The French Piano School
For some 150 years a distinctively French piano style was nourished at the Paris Conservatoire. During the first half of the nineteenth century Paris was the centre of pianistic activity in Europe, with performers, piano-makers, composers and publishers vying for the attention of a music-loving public. It didn’t take too long for the state-run Conservatoire to become ingrown, with its faculty made up mostly of distinguished graduates whose students would in turn become the next generation of teachers. At first, foreign students were not allowed, and even Liszt was turned down. The repertoire was quite narrow, and all students competing for prizes at the end of the year had to play the same required piece. A premium was placed on fast, clean and brilliant finger work (‘le jeu perlé’) and on a transparent and unforced sound that was never marred by excessive pedal, with variety of tone produced ideally by the fingers and wrists rather than the arms or shoulders. Early recordings by Camille Saint-Saëns, Francis Planté, Louis Diémer, Isidor Philipp and Marguerite Long are classic examples of this style.

But the piano school did not operate in complete isolation. Links with composers and pianists both at home and abroad abounded—Saint-Saëns and Planté performed with Liszt; Philipp studied with Saint-Saëns and with Chopin’s student Georges Matthias; Long, Cortot and Magda Tagliaferro were closely associated with Fauré; and Robert Casadesus and Vlado Perlmuter worked with Ravel—these ties are among the most valuable within this tradition.

Diémer and Philipp were the pre-eminent teachers at the beginning of the twentieth century. Diémer must have allowed individuality, for his students included such very different pianists as Alfred Cortot, Yves Nat, Robert Casadesus, Lazare-Lévy, Édouard Risler, Marius-François Gaillard and Victor Staub. Philipp’s students also showed stylistic variety, with Paul Loyonnet, Jeanne-Marie Darré, Monique de La Bruchollerie and Guiomar Novaes sounding very different. And we must not forget Aline van Barentzen, the first American to win a first prize at the Conservatoire. She represents an entirely different line, having been a pupil of Charles-Valentin Alkan’s student Élie Delaborde. But van Barentzen later studied in Vienna with Theodor Leschetizky and in Berlin with Ernst von Dohnányi, and she may have been following a trend for French-trained pianists to do postgraduate study elsewhere. Risler, for example, worked with three of Liszt’s students, Bruchollerie studied with Emil von Sauer, Darré worked briefly with István Thomán, and Loyonnet studied with Martinus Sieveking.

Inevitably the old French school became diluted by the 1950s, due to the dissemination of other performing styles through recordings, radio, television, international competitions and increased ease of travel. Today, even foreign musicians are permitted to teach at the Conservatoire.

This series of recordings hopes to give an in-depth picture in sound of the many pianists who represented this school at its peak in the early twentieth century and whose recordings have been neglected in the CD era.
Charles Timbrell

This latest issue in APR’s important series celebrating The French Piano School contains the earliest recorded examples of that school (Chaminade’s six recorded sides of her own music made in London in 1901, and available elsewhere on APR, are a special case). Indeed, some of the precious sides reproduced here contain what are among the very first recordings of any pianists. Charles Timbrell’s masterly introduction provides the background to this series, defining for pianophiles, connoisseurs and newcomers alike exactly what is meant by the ‘French School’ of piano playing. In the same way, the actual recordings need to be put in context. Some history: one must bear in mind that when the first of these recordings were made (Pugno in 1903, Saint-Saëns and Diémer in 1904), the recording industry was in its infancy; in fact, it had barely left the womb.

Commercial recordings on cylinders had been introduced by Thomas Edison in 1889 (and in the previous year, twelve-year-old piano prodigy Josef Hofmann had made the first-ever recording of serious music at Edison’s West Orange laboratory). Commercial disc recordings only began to appear in 1895; the first recording studio (over a shoe shop on 12th Avenue, Philadelphia) opened in 1897.

