Magister Ludi: John Culshaw, 100 Years On

When Alfonso XIII once asked Sergei Diaghilev, “What exactly is it that you do?”, the question had much merit. Composers, dancers, singers, instrumentalists, conductors, and set designers: these all carried out readily identifiable tasks in a Diaghilev production, whereas Diaghilev himself never composed, never painted, never sculpted, never sang, never played, never conducted and would have died rather than disport himself before the paying public in a pas de deux. With that effrontery that never ceased to charm, he responded to the Spanish monarch: “Your Majesty, I am like you. I don’t work. I do nothing. But I am indispensable.”

The exceptional British recording producer John Culshaw, born one hundred years ago last May, could have said something similar about his own function. As reticent as Diaghilev was exhibitionistic, Culshaw nevertheless had this in common with the expatriate Russian: he revolutionised an entire art. Every performer and every producer who has made a classical recording over the last six decades is, in a certain sense, Culshaw’s child. For most of us, Culshaw will always be associated with his groundbreaking 1950s and 1960s work of evangelism on behalf of four composers above all others: Wagner, Verdi, Britten, and Richard Strauss.

Culshaw found a powerful and convincing solution to the problem of how to capture entire Wagner operas on disc, with as little as possible by way of non-musical distraction to get in the way of the music itself.

At a time when ten minutes’ perusal of Amazon discloses more than twenty different Ring cycles available—and with no guarantee of completeness on Amazon’s part—it requires something of an imaginative struggle to recollect what Culshaw emphasises with understandable pride in the first chapter of his minor classic, Ring Resounding. To wit, how deeply inimical the pre-Culshaw recording procedures had long been to Wagner, and how in several respects the Wagner-loving record collector was scarcely better off in 1957 than he had been in 1907.

Two technological liabilities, which long seemed permanent, explain the situation. First, the shameless despotism wielded by the 78-rpm disc’s four-minute side-lengths, which inflicted a procrustean torture upon the ebb and flow of Wagner’s musical thought. This despotism could have been specifically designed to ruin anyone’s appreciation of Wagner’s unhurried musical paragraphs. Second, would-be Wagnerians found themselves confronted with the enduring limits on sound quality itself. Ably though the best 1930s and 1940s performances (including radio broadcasts from La Scala, Covent Garden, and the Metropolitan Opera) managed to capture voices, they had nothing like comparable success in conveying the panoply of a full Wagnerian orchestra even in quiet passages, let alone in what should be the heaven-storming climaxes of the gods’ entry into Valhalla or Siegfried’s funeral march. How could any listener who had heard such climaxes performed in the theatre, or in concert, be expected to remain satisfied with recordings of the period?

It is, after all, widely recognised that Wagner took a certain amount of trouble over the niceties of orchestration. When the instrumentalists concerned end up sounding like a string quartet, a wind quintet and a couple of trumpeters fighting for space and oxygen inside a broom-closet, the result automatically distorts Wagner’s intentions, however glorious individual singers (such as Lauritz Melchior, Astrid Varnay or Friedrich Schorr) might be.

But this difficulty was almost bearable compared with the total lack of long-range planning that typified Wagner recordings in the 78-rpm era. To quote Culshaw’s own sardonic prose:

Not long ago a colleague of mine came across an old 78-rpm set of Walküre on the HMV label. It contained fourteen records—twenty-eight sides—and played for roughly two hours, which is just over half the average timing for the whole work. It was, therefore, a “condensed” Walküre, although the process of condensation seems, from today’s standpoint, to be the least of its surprises. Seven sides, or about thirty-two minutes, are devoted to Act One, with Walter Widdop as Siegmund and Göta Ljunberg as Sieglinde. Through the first four sides the London Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Albert Coates, but when we come to sides five and six an anonymous orchestra has taken over, and Lawrance Collingwood is the conductor. (The singers remain the same.) By side seven, which contains the end of Act One, Mr Coates has reappeared with the London Symphony.

The interjection of another orchestra and conductor in the middle of Act One may seem startling enough today, but it is as nothing when compared with the comings and goings in Act Two. For the opening of the second act the orchestra has become the Berlin State Opera, and the conductor is Leo Blech … But when, on sides eleven and twelve, it is necessary for Siegmund and Sieglinde to reappear, the orchestra becomes the London Symphony once again and Mr Coates is back on the podium. From that point onwards a state of anarchy may be said to prevail.

