John Culshaw
He produced a wide range of music, but is best known for masterminding the first studio recording of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, begun in 1958.
Largely self-educated musically, Culshaw worked for Decca from the age of 22, first writing album liner notes and then becoming a producer.
[1] The Times said of him that "he stood in that great tradition of propagandists from Henry Wood to Leonard Bernstein, who seek to bring their love and knowledge of music to the widest audience.
At Decca, the musicians whom he recorded included Ida Haendel, Eileen Joyce, Kathleen Ferrier and Clifford Curzon.
[15] For Culshaw, Wagner was an abiding passion,[16] and he persuaded Decca and the Bayreuth management to let him record that year's Ring cycle in addition to Parsifal.
The resultant recording was well reviewed,[n 3] but Culshaw wrote of it: … the cast was only of moderate ability, and we had access to far too few performances to make up anything really worth while.
It was still felt that this was the only economic way to record Wagner, for the expense involved in taking his major works to the studio did not seem to be justified by the sales potential.
[23] Culshaw found his attempts to build up a roster of classical artists for Capitol frustrated by bureaucracy at the company's headquarters in Los Angeles.
The latter misjudgment, as Culshaw noted in his memoirs, was not repeated by Walter Legge of EMI, who signed Klemperer up with great artistic and commercial success.
[27] The Gramophone obituarist wrote of him in 1980: "To meet John Culshaw for the first time, quiet, charming, sharp-eyed but with no signs of aggressiveness about him, was to marvel that here was one of the two great dictators of recording art.
If Walter Legge in a flash had one registering extrovert forcefulness in the very picture of a dictator, John Culshaw's comparable dominance was something to appreciate over a longer span.
"[30] To the astonishment and envy of Decca's rivals the set outsold popular music releases such as those of Elvis Presley and Pat Boone.
[32] His cast for the remaining three Ring operas included Birgit Nilsson, Hans Hotter, Gottlob Frick, Wolfgang Windgassen, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Régine Crespin, with even minor roles sung by such stars as Joan Sutherland.
[33] In these productions Culshaw put into practice his belief that a properly-made sound recording should create what he called "a theatre of the mind".
Similarly, where Wagner called for steerhorns, Culshaw arranged for them to be used instead of the trombones habitually substituted at Bayreuth and other opera houses.
"[2] Culshaw persuaded Decca to make the first complete recording of Peter Grimes, arguing that unless they did so they should abandon their exclusive agreement with the composer and so "give him a chance to try his luck with other companies".
[40] Among the works Culshaw himself recorded with Britten were the operas Albert Herring (1964), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1967), and Billy Budd (1968).
For the recording Culshaw managed to assemble the three singers whom Britten had in mind when writing the work, uniting Russian, German and English soloists to represent the former enemy nations – Galina Vishnevskaya, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Peter Pears.
[43] Culshaw produced many of the conductor Herbert von Karajan's best-known operatic and orchestral sets, which remain in the catalogues five decades later.
Among the recordings supervised by Culshaw for RCA were Sir Thomas Beecham's lavishly re-orchestrated version of Handel's Messiah.
Other artists with whom he worked for Decca and RCA included pianists such as Wilhelm Backhaus, Arthur Rubinstein and Julius Katchen; conductors including Karl Böhm, Sir Adrian Boult, Pierre Monteux, Fritz Reiner, and George Szell; and singers such as Carlo Bergonzi, Jussi Björling, Lisa Della Casa, Leontyne Price, and Renata Tebaldi.
[48] In 1973 he organised for BBC television to broadcast a complete performance of Wagner's Siegfried conducted by Reginald Goodall,[49] but the project never happened.
[50] Culshaw also set up BBC studio productions of The Marriage of Figaro, The Yeomen of the Guard, The Flying Dutchman and La traviata.
He also persuaded Britten to conduct television productions of Peter Grimes and Mozart's Idomeneo, and to accompany Pears in Schubert's Winterreise.
[4] Some of his BBC programmes have been preserved on DVD, including films of the Amadeus Quartet playing works by Schubert and Britten.
[53] He took time off from the BBC to return to the recording studio, rejoining his old Decca engineering team in 1971 to produce Der Rosenkavalier, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