Emile Berliner, a German immigrant living in Washington, DC, had filed a patent in 1887 for a ‘Gramophone’, using discs rather than cylinders. These discs, easier to manufacture, went on sale in 1894 and cylinders fairly quickly became obsolete. Fred Gaisberg, a young American recording engineer and talent scout, was despatched to London to establish The Gramophone Company Limited, opening the first recording studio in London—the basement of 31 Maiden Lane, just off The Strand. The first record was cut in the premises on 2 August 1898 (a Ms Lamonte sang Comin’ Thro the Rye). The recording machine used had been made by a young engineer in Camden, New Jersey, and shipped to the UK. His name was Eldridge R Johnson and he deserves to be better known: it was he who, in late 1895, invented the wind-up gramophone. Until Brunswick’s ‘Panatrope’ all-electric turntable was introduced in 1926, none of the recordings reissued here, with the exception of the Planté discs, could be heard by any other method than on a clockwork gramophone. (Why it took the recording industry over two decades to harness electricity is a mystery, especially when the first electric motor had been made nearly a century earlier in 1829 by Joseph Henry.)

More significantly for us, Berliner also set up branches in Berlin (Deutsche Grammophon AG), France (the Compagnie Français du Gramophone), while Berliner’s brother set up a disc-pressing facility in Hanover, Germany. Most of Europe’s recording industry thus was started by Berliner’s representatives.

Attentive readers will have noted that the recordings by Saint-Saëns, Diémer and Pugno were made for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company—hence the abbreviation by which the discs from this era are universally known: ‘G & Ts’. How did this come about? The Gramophone Company Limited was established in April 1898. In just over two-and-a-half years it was able to advertise the availability of no fewer than 5000 titles. Convinced that the bubble would burst after this extraordinary success, the company’s managing director, William Barry Owen, took the decision to diversify into a totally unrelated field, that of typewriters, in particular a brand called the Lambert which employed a rotating plate rather than the standard keyboard. The Gramophone and Typewriter Company was formed in December 1900. It proved to be a disastrous mistake, for the Lambert model soon proved to be as impractical as it was cheap. By February 1905, Owens had resigned, and all connections with the Lambert typewriter were severed, though it was not until November 1907 that the ‘Typewriter’ was dropped from the company title which then reverted to its former name.

Only six pianists born before 1850 made surviving records issued for commercial release: Louis Diémer, Edvard Grieg, Otto Malling, Vladimir de Pachmann, Francis Planté and Camille Saint-Saëns (we do not include the cylinder recordings by Brahms and Anton Rubinstein, nor the numerous piano rolls made by Carl Reinecke, the earliest-born pianist to make a recording of any kind).

Camille Saint-Saëns, born in 1835, is the earliest-born pianist of distinction to make a commercial disc piano recording. The five titles he recorded in Paris in 1904 were made in a single day (together with four vocal items, not included here, with the mezzo-soprano Meyrianne Héglon). It was another 15 years before he ventured into a recording studio again when he recorded, again all on the same day (24 November 1919) four more piano solos and two pieces with the violinist Gabriel Willaume. The following year they returned to record Saint-Saëns’s Havanaise, by far the longest work (8 minutes) of all three sessions.

Whether he himself was keen to record, whether he was enticed or persuaded, we shall probably never know, but his relationship with The Gramophone and Typewriter Company or its successor seems to have been an insignificant event for him. Neither Saint-Saëns nor any of his biographers make any mention of his disc recordings—nor, indeed, of the nearly 50 piano rolls he made during the last two decades of his long life, the last for Aeolian, made at the age of 80 when he attended the San Francisco Exposition on a visit to the United States. Perhaps he shared the scepticism of many pianists of his time about the sound quality of these early discs, deciding not to bother further with the medium and to favour the piano roll instead.

When we listen to these recordings of Saint-Saëns, we are listening to a man born not far short of 200 years ago. Furthermore, when the youngster established himself as a pianistic prodigy, the two founding fathers of the French School were still very much alive: Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1784-1849) and Pierre Zimmerman (1785-1853), his fellow student at the Conservatoire Nationale de Paris in the early 1800s, exercised enormous influence on the following generations of pianists they taught—among them Camille-Marie Stamaty (1811-1870) who taught Saint-Saëns (and, by the way, Gottschalk).

