National Recording Registry: Classical/Opera

Opera is when a man gets stabbed in the back, and instead of bleeding, he sings. - Robert Benchley

There are two playlists above this, because the classical and opera recordings of the National Recording Registry tell two distinct stories - one, of the appreciation of Common Practice Era European art music in 20th century America, the rise and fall of pieces in the repertoire long after their composers have turned to decomposing, their legacy in the hands of conductors and instrumentalists; the other, the story of American development of its own art music tradition after Europe's. The recordings generally fall into corresponding categories: pieces composed by non-Americans long before the recording was made, and pieces composed by Americans around the same time as the recording, each category corresponding to one of the stories above.

The first story

The first story - that of European art music in the U.S. - begins with some of the Registry's oldest recordings, even with the oldest recordings in the world. The first audio recordings - the phonautograms of Eduoard Leon-Stott de Martinville - include a few selections of opera. Another ancient entry, the Mapleson cylinders, consists of over a hundred two-minute recordings taken of New York's Metropolitan Opera in the 1900s decade, when opera was still reasonably popular with American high society. For so it was in the 19th century, that opera was popular in Europe, often more important than other forms of art music (at one point, Mozart was best known for his operas!), and Americans imitated this.

Operatic arias also had the advantage that they fit onto short-form wax cylinders and small records, like pop songs, better than movements of sonatas, though the works of Jascha Heifetz (whose entire 1917-1921 works with the Victor label have been inducted for preservation) demonstrate that elaborate violin showpieces by now-lesser-known composers were also eligible. Later in the 1930s, a couple of classical works (Schnabel's recording of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, and the Met's recording of Tristan und Isolde) were remarkable for the effort put into recording their entireties with the technology of the time. The Bell Labs recordings of Leopold Stokowski may also be considered classical.

Opera was still an important medium after World War One, if to a shrinking portion of high society, luckily important enough after the invention of the long-playing record to be recorded in full (in fact, the longest musical entry in the Registry is the 1965 recording of Wagner's Ring Cycle). Chamber music and symphonies, however, were hardly unpopular at the time. Many of the Registry's classical entries date to the late 1940s and 1950s; when the long-playing record was introduced, a number of landmark recordings of non-operatic works were made, including the Budapest Quartet's recordings of the Beethoven String Quartets, a recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons made with the novel technique of hanging microphones over the orchestra, and Glenn Gould's recordings of Bach's Goldberg variations. Also of interest at this time are recordings of the music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, and a twelfth-century morality play, all atypical of the repertoire but of historical interest.

While classical music is still being recorded today, there seems to be less tendency to produce landmark recordings; no one cover matters much more than another. As such, it is not surprising that there are fewer registry recordings in this category after the Beaux Arts Trio's 1975 recordings of the complete Schumann trios (really, there are two: an album of arias by Renee Fleming, and one of Rachmaninoff's Vespers). The newer classical albums of interest are those playing new music.

The second story

The first work of American art music in the National Recording Registry, by date of composition, in a 1911 opera with many elements of European-style operas, but which is inevitably referred to as a "ragtime opera" on account of its being composed by ragtime composer Scott Joplin. It was not performed until the 1970s (and it is from this time that the Registry's recording dates), as American art music was of little interest even in the United States for some time (and Black American of less).

A taste of the developing American art music can be had from the New Music Quarterly Recording Series, a set of 30 records sent quarter by quarter by one Henry Cowell in an attempt to promote avant-garde music in the United States. The recordings feature many short, recordable movements from pieces of now-remembered and now-forgotten composers from the early 19th century. Though they did not sell well, and the recordings are hard to find, I have assembled a playlist consisting of recordings of the same pieces by other artists. The Registry also acknowledges the first recordings of many well-known 20th-century American composers: Copland's Appalachian Spring, George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" (as recorded by the then very popular Paul Whiteman orchestra), Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach, Benjamin Britten's War Requiem (1962, regarding World War Two), and George Crumb's Black Angels: Thirteen Images from the Dark Land (1972, regarding the Vietnam War).

The works described above are reasonably part of the art music canon, whether modern or postmodern - but still performed by a typical orchestra. Also part of the postmodern canon are the works of several composers with electronic music, beginning in the late 1960s. These recordings were generally regarded as experimental, and not as performable.

The Registry also highlights a few contemporary composers, whose names are not yet in history books - an album of Yo-Yo Ma's premiers of cello works, Jennifer Hidgon's 2008 percussion concerto, Joan Tower's Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman, and one Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra.

Recordings of both categories are enumerated in the table below. They total over ninety-two hours, more than any other genre of music, and nearly one-third of the musical recordings.