• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1991 0

was an economy at play in opera piracy at a time of technological transition, and that economy was moral and aesthetic as well as economic. Small, dedicated operators could profit from opera issues where major labels could not. It cost about $i,ooo-1,5oo to press a two-disc opera in a run of a few hundred copies, which meant that an outfit like Wagner-Nichols could break even on sales of perhaps one hundred. A company like RCA or Columbia, on the other hand, with much larger overheads, would have had to sell more than five thousand to make an issue worthwhile. That alone made it unlikely that a major corporation would publish works like Meyerbeer's Roberto it Diavolo or (naturally) Bellini's IlPirata, both of which appeared from so-called private labels. As with jazz, moreover, the market was made up of cognoscenti who prized every performance and every pressing, and the pirate enterprise built on that fact. More standard repertoire did sell better, of course. Callas, especially after her American debut in Chicago in 1954, was a must; and the most celebrated performance of all was Montserrat Caballe's in Lucrezia Borgia. On the other hand, a few particularly arcane items apparently sold so badly that they strained even the pirates' margins to the breaking point. But theirs was a niche enterprise, and a certain esoteric quality was embraced. In explaining why, one pirate with a revealingly acute historical sensibility invoked the spirit of Lionel Mapleson, who had been the Metropolitan Opera's librarian at the turn of the century. Mapleson had made a series of cylinder recordings of star singers in performance that later became celebrated among aficionados. He had done so with the House's permission, but for the opera bootleggers he provided a foundation myth. He was "the first pirate," they believed, and the tones of Caruso had been preserved for posterity only because of his efforts. "We `pirates'-if you must call us that-are the custodians of vocal history," his later epigone declared.16

The opera pirates generated their biggest coup by taking on the most daunting project in all music. They produced the first commercially available recording of Richard Wagner's DerRing des Nibelnngen in its entirety. Today, opera mavens tend to recall Sir Georg Solti's Decca Ring as the first complete recording to be sold, although other cycles were recorded earlier and have been published since Solti's first appeared in 1965. But Decca was preceded-and, it was feared at the time, preempted - by the pirates. The first published Ring was advertised-in the New York Times, no less-by the label Allegro in 1954. It cost $56 for nineteen discs. Its announced origin lay with performances in Dresden led by an otherwise mysterious conductor named Schreiber. Music critics pounced on it eagerly. When they listened, however, what they heard immediately made them suspicious. The recording quality was atrocious, with what sounded like radio interference plaguing the sound, and breaks every thirty minutesprecisely the length of a tape recorded on a domestic deck. Someone had clearly recorded the operas from broadcasts, and had done so amateurishly perhaps at home, with a single tape machine. A little more work revealed that the actual performance had come from Bayreuth in 1953, and the real conductor had been Joseph Keilberth. It was an "indecent travesty," said one critic; "the most brazen and daring case of out-and-out piracy that we haveyet come across," added another. The Wotan and Sieg- linde, Hans Hotter and Regina Resnik, took to the press to condemn it. Resnik sued. Allegro was forced to destroy the stock.

The underlying story to the recording came out during Resnik's suit. It had come from a company calling itself "RCA." This was not, of course, the real RCA. The letters stood here for "Record Corporation of America." Such imitative tactics had been used by print pirates for centuries, but this "RCA' was one of a number of operators bringing the technique up to date. Such outfits began producing classical LPs in i95i and continued in "RCA"s