Descended from the classical refinement of harpsichord touch (Rameau, Couperin), their technique is hand-and-wrist based, rather than the weightier arms-and-shoulders approach of the German and Russian schools. ‘The touch was sensitive,’ writes Reginald R Gerig (Famous Pianists and Their Technique, David & Charles, 1976); ‘it stayed close to the keys, and it did not press deeply. It also was fluent, deft, immaculate like a fine etching. Therefore, the tone was likely to be of smaller dimensions—shallow, pale, transparent. Behind it was an unruffled emotional spirit which highly valued such aesthetic graces as elegant, calculated proportions and subtle phrasing.’

There can hardly be a better illustration of this than the film made in 1914 of Saint-Saëns playing his Valse mignonne (tracks 2 & 9 of this release). It was clearly a favourite work of his as he also made a piano roll of it. The pianist Jack Gibbons has cleverly synchronized the (silent) film with the composer’s 1919 disc recording. One notes the economical, effortless address of the keyboard; the quiet, relaxed hands; the composure, the delicacy of touch. These are enchanting to watch but what is most interesting is how the white notes are struck at the top of the key, very close to the lower end of the black keys.

The first recordings made in the G & T’s Paris studio (among them those by Raoul Pugno featured on CD2) suffered from a faulty turntable resulting in unstable speeds and therefore pitch fluctuation. Having achieved the coup of Saint-Saëns agreeing to make disc recordings, the managing director of the French branch requested that a new machine be specially built. This was accomplished, but Fred Gaisberg, responsible for the company’s early successes, was the only recordist familiar with the new equipment that had been developed in New York where his career had begun. This meant him journeying from London to Paris on the Friday and testing the new machine on Saturday before the recording session on the Sunday afternoon, prior to Saint-Saëns’s departure on Monday.

Listening to this great composer at the keyboard is one of the gramophone’s great treasures. Saint-Saëns’s ‘Africa Fantasy’ is one of his most brilliant works. It was written especially for Marie-Aimée Roger-Miclos whose complete recordings can be heard on CD2. A two-piano score, solo piano score and version for piano and orchestra were all published in the space of a few months between October 1891 and February 1892. Here he presents a selection of themes entitled on the disc ‘Improvised cadenza on Afrique’, despatched with phenomenal dexterity and breathtaking nonchalance. Saint-Saëns’s voice is heard at the end (perhaps enquiring if the engineer thought it was any good?). Less successful is the Rapsodie d’Auvergne, slashed from its normal duration of about eight minutes to a frantic 1’55”. The heavily abbreviated extracts from the opening of the Second Piano Concerto are of greater musical interest, though hardly a reliable guide as to how the piece should be played. Interestingly, the pianist Harold Bauer said that Saint-Saëns tended to play most things too fast: technically brilliant, emotionally inhibited. Leopold Mannes heard him play for an entire afternoon and was reminded of ‘a dry well’.

The 1919 recordings are an infinitely better illustration of Saint-Saëns the pianist and in superior sound. In Rêverie du Soir he allows himself a few changes to the printed score (a repeat of the first section, extended trills in the closing bars) while the ‘Marche Militaire Française’ from the same Suite Algérienne offers a glimpse of the composer’s unfettered virtuoso prowess at the age of 84. On the same day these were recorded (24 November), Saint-Saëns was joined in the studio by the violinist Gabriel Willaume (1873-1946), a prominent player in the French capital at the time who had previously given the premiere of Ravel’s Piano Trio in 1915 (with cellist Louis Feuillard and pianist Alfredo Casella). The Élégie, written in 1915 when Saint-Saëns was in San Francisco representing France at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, was premiered on 23 November 1916 at the Salle Gaveau in Paris by Willaume and the composer, as part of a benefit concert to raise funds for the Ligue fraternelle des enfants de France. ‘I had as my partner,’ wrote Saint-Saëns to the work’s dedicatee Henry Heyman, ‘a violinist who possesses the most brilliant qualities, which he exercises on one of the most wonderful instruments by Guarnerius that one may ever hope to see.’ Curiously, the original 78-rpm disc of the Élégie on the red Disque Pour Gramophone label (with the now familiar HMV trademark picture of Nipper and horn), gives Willaume pre-eminent billing in large capital letters above (in very small lower case) ‘accompagné par Monsieur Camille Saint-Saëns’.

