Fred Gaisberg

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Fred Gaisberg (born, New York 1873 - died: England 1951) was the first of the three great classical producers for the gramophone. He himself did not use the term ‘producer’ and was not an impresario like Walter Legge of EMI or an artistic visionary like John Culshaw of Decca. Gaisberg’s genius was in talent spotting and persuading performers to make recordings for the new-fangled gramophone.

A musically talented youngster, he encountered the fledgling recording technology in the early 1890s, and got a job working for the ‘Graphophone’ [sic] company in America. Sound quality and short playing time, however, meant that recordings were more an amusing novelty than a serious means of reproducing music. In this decade the first of the recording industry’s format wars was taking place, with the original cylinder recordings gradually being ousted by the superior and more convenient flat disc. Gaisberg played an important part in this, helping to establish 78 revolutions per minute as the standard playing speed and shellac as the standard material for making discs.

In 1898 the Gramophone Company was formed in London. Gaisberg, by then working as piano accompanist and recording supervisor for Emile Berliner, left New York for London to join the Gramophone Company as its first recording engineer. His first recording in London was sung by Syria Lamonte, a barmaid at Rules Restaurant in Maiden Lane, but greater things were very soon to follow.

Gaisberg – despite reservations from his employers in London – signed up the tenor Enrico Caruso to make his first recordings. The voice recorded well even on the primitive equipment of the time, and Gaisberg’s risk paid off financially as well as artistically. Caruso's recordings were released in 1903 on the premium-price Victor 'Red Seal' label, the first recordings to feature Nipper, the ‘His Master’s Voice’ dog, listening to the acoustic horn of a gramophone. Caruso's Victor recordings sold prodigiously and turned him into an international star. Caruso himself said, ‘My Victor records will be my biography’.

Gaisberg remained as senior recording manager for the Gramophone Company from 1898 till he retired in 1939. He weathered the change from acoustic recording to electrical recording, using microphones which overnight turned gramophone records from an entertaining toy to a genuine means of reproducing music, and characteristically made full use of the new technology. The recordings made under his overall supervision include Elgar’s series of records of his symphonies, concertos and other major works. With Bernard Shaw, the BBC and others Gaisberg was partly responsible for persuading Elgar to write a third symphony, though in the end the composer died leaving the sketches incomplete. (They were successfully ‘elaborated’ into symphonic shape by the composer Anthony Payne four decades later).

Gaisberg was the only record producer to record a castrato singer, and he was the first record producer to make discs in Japan, recording over 270 titles in one month of 1903.

Unlike his great successors Legge and Culshaw, Gaisberg did not generally regard it as part of his function to influence the way performers performed. He found the best artists, signed them up and faithfully captured their performance on disc in the best possible sound.

Gaisberg is buried in Hampstead Cemetery in West Hampstead.