The post-1945 acceptance of magnetic tape and of the LP record solved some problems only to create others. These new technologies made feasible for the first time complete live recordings from operatic capitals of Europe and America, with all the faults that live recordings are heir to in terms of on-stage bangs, thumps, undue distance from microphones, split brass notes, bungled cues, and—above all—seemingly endless contributions from audience coughers of the most emphysematic kind. (In an operatic auditorium, one almost certainly would never have noticed such distractions. Then again, as cannot be stressed often enough, the listening process which operates during live events and the listening process which operates during domestic record-playing are utterly different; ’twas ever thus.)

At any rate, Culshaw found a powerful and convincing solution to the problem of how to capture entire Wagner operas on disc, with as little as possible by way of non-musical distraction to get in the way of the music itself. His approach can be summarised in two sentences, devoid of engineering jargon. Culshaw threw into the rubbish-bin every maxim that more conventional recording technicians had preached, and practised, about what an operatic recording should involve. He aimed not at perfect fidelity to a particular opera’s particular performance in a particular venue at a particular time, but at realising the Platonic Idea of how that particular opera should sound: how it would have sounded to the composer while it was being created, with imaginary archangels doing the performing inside the composer’s own brain, untroubled by human weaknesses.

A tall order, obviously. Nor was it at once self-evident that Culshaw could be the man to make such lofty schemes real, or, if he could make them real, to prevent bankruptcy on the part of any record label imprudent enough to back them. But Culshaw had several characteristics working in his favour, above all his shortage of conventional training in music. From his very earliest writings it is evident that he had praiseworthy musicological acumen—his short 1949 biography of Rachmaninoff wears better than many a more ambitious volume—allied to what can only be called pluck. His wartime background in the Fleet Air Arm gave him a consciousness of group exertion’s significance, as well as a capacity for last-minute improvising, which served him remarkably well as a civilian.

Decca, Culshaw’s employer, pioneered stereophonic recording as early as 1955 in a manner that staider British labels like EMI refused to do. Culshaw’s rival at EMI, the redoubtable producer Walter Legge (who, in private life, was Mr Elisabeth Schwarzkopf), ill-advisedly rejected stereo outright. “I spend my whole life mixing sounds,” Legge complained, “and now they’re trying to separate them.” Nevertheless, for realising Culshaw’s musical vision—to which he gave the rather ungainly but accurate neologism “Sonicstage”—stereo was vital. The composer-conducted 1958 Decca stereo recording of Britten’s Peter Grimes proved to be an early example of the panache with which Culshaw and his colleague Erik Smith deployed the new medium’s potential: characters can be heard to move not merely backwards and forwards but also between left and right, according to what the story demands. Culshaw preferred to get his way via unobtrusive and detailed argument rather than by aggression. In surviving radio interviews, he speaks as impersonally as if he delivered traffic reports, nowhere raising his voice. Words such as gentleman, polite, quiet, obsessive and private recur in accounts of his methods. Legge relished the role of swashbuckling dictator; Culshaw, that of grey eminence.

In the comparatively little-known, Budapest-born, forty-something maestro Georg Stern—whose Jewish blood had made it essential for him first to Magyarise his surname to Solti, and then to flee Hungary altogether—Culshaw found the conductor of his dreams. Solti’s comparative youth gave him an advantage over such older figures as Furtwängler and Hans Knappertsbusch. They had learnt their craft at a time when live performances dominated musical life, and they found the recording studio’s very different demands oppressive. By contrast, Solti had grown up doing regular studio work and had therefore gained a disciplined reliability that made him a far safer bet than the sometimes inspired but sometimes bone-lazy Knappertsbusch. The decision to employ the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, rather than any British band, demonstrated both economic and artistic sense. Successive Austrian governments welcomed the arrival of hard foreign currency to the capital, and the recording procedures never lost a certain seedy glamour, an atmosphere of Harry Lime and black-market penicillin.

In the comparatively little-known, Budapest-born, forty-something maestro Georg Stern—whose Jewish blood had made it essential for him first to Magyarise his surname to Solti, and then to flee Hungary altogether—Culshaw found the conductor of his dreams.