Louis Diémer, whose complete recordings follow, died less than four weeks after these Saint-Saëns sessions. Although largely forgotten now, he was among the most influential performers and pedagogues of his day. Born in Paris in 1843, he was a precocious student at the Paris Conservatoire winning the premier prix pour piano at the tender age of 13. Eventually he succeeded his teacher Antoine Marmontel as head of piano at the Conservatoire, teaching, among others, Alfred Cortot, Alfredo Casella, Yves Nat, Sigismund Stojowski and Édouard Risler. Numerous composers wrote concertos for him—Massenet, Lalo, Tchaikovsky (No 3) and Saint-Saëns (No 5), for instance—and he gave the first performances of many works, including César Franck’s Les Djinns, while he himself wrote a piano concerto, and much chamber and piano music.

As for his extant published recordings, I am indebted to Bryan Crimp for the complex discographic information surrounding them included in his booklet for the original release on APR5534: ‘Detailed research has revealed that [Diémer] recorded six sides in Paris in 1904, five of which were published. Two years later he recorded a further four titles though only two were published, these being recordings of his own Grand Valse de Concert and Le Chant du Nautonier. For some reason, the 1906 discs were given the same catalogue numbers as the 1904 records though not before the 1906 version of the Valse had appeared as 35541, a number already allocated to Pugno’s recording of Mendelssohn’s Scherzo, Op 16 No 2! To cloud the issue even further, some copies of 35542 carried the suffix ‘X’, indicating a re-recording while others did not. The haphazard management of the French branch of G & T has a lot to answer for.’

Diemer plays only the first six pages of his Grande Valse de Concert, omitting its third section (in G flat) and recapitulation; the final pages of the flashy-sounding cross-hand study Le Chant du Nautonier are abbreviated. Yet there could hardly be better illustrations of the French school of playing than these two works, lightly pedalled and executed with an airy grace, featherlight touch and jeu perlé passagework. Godard’s enjoyably silly Valse chromatique, Mendelssohn’s beloved ‘Spinning Song’ (aka ‘The Bees’ Wedding’) and Chopin’s D flat Nocturne (shorn of its final ten bars presumably to accommodate the disc playing time) offer further examples of Diémer’s fabled fluency. The two repeated titles from 1906 are in noticeably improved sound.

Another important pupil of Diémer was Vincent d’Indy (1851-1931). On two of the rarest piano discs in existence are five short pieces composed and played by him. Unlike all the other pianists heard here, d’Indy had no career as a concert pianist, for it is solely as a composer that he is remembered today. Indeed, if he is remembered at all, it is (perhaps unfairly in some peoples’ minds) because of one work, his Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français (also known as the Symphonie cévenole) composed in 1886. D’Indy, born into an aristocratic family from the Vivarais, first visited the Cévennes district when he was 13. It made such an impression on him that he returned there at least once a year throughout his life. A composition pupil of César Franck, the chief influences on his music were Franck, Liszt and Wagner. It has been said that he spent his entire life torn between French nationalism and his love of German music.

His discs were, somewhat surprisingly, made in the UK at the HMV studios in Hayes, Middlesex. On them are four of the 13 numbers that make up his Tableaux de voyage composed in 1889, with a theme inspired by a series of hiking trips he had taken to Bayreuth and through Germany’s Black Forest and Tyrol regions. Six of the pieces were orchestrated in 1892. ‘Danses rythmiques’ is the second of the five pieces that make up his Poème des Montagnes composed in 1881 and dedicated to Emmanuel Chabier.

Raoul Pugno (1852-1914) can claim to be the first concert pianist of international importance to make recordings. During two sessions in Paris in April and November 1903 he set down 17 titles. Yet his career as a soloist by then was only a decade long: though having made his debut as a six-year-old prodigy, after graduating from the Paris Conservatoire in 1869 he made his living as an organist and choirmaster before returning to the Conservatoire to teach. He was 41 when he decided to return to the concert stage.

