Ernst Oppler, Arthur Nikisch. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Berlin, 10 November 1913. Arthur Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic walk into a studio that has nothing an orchestra needs: no hall, no acoustics, no room. A metal horn juts out of one wall, and behind the wall stands a technician, Max Hampe, who knows how to work it. The strings sit in front, facing the mouth of the horn; the woodwinds play sideways; the brass are pushed to the back, against the wall. Where the double basses are not enough to leave a mark in the wax, a tuba reinforces them. That day Beethoven’s Fifth is recorded, all of it, for the first time with an orchestra and a conductor the world knows.
All of it, though, in its own way. The symphony fits onto eight sides, four twelve-inch 78 rpm discs cut on both faces, and each side holds something like four or five minutes of music. The ten-inch disc, the one for songs, ran to three: for symphonic music the large format was used, and even that was not enough. Every minute had to be wrestled out of the wax. Deutsche Grammophon puts the complete set on sale in February 1914.
For decades that recording passed as the first complete symphony in the history of the gramophone. It was not. Three years earlier, in 1910, the Odeon label had already issued the entire Fifth, credited to Friedrich Kark and a Grosses Odeon Streich-Orchester, a “great Odeon string orchestra”, a name that does not match what you hear: the winds are on the recording, and they are clearly audible. The conductor, too, according to the most recent research, was not the man named on the label. In those years Odeon employed as a conductor a composer of twenty-five, Eduard Künneke, and to him are now attributed, though his name never appeared on the labels, two of the very first complete symphonies on record: Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth. An essay published in 2023 in the Journal of the American Musicological Society reconstructed the affair, starting from its very title, which puts Odeon, Künneke and the first recordings of complete symphonies in one line. Eleven years later, Künneke himself would write Der Vetter aus Dingsda, the operetta for which Berlin remembers him.
The first recorded symphony thus has two fathers, one famous and one anonymous, and neither of them could hand it over in a single piece. But the question of names is the least interesting part. What matters more is what the format did to listening. For half a century, until the long-playing record, anyone who wanted to hear a symphony at home heard it in four-minute pieces, with a pause to get up, lift the arm of the gramophone, turn the disc or change it, and begin again. The breaks were not Beethoven’s: the wax decided them. Conductors learned to choose their tempi by watching the clock, engineers to cut where the cut would show least, listeners to carry in memory the bar left hanging until the next side. The dining-room symphony was born this way, in slices, and it shaped the taste of millions of people who had never seen a concert hall.
In Britain the Gramophone Company issued Nikisch’s recording during 1914, on eight discs cut on one side only.