Fritz Kreisler’s Beethoven Goes Digital

Cover design for a digital release, which does not need a cover (courtesy of Warner Classics)

At the end of last week, when I was writing about a recent release of performances of Ludwig van Beethoven’s sonatas for piano and violin (as he preferred to identify them), I observed that, in spite of having several different recordings of the full cycle of ten sonatas, I much preferred “the spontaneity of performance” for these compositions. That said, I feel it is necessary to call out the efforts of violinist Fritz Kreisler and pianist Franz Rupp. Between 1935 and 1936 they made the first recordings of the entire cycle.

I must confess that I knew little about Rupp until I encountered his Wikipedia page. His chamber music partners included not on Kreisler but also violist William Primrose and cellist Emanuel Feuermann. In 1938 he moved to New York, where he became the permanent accompanist for contralto Marian Anderson. In 1945 he joined the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, remaining there full-time until 1952. He returned in 1968 and probably worked with students until his death in 1992.

One has only to do an Amazon search to see how many times recordings of the Kreisler-Rupp Beethoven cycle have been released. However, this past April Warner Classics released the full canon in digital form. Amazon.com has created a Web page for downloading all 33 tracks in MP3, along with a mini-player to sample the content. Prior to listening to these recordings, I had encountered recordings of Kreisler performances twice. The first came when I purchased the compete RCA recordings of performances by Sergei Rachmaninoff, which included the third of the Opus 30 sonatas (the sixth in the “full count” of sonatas) in the key of G major, recorded on March 22, 1928. The second was much more recent, when I encountered the remastered 78s of Kreisler playing Beethoven’s Opus 61 violin concerto in D major with John Barbirolli conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra on June 16, 1936.

Remastering historical content is often a controversial matter, particularly when the recording process itself had to deal with how much could be contained on one side of a 78 RPM disc. Fortunately, the individual movements of the ten Beethoven sonatas tend to be on the short side. The most notable exception is the second movement of variations in the Opus 47 (“Kreutzer”) sonata, which may well have required one break to be recorded on two sides of a single disc. Nevertheless, even with noticeable technical shortcomings, there is much to be learned about how Beethoven’s music was performed during the first half of the twentieth century; and there are definitely advantages to having that content available in digital form.