Pugno’s recordings suffered from the faulty Paris turntable referred to earlier, resulting in slight but noticeable pitch wobble. Here, thanks to recent computer wizardry, they can now be heard without that defect. These recordings, alongside those of Alfred Grünfeld, are the finest acoustic discs of any pianist who trained in the mid-nineteenth century. One of Pugno’s teachers was the Chopin pupil George Mathias which makes the five pieces by the Polish master particularly important—and interesting. The A flat major Waltz becomes a vehicle for speed and velocity; on track 16, the return of the Funeral March theme after the central trio is played fortissimo (Anton Rubinstein seems to have initiated this alternative to Chopin’s dynamics, echoed most famously in Rachmaninov’s landmark recording); more unsettling is the extremely slow (by today’s standards) tempo of the Nocturne in F sharp major, Op 15 No 2. Pugno justifies this as Mathias studied the work with Chopin himself. ‘It seems to me,’ he wrote, ‘that the metronome marking would correspond better to a bar at 4/8 than to the 2/4 time indicated. I played it at quaver = 52.’

Other highlights of Pugno’s discography—presented here in the order in which they were recorded—are Handel’s Gavotte & Variations and Scarlatti’s A major Sonata, K24, both illustrative of his wonderful dexterity and jeu perlé runs; Massenet’s madcap Valse folle, and three of his own compositions. Of the last of these, the Sérénade à la lune (the final item recorded at the April 1903 session), together with Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 11 (an impetuous, thrilling account), Weber’s Rondo brillante and Mendelssohn’s ‘Hunting Song’ were omitted from APR’s original release because of time restrictions. Here, then, are the complete solo piano recordings of this major figure (there is possibly one other—a single vocal disc where Pugno may be the accompanist). In 1914 he died of a heart attack in Moscow while on a concert tour of Russia.

Aimée-Marie Roger-Miclos hailed from Toulouse, studied at the Conservatoire there, and then in Paris with Louise Aglaé Massart and no less a figure than Henri Herz. She is the only pupil of Herz to have been recorded. When we listen to her recordings made in 1905 and 1906, we are hearing an artist with a direct link to a musician born in 1803. Madame Miclos became Roger-Miclos after her marriage in 1881 to a railroad inspector of that name. He passed away a mere six years later, but his widow kept that name when she married a fellow musician named Louis-Charles Battaille in 1905, after which she maintained a very low public profile.

George Bernard Shaw, still writing under the pseudonym of Corno di Bassetto at the time, was present at her London debut in August 1889 when she played Beethoven’s C minor concerto:

She is a swift, accurate, steely-fingered player, who can make a scale passage sound as if it were made by a dexterous whipcut along the keyboard. I admire Madame Roger-Miclos much as I admire the clever people who write a hundred and eighty words a minute with a typewriter. Her classic Madame de Staell draperies suited her slim figure, Egyptian profile, and cold style. She was the only artist [at this concert] who came off without a mishap.

In a June 1890 recital he caught ‘only a glimpse of [her], playing in her cold, hard, swift style on one of those wonderful steel dulcimers made by Pleyel.’

That playing clearly impressed Saint-Saëns for he dedicated his ‘Africa Fantasy’ to her. She gave the triumphant premiere of the piece in 1891. The ten sides she recorded in Paris and Milan are of extreme rarity. They were made for the Fonotipia label, established only two years before her visit to the studio by the Anglo-French composer Baron Frédéric d’Erlanger. Its principal interest was to record the great singers of the day. Several violinists were captured during the label’s existence (it vanished in 1925) and the playwright Victorien Sardou was recorded reciting some of his work, but Roger-Miclos was the only pianist. It seems strange that after these Fonotipia recordings she made no others, though she survived for a further 45 years, dying in 1951 at the age of 91.

