Stage” tech­nique. Intro­duced in mar­ket­ing for Decca’s 1962 release of Strauss’s opera Salome, Son­ic­Stage ini­tial­ly encom­passed Decca’s attempt at greater clar­i­ty of orches­tral sound while afford­ing more pos­si­bil­i­ties to the voice: ​“In one sense it is a musi­cal advance because it reveals more of the musi­cal tex­ture with­out iso­lat­ing or detach­ing any strand; but even more, it is a dra­mat­ic devel­op­ment, enabling the artists to con­vey extreme­ly sub­tle shades of the­atri­cal expres­sion.”³⁴ The term Son­ic­Stage has also come to encom­pass how actu­al stag­ing was employed dur­ing record­ing ses­sions to enhance such ​“expres­sion.” Singers would act on a grid­ded stage with sim­pli­fied but dra­mat­i­cal­ly sen­si­ble move­ments, based on the opera’s stage direc­tions. Elek­tra would be one of the final projects brand­ed with the term, though the stress on sound qual­i­ty and stag­ing would per­sist at Dec­ca in the fol­low­ing decades. In an iron­ic echo of Schon­berg’s exco­ri­a­tion of record­ing ​“gim­micks,” how­ev­er, Cul­shaw lat­er dis­par­aged the term Son­ic­Stage as ​“child­ish.”³⁵

Attempt­ing a Playback

John Culshaw’s record­ings, like those across var­i­ous discogra­phies, are rep­re­sen­ta­tions and embod­i­ments as much of the musi­cal works they inscribe as of the aes­thet­ics, val­ues, and ethics of the indi­vid­u­als who made them. With­in the embod­ied prac­tice of record­ing, they remain a polit­i­cal reflec­tion of what is both son­i­cal­ly and aes­thet­i­cal­ly desir­able and prefer­able. In con­sid­er­ing the pos­si­ble tenets of an ethics of opera record­ing, cer­tain points become salient. An ethics of opera record­ing is ground­ed on a social plane of inter­ac­tion com­pris­ing dif­fuse stages of cir­cu­la­tion. This social plane is pop­u­lat­ed by mem­bers of a record ​“com­mu­ni­ty” who remain, regard­less of their role or func­tion as mak­er or con­sumer, assign­ers of val­ue as lis­ten­ers to the record­ing in ques­tion. There are many oth­er aspects still to be teased out and cri­tiqued not only with­in Culshaw’s dis­course but also with­in those of his con­tem­po­rary pro­duc­ers and suc­ces­sors. The record­ings keep us lis­ten­ing and reeval­u­at­ing, as they were intend­ed to do.

In the fifty years since the release of Decca’s Elek­tra, the sub-spheres of this cir­cu­la­tion have been broad­ened con­sid­er­ably not only because of the pro­lif­er­a­tion of the record­ing in var­i­ous ana­logue and dig­i­tal forms, but also with the ever-expand­ing discog­ra­phy of the opera. Cul­shaw admit­ted that the Dec­ca Elek­tra respond­ed to what came before it, and Decca’s release would sure­ly elic­it respons­es as well. In Gramo­phone​’s sur­vey of the discog­ra­phy of Elek­tra in 2013, the Dec­ca Elek­tra came in as the ​“alter­na­tive choice” to the ​“top choice,” Profil’s 2004 release of the opera con­duct­ed by Semy­on Bychkov.³⁶ As more record­ings are cre­at­ed and released — many now record­ed and edit­ed from live per­for­mances — the cir­cu­la­tion con­tin­ues and the eval­u­a­tion will start once again. While this cir­cu­la­tion con­tin­ues in print, the dig­i­tal realm must also be exam­ined as a prime site of cir­cu­la­tion. Across the Inter­net, record­ings are streamed or down­loaded, bootlegs are furtive­ly exchanged, and fierce debate rages about the mer­its of an indi­vid­ual con­duc­tor, a per­former, a per­for­mance, and even the opera itself. With­in this cir­cu­la­tion, the eth­i­cal aspect of opera record­ing will con­tin­ue to finesse itself in the man­ner of the medi­um it envelopes: attempt, assem­ble, play­back, repeat. Of this point, John Cul­shaw would doubt­less approve.

The author grate­ful­ly acknowl­edges Louise Mein­t­jes, whose sem­i­nar at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty in Fall 2015 ger­mi­nat­ed an ear­li­er ver­sion of this essay.