But hi-tech alone will not redeem a production that no one wants, or can afford, to buy. Culshaw, Solti and Decca benefited from the rapidity with which the United Kingdom’s music-lovers took to purchasing stereophonic record-playing equipment once it became the industry standard in 1958; and this rapidity, in turn, presupposed the affluence of late-1950s Britain, the society of Harold “Supermac” Macmillan and his adage, “We have never had it so good.” During one month the Culshaw–Solti Das Rheingold, in a sequence of events unimaginable today but much commented upon at the time, sold—as the columns of Billboard proclaimed—more copies than the latest Elvis Presley and Pat Boone albums. Sensibly, Culshaw stretched The Ring’s production processes over years, issuing its constituents out of chronological order: Das Rheingold appeared in 1959, Siegfried in 1963, Götterdämmerung in 1965, and Die Walküre not until 1966.

All this, and a good deal more, Culshaw has so well described in Ring Resounding’s pages (the book sometimes reads like a thriller: will the project ever be finished?), which renders any outsider’s synopsis otiose. Suffice it to observe that by the time he left Decca for good in 1967, he had given us a dozen-odd recordings which will be admired and bought as long as classical recordings are bought at all. Here, writing these words, is one whose life Culshaw’s Walküre boxed set changed forever when, aged ten in 1971, he received it as a Christmas present in the New South Wales countryside (not, to put it mildly, a region capable of being confused with Bayreuth). Nowadays, The Ring cycle—like the Richard Strauss, Britten, Verdi, and Puccini productions from the same atelier, sometimes with the same conductor—continues to make converts among the grandchildren of those cognoscenti who snapped up each instalment when it reached the shops.

In 1967, Culshaw was still only forty-three years old. What did he plan to do for the rest of his life? The world can hardly keep on supplying extra Everests for Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay to climb. Culshaw found himself in an analogous position to these mountaineers.

For all his tactical shrewdness (essential in any producer), Culshaw exhibited a marked lack of strategic cynicism. He would only record music to which he could give, technically and emotionally, his fullest efforts. Thus, he played almost no part in the astonishing revival of Mahler’s symphonies, which occurred during the 1960s and 1970s: he detested Mahler’s style and could not hope to conceal that detestation. Pre-1750 music held little or no interest for him. The fact that he had obtained most of his musical knowledge on the run, without the leisure indispensable for sustained research, rendered him dubiously eligible for any academic post. As for turning to mainstream operatic production in a theatre, he had fought all his life against the artistic compromises innate in theatrical management. (By a kindly dispensation of providence, he did not live to witness the ideological imbecilities now so widespread on the operatic stage: the shrieks of hatred towards Madam Butterfly and Turandot as embodiments of “Western imperialism”—“yellowface” being the preferred epithet—or the recent Opera Australia Ring production that purportedly “drew on Asian themes”, with such themes being undefined but possibly connected to the staging’s Chinese sponsor.)

It is unlikely that the young Culshaw ever gave more than three minutes’ thought to antipodean residence. Yet lo and behold, the 1970s found him doing consultancy work for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and even giving lectures at the University of Western Australia.

From 1967 to 1975, Culshaw occupied a somewhat ill-defined job at BBC television, an odd locale for someone who had made an entire musical career from doing his best to render visuals unnecessary. It would be idle to deny that in his BBC years he did good things. His genius (no weaker word is adequate) for talent-spotting led him to discern at an early stage that André Previn combined executant and compositional brilliance with an extraordinary communicative gift—like Leonard Bernstein, but without the Black Panther nonsense. The BBC series André Previn’s Music Night attained ratings that in 2024 would be unthinkable for any show except the most puerile reality television.

But Culshaw’s burning of incense at the Britten shrine exemplified, by 1970, the law of diminishing returns. At this late stage of his career, Britten found it increasingly difficult to pretend that he had any interests in life except pacifism and little boys—not necessarily in that order—and Culshaw’s over-developed bump of reverence concerning Britten impaired his artistic judgment, as he showed with his commissioning of Britten’s television opera Owen Wingrave, an anti-war diatribe that Yoko Ono would have scorned for insufficient subtlety. (Did, perhaps, Culshaw share Britten’s homosexual orientation?)