The most obscure of all the pianists represented here is Gaston Régis, a figure who has escaped the attention of almost every musical reference book. I am indebted to Frédéric Gaussin for information. He was born in Nîmes (not Nice as is sometimes stated) and made his public debut there at the age of 12 along with Étienne Régis (1864-1904, most probably an uncle who hailed from Montpellier). He entered the class of Charles de Bériot in 1897 and took part twice in the final ‘concours’ of the Conservatoire, yet without securing any diploma. Gaussin notes that ‘on July 21, 1898 (at a concert by Conservatoire students), Gaston Régis competed against Lazare-Lévy, Alfredo Casella and ‘lesser great names’ such as Armand Ferté, Maurice Estyle, Gabriel Grovlez, Georges de Lausnay and Raymond Roussel (the writer).’

Régis settled in Algeria’s second city, Oran (Algeria was at that time a départment of France), where he remained at the centre of its musical life until his death. We know he performed quite a few times with Saint-Saëns who was a frequent visitor to Algeria (most notably the Variations on a theme of Beethoven for 2 pianos), and, in March 1921, organised a festival of the composer’s music. It is no doubt as a result of this that his two extremely rare discs featuring works by Saint-Saëns were recorded in Algiers four months later. He died in Oran on Christmas Eve 1935.

For the second half of the 19th century, the most revered French pianist was Francis Planté. The 18 pieces he set down are electrical recordings made in 1928 and so, strictly speaking, fall outside the remit of this release, but he exemplifies the French style of playing, and is the important and direct predecessor of those other names featured here, despite having been recorded later. He was born as long ago as 1839 and thus was already ten years old when Chopin died. Planté came from Orthez in the Basses-Pyrénées. He was a child prodigy who made his debut aged seven and, having studied with Marmontel, created a sensation when he graduated from the Paris Conservatoire at 11. His was a strange personality and career. In 1861 he disappeared for ten years, returning to the Pyrénées to study (rumour had it that it was a decade-long sulk after an imagined insult during a recital). When he re-emerged in 1872, touring throughout Europe and Russia, he was considered to be the supreme French pianist of his day. In about 1900 he vanished from concert life once more, vowing to never appear in public again. When he returned in 1915, he was heard again in several concerts but, in order to keep his vow, played behind a screen out view of the audience.

In Planté’s 90th year, an American friend persuaded the French Columbia Company to record him so that his art could be preserved in some form. Refusing to travel to the studio in Paris for the experience, Planté insisted that the Columbia people take their recording equipment to the villa he had built in the country at Saint-Avit, near Mont-de-Marsan. The team spent two days recording there in July 1928. Planté’s own Érard piano is captured in remarkably good sound for the era. All 18 sides, which include seven of the Chopin études and two of his own transcriptions, are first takes. Altogether, and despite the odd finger slip and smudge—inspiring the famous exasperated cry of ‘Merde!’ audible at the close of Op 10 No 7—it was an extraordinary achievement for a near-nonagenarian.

For the final selection, we return to the acoustic era and the eight titles recorded in Paris in 1911 by Lucien Wurmser. Reference books omit him entirely, and despite the vast resources of the internet, little biographical information about his (long) life (1877-1967) and career has come to light. We know that he was born in Paris on 23 May 1877, that he was Jewish, became a pupil of Charles de Bériot at the Paris Conservatoire and was awarded his première prix at the Conservatoire in 1893. He married the harpist Lucile Delcourt, presumably a fellow student at the conservatoire (she graduated 1895), who died quite young in 1933.

Wurmser was a general musician rather than primarily a pianist, for we find him at various times in the roles of conductor, chamber music player, teacher and (particularly) composer. He was one of those featured in the celebrated mystery concert of May 1911, which included Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, where a group of new works was performed, and the distinguished audience had to guess who might have composed them. He was clearly at the centre of the Parisian music scene, performing, for instance, Chabrier’s Valses romantiques on two pianos with Raoul Pugno, and playing the premiere of the (original) piano version of Debussy’s Tarentelle styrienne (in 1929 he recorded two Debussy Préludes, ‘La danse de Puck’ and ‘Bruyères’, and the Toccata from Pour le piano not included here). More unexpected are discs of Beethoven’s Quintet for piano & wind, Op 16 (1931), and Fantaisie pour piano et orchestre and Le Moulin by Albert Périlhou. He appears to have edited a Chopin edition published by Huegel in 1917.

