page_title: John Culshaw
section_title: Stereo and the Decca Ring
hierarchical_section_title: John Culshaw / Biography / Stereo and the Decca Ring
caption_attribution_description: Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson, behind the stage at Gröna Lund.
context_page_description: John Royds Culshaw OBE was a pioneering English classical record producer for Decca Records. He recorded 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.
  Notably, Sir Georg Solti's prolific and award-winning recording career took off when Culshaw was put in charge of Decca's classical recording programme. For Decca, Solti made more than 250 recordings, including 45 complete opera sets. Among the international honours given Solti for his recordings were 31 Grammy awards – more than any other recording artist, whether classical or popular. For much of that time, Solti's career at Decca was closely linked with Culshaw.
  Largely self-educated musically, Culshaw worked for Decca from the age of 22, first writing album liner notes and then becoming a producer. After a brief period working for Capitol Records, Culshaw returned to Decca in 1955 and began planning to record the Ring cycle, employing the new stereophonic technique to produce recordings of unprecedented realism and impact.
context_section_description: Finding on his return to Decca that other recording producers were capably filling his former role, Culshaw concentrated on the emerging stereophonic recording technology, and stereo opera in particular. A year after his return he was made manager of the company's classical recording division, a position of great influence in the classical music world. 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. … [H]e transformed the whole concept of recording."
  Culshaw hoped to record Die Walküre with Flagstad, whom he persuaded out of retirement, as Brünnhilde. Flagstad, however, was over sixty, and would not agree to sing the whole opera. To capture as much of her Wagner as she was willing to record, Culshaw produced separate sets of parts of the opera in 1957. Act 1 was conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch with Flagstad in the role of Sieglinde; in the other set the "Todesverkundigung" scene from Act 2 and the whole of Act 3 were conducted by Solti with Flagstad as Brünnhilde. In those early years of stereo, Culshaw worked with Pierre Monteux in recordings of Stravinsky and Ravel, and with Solti in a recording of Richard Strauss's Arabella. He also recorded the first of many New Year's Day concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic and Willi Boskovsky.
  By 1958 Decca, with its pre-eminent technical team (The Times called them "Decca's incomparable engineers") was in a position to embark on a complete studio recording of Wagner's Ring cycle. Decca decided to begin its cycle with Das Rheingold, the shortest of the four Ring operas. It was recorded in 1958 and released in the spring of 1959. Culshaw engaged Solti, the Vienna Philharmonic and a cast of established Wagner singers. The performance won enthusiastic praise from reviewers, and the engineers were generally acknowledged to have surpassed themselves. The Gramophone described the recording quality as "stupendous" and called the set "wonderful … surpass[ing] anything done before." To the astonishment and envy of Decca's rivals the set outsold popular music releases such as those of Elvis Presley and Pat Boone. The cast included Flagstad in one of her last recorded performances, in the role of Fricka, which she had never sung on stage. Culshaw hoped to record her as Fricka in Die Walküre and Waltraute in Götterdämmerung, but her health did not permit it. 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.
  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". He disliked live recordings such as those attempted at Bayreuth; to him they were technically flawed and, crucially, were merely sound recordings of a theatrical performance. He sought to make recordings that compensated for the lack of the visual element by subtle production techniques, impossible in live recordings, that conjured up the action in the listener's head.
  Culshaw took unprecedented pains to meet Wagner's musical requirements. Where in Das Rheingold the score calls for eighteen anvils to be hammered during two brief orchestral interludes – an instruction never followed in opera houses – Culshaw arranged for eighteen anvils to be hired and hammered. 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. In The Gramophone, Edward Greenfield wrote:
  It was thanks to Culshaw's devotion to Wagnerian intentions – ever encouraged by the engineer who was at his right hand through t
caption: Birgit Nilsson, Culshaw's chosen Brünnhilde
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