After 1975 the dreaded word “freelance” loomed on Culshaw’s horizon. Freelancing, by its very nature, could not accommodate his strengths: for all his workaholic initiative, he operated best as an organisation man—provided, needless to say, that the organisation itself remained tolerable—while his earlier operatic productions would never have been completed without selfless teamwork at every musical and administrative level.

It is unlikely that the young Culshaw ever gave more than three minutes’ thought to antipodean residence. Yet lo and behold, the 1970s found him doing consultancy work for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and even giving lectures at the University of Western Australia. His UWA title was “Senior Fellow in the Creative Arts”, an appellation that for readers of this magazine is all too likely to conjure up images of Sir Les Patterson the cultural attaché, and his phalanx of nubile “research assistants”.

No doubt those with whom Culshaw worked in Perth, Adelaide (he heard of Britten’s death while visiting Adelaide during December 1976) and Sydney benefited from his expertise. At the same time, his very last operatic recording—devoted to Puccini’s almost forgotten early opera, Le Villi—implied an alarming decline in his directorial powers, being marked by all sorts of vocal solecisms that in his heyday he would never have allowed onto the final master tapes. Whether this decline would have continued, or whether it amounted merely to a brief aberration, we will never know; while in Australia, he contracted a rare form of hepatitis (probably nothing to do with AIDS, despite Norman Lebrecht’s scuttlebutt to the contrary) which killed him, after his return to London, in April 1980. So completely had he come to seem a man of the musical past—albeit a glorious past—that many newspaper readers, on discovering his Times obituary, must have been taken aback to learn that he had not died years earlier.

Culshaw had one more surprise to spring on posterity, and a most unpleasant one at that. Towards the end, he had dropped hints that he was working on a tell-all memoir about all the musicians and engineering personnel whom he most loathed; but until this memoir (Putting the Record Straight) appeared in 1981, few suspected how pointlessly bitchy it would be. Of course, the man could write—quite apart from Ring Resounding, every paragraph he had produced for the booklets of his boxed sets confirmed his expository skill—and he had the requisite literary aptitude for turning himself into, as it were, the Procopius of classical music’s Byzantium, peddling secret histories. But the spirit of sheer hatred which suffuses Culshaw’s chronicle of drunken tenors, narcissistic sopranos, indolent pianists, boorish impresarios and conductors behaving like escapees from a Nuremberg dock did far more damage to his own reputation than to the good names of the peccant artists whom he described. As Kaiser Wilhelm II, in one of his few known jokes, remarked about the likewise vengeful, and likewise posthumously published, autobiography by ex-Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow: “He’s the first man ever to have committed suicide after his death.” It is as if the ailing Culshaw had become a latter-day Samson, with some deep psychological need to bring crashing down about his own ears the temple that he had once so eagerly, and so ingeniously, helped to build.

Fortunately, Putting the Record Straight no more represents the final word on Culshaw’s achievements than Pablo Neruda’s Stalinist agitprop represents the final word on Neruda’s best lyric poems. A far better memorial to him appeared in England last May: a boxed set of twelve CDs, John Culshaw: The Art of the Producer, which should silence any remaining sceptics through its concentration on Culshaw’s very earliest recordings, the ones he produced between 1948 and 1955. Many of them have never before made it to CD. All demonstrate the downright unnerving skill by which Culshaw, from his earliest days as a freshly demobbed studio professional, obtained the vocal and instrumental sounds which he wanted.

In 1982, Canadian conductor and musicologist Harvey Sachs, amid the congenial task of driving a truck through the gaps in Glenn Gould’s much-ballyhooed aesthetic “reasoning”, remarked with great wisdom (and with an allusion to a famous Hermann Hesse novel): “The true magister ludi does not merely twirl the dials from a glass booth: he stakes his life on every move in the proceedings.” So too did Culshaw at his finest. In 2024, you can possess all the computers, artificial intelligence algorithms and sales spreadsheets on the planet at your disposal, but unless you also have—as Culshaw unmistakably had—the synthesising intellect and, let it be said, moral courage needed to make those bells and whistles work to music’s benefit rather than to its detriment, then you will never issue a single recording that any sane listener would wish to play twice.

R.J. Stove is an organist, poet, and frequent contributor to Quadrant Music.

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