Fred Gaisberg

Frederick William Gaisberg (1 January 1873 – 2 September 1951) was an American musician, recording engineer and one of the earliest classical music producers for the gramophone.

[1] A musically talented youngster, he encountered the fledgling recording technology in the early 1890s and got a job working for the Berliner Gram-O-Phone Company in America.

Poor sound quality and short playing time, however, meant that recordings were more of an amusing novelty than a serious means of reproducing music.

[3] Among his first recordings in London were several made by Syria Lamonte, an Australian singer working at Rules Restaurant in Maiden Lane.

They signed up and/or recorded such international stars as Adelina Patti, Francesco Tamagno, Feodor Chaliapin, Beniamino Gigli, Nellie Melba, John McCormack and Fritz Kreisler.

He told a colleague that he saw his task simply as one of making as many sound photographs or gramophone (78-rpm) disc sides as possible during each recording session.

He remained as artistic director after the HMV and Columbia firms merged in 1931, creating Electric and Musical Industries (EMI).

With Bernard Shaw, the BBC and others, Gaisberg was partly responsible for persuading Elgar to write a third symphony, although he died before he could complete any more than initial sketches.

One of his last projects, in the early 1930s, was to conceive, and supervise the construction of, a major facility for classical recording, Abbey Road Studios.

It was attended by renowned musicians as diverse as Sir Thomas Beecham, Gracie Fields, Richard Tauber and Artur Rubinstein.