The Life and Death of Classical Music by Norman Lebrecht

concerto, I repaired for a beer with the recording team to a bar where, this being Germany, classical music was playing as background. The Mendelssohnconcerto we recognized automatically but we couldn’t identify the soloist, so we went through a specialist process of elimination by ear: not Kreisler, not Heifetz, not Menuhin, not Stern, not Milstein, not Oistrakh, not Perlman, not Kremer, not Haendel, not Mutter. After ruling out twenty of the best, we summoned the bar owner and demanded to see the CD sleeve. To our dismay, the violinist coming through the speakers was the one we had been working with all day. His playing was so dull, so lacking in colour and individuality, that some of the best ears in studio world failed to pick him out in a blind audition. That, for me, was a scales-falling moment, a revelation of how ruthlessly corporate pressures were pushing music into a corridor of conformity whose narrowness was choking off its life force. It was also a moment that reinforced my appreciation of all the rich humanity that had run before, a panoply of performers and producers who, unafraid of risk, engraved records that continue to evoke wonderment.
    The century of recording yielded a kaleidoscope of personalities whose performances amount to an indelible history of interpretation. Within that legacy there are summits and troughs, as well as miles upon miles of meandering flatlands. My task here has been to pick out the peaks on a contour map and arrange them in chronological order. No one is expected to agree with all of my selections, but the list as a whole is a faithful representation of a century of achievement and, at the very least, the starting point for an infinity of web debate.
1
. Caruso: The First Recordings

Enrico Caruso
Gramophone and Typewriter Co. Ltd: Milan (Grande Hotel),
11 April 1902
    The history of recording begins not with Edison the inventor, nor with Emil Berliner who patented the flat disc, but with a short, fat Neapolitan who, for a hundred pounds sterling in a Milan hotel room, pierced the clatter of mechanical noise with a richly baritonal tenor. Enrico Caruso was the voice of choice for Italian verismo composers. He had just premiered Franchetti’s ephemeral Ger-mania at La Scala and insisted on incorporating two of its arias in his debut recording. The first – Studenti! Udite!-so excited the producer Fred Gaisberg that he wrote on the wax a matrix number already given to a visiting soprano. Gaisberg’s Italian partner, Alfred Michaelis, left a more sober account of the session:
    Dressed like a dandy and twirling a cane, Caruso sauntered down Via Manzoni and-to the delight of those worshippers of tenors, the waiters-entered the Grande Hotel where we were waiting for him. We barred from the room his escort of braves with the exception of his accompanist, Maestro Cottone … Caruso wanted to get the job over quickly as he was anxious to earn that £100 and have his lunch [but] he forgot all this when he started on the job 1 .
    The remaining eight tracks were prime Verdi-Celeste Aida and Rigoletto’s Questa o quella; a pair of Boitos; a Tosca showstopper; Donizetti’s Una furtive lagrima from L’Elisir d’amore; a spot of ephemeral Mascagni and a Massenet aria. Salvatore Cottone’s piano tinkles somewhere in the back of the room and a loud cough punctures one song: no one ever devised a way of editing on wax.
    The discs were instant bestsellers, winning Caruso his first engagements at Covent Garden and the Met, the stages of his greatest fame. Jovial, uncomplicated, musical by instinct and never knowingly underpaid, he died young but wealthy, supporting a vast number of Neapolitan cousins on his record royalties. More significantly, he is the role model for every well-regarded tenor on record.
    What, exactly, was the extra quality that Caruso brought to the party? First of all, stability: a voice that sat deeper than tenor and did not wobble under stress. Beyond that, he possessed