Away from the piano, he was the conductor for Anna Pavlova when she toured Australia, and composed the score for at least three French films: Water, Gas and Love on Every Floor (1930), The Heir to the Bal Tabarin (1933) and Paris-Deauville (1934). He made his final recording (of Schumann’s Piano Trio No 3 in G minor, Op 110) in November 1942.

Jeremy Nicholas © 2024

A note on pitch
Pitching of early recordings is fraught with complexity and is likely to remain perennially contentious. It may never be possible to determine with absolute accuracy the true pitch of each piano in this collection of recordings. However, when the earliest was made in 1903, diapason normal, A4 = 435Hz (established in 1859) had been the standard in France for almost half a century, and, after the Conférence de Vienne in 1885, across much of Continental Europe too. Though the French standard is slightly lower than modern pitch (A4 = 440Hz), the apparent distinction is, to an extent, misleading.

Prompted by the express wishes of Queen Victoria and in accordance with the research of the musician, musicologist and Broadwood piano builder A J Hipkins, the stated intention of The Philharmonic Society’s 1895 resolution to establish A4 = 439Hz as concert pitch was to align the British standard with the French diapason normal, the frequency of which having been codified at 59° Fahrenheit (15° Celsius). While the Philharmonic Society’s definition designated A4 = 439Hz, it did so at the higher temperature of 68° Fahrenheit (20° C); the substantive difference between the two standards, as Hipkins had shown, being one of temperature.

Nevertheless, before presuming that this small notional pitch distinction consequently vanished in a puff of theoretical smoke and that perfect entente was cordially achieved thereafter, we should bear in mind that the regulating authorities in both countries ensured their newly established standards were realised in practice by arranging for the manufacture and distribution of tuning forks, the French ones calibrated to 435Hz, the British to 439Hz. Accordingly, as piano tuners are apt to have little control over the temperature of venues where pianos are kept, it is fair to assume that pianos in France continued, into the twentieth century, to be tuned 4 hertz lower than those in Britain.

For most listeners without recourse to direct comparison, the difference between A = 435Hz and standard modern pitch will be imperceptible, whereas small, arbitrarily different pitches from track to track might well have proved disconcerting. If only for this reason, our aim, in remastering this collection of recordings, has been to adhere to the French A4 = 435Hz standard throughout.

The rotational speed at which early twentieth-century disc recordings were made deviated even further from a standard than did concert pitch, the 78-rpm median only becoming established at least as a notional standard over the course of time. A wide range of transfer speeds has been invoked to render these recordings at the tonalities indicated by the scores: 68-rpm for Pugno’s Scarlatti Sonata; 81-rpm for Wurmser’s Petit aubade and Impromptu—though these examples are not necessarily the most extreme.

The earliest recordings in this set, specifically those of Pugno and Diémer, also suffered from a notoriously persistent mechanical defect that afflicted many Parisian G & T recordings made between 1902 and 1904. An inconsistency in the rotation of the cutting lathe caused an unwanted, rapid, tremulous effect which, fortunately, it has been possible to remedy using digital software.

One further pitch anomaly common to many 78-rpm recordings and not peculiar to this set is that of waning pitch. Friction between the recording stylus and wax platter causes significant drag, which has a tendency to slow the rotational speed of the cutting lathe at the beginning of a recording. As the stylus follows its helical course towards the disc’s centre, it traces ever shorter laps on each successive circuit. Consequentially, the linear velocity at which the stylus cuts its groove gradually decreases, resulting in a commensurate diminution in friction which, in turn, allows the rotational speed gradually to recover until, once again, it makes the correct number of revolutions per minute. If such a disc is replayed at a constant speed, its pitch will be heard to fall in inverse proportion to the acceleration of the original recording. To correct for this, the replay speed of the disc must be increased gradually throughout the side. But since the necessary change in speed is non-linear, making the correction is not altogether straightforward.

Andrew Hallifax © 2024