FOR decades, hints tantalized record buffs and anyone interested in how classical music was performed through the centuries.
Somewhere out there, just possibly, was the largest cache of classical music from the dawn of the recorded age known to exist: hundreds of cylinders incised on an Edison phonograph from the 1890s by a music-loving businessman, Julius H. Block.
References popped up in his privately published memoirs in the 1960s. There were letters between him and Thomas Edison and a chance conversation in 1971 between researchers and a schoolmate of the great violinist Jascha Heifetz. A few cylinders came to light at auction in the 1990s.
If found, the recordings would furnish a deep and fascinating glimpse into the way music was played in the time of Tchaikovsky and Brahms, a sonic toe-touch into a distant epoch. But there was little hope. The collection, most believed, was destroyed in World War II.
Instead, it survived.
Thanks to other chance encounters, a shared passion for violin history by a father and son, and a bit of detective work, some 200 cylinders were rediscovered several years ago in an archive in Russia, where only a handful of musicologists appear to have known about them.
Three CDs of excerpts are to be released late next month by the Marston label (marstonrecords.com), which is based here and specializes in the early recorded age.
According to Marston, the cylinders contain the earliest existing recordings of works by Bach, Wagner, Verdi, Chopin, Schumann and others. The performers include several noted composer-pianists: Sergei Taneyev, a pupil of Tchaikovsky’s who played the premiere of his Second Concerto; Anton Arensky, playing his much-loved Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor just months after it was written; and Paul Pabst, a Liszt pupil and dedicatee of pieces by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. They also include the legendary pianist Josef Hofmann in his first known recordings and singers who performed in the premieres of operas by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. Some 22 of the artists, well known in their day, have not been represented on recordings until now, including Taneyev.
With each cylinder able to record for only two to four minutes, the release will be limited to snippets: 90 of music and 4 with just spoken words. Those include Tolstoy reading from his work and what may be the voice and whistling of Tchaikovsky. The musical recordings in the release run from 1890 to 1923.
The recordings are not likely to appeal to casual music lovers, as even the engineer, Ward Marston of Marston Records, concedes. The surface noise is heavy, the music sometimes barely audible. “It’s not what you call pleasant to listen to,” said Mr. Marston, who is considered one of the leading audio-conservation engineers.
Still, the cylinders have obvious musical value, at least for specialist listeners. Runs, singing melodies, expressive rhythmic quirks can be picked out like gemstones from gravel. Ghosts come alive, and the listener mingles with them.
The recordings are also fascinating historical documents. They were mostly made in living rooms, at informal social occasions. Listeners applaud and yell “bravo!” The musicians often introduce themselves, as an 11-year-old Heifetz does in a high-pitched voice.
“Considering when they were done and the people that Block contacted, they are extremely exciting,” said Raymond R. Wile, a retired Queens College librarian who has written extensively about the early phonograph industry, including the Block cylinders. “I never thought they would surface.”
Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 and began developing it about a decade later, considering the machine mainly a device for business. It generally worked like this: a speaking tube would transmit the sound to a vibrating membrane, which would guide a needle as it incised grooves on a four-inch wax cylinder.
Commercial recording did not begin until roughly 1889, but Edison’s agents and others recorded hundreds of cylinders before then. Only a handful of classical music recordings from the phonograph’s first decades survive. The earliest example is believed to be from July 5, 1888: excerpts of Handel’s “Israel in Egypt” incised at London’s Crystal Palace. Others include barely audible recordings of Brahms playing and speaking in 1889, and of a Danish bass, Peter Schram, possibly from the same year. A music buff in New York, Gianni Bettini, made cylinder recordings of singers in the late 1890s, but only several dozen survive, Mr. Marston said.
The closest rival in importance to the Block cylinders is the precious batch of live recordings made by Lionel Mapleson, the librarian of the Metropolitan Opera, on the Met stage from 1900 to 1904. Block was born in 1858, in British territory in South Africa. His mother took him as an infant to rejoin her husband, who was in business in Russia. Educated in London and New York, Block returned to take over the family firm, which mainly involved introducing and importing goods like the typewriter and the bicycle to Russia. Fascinated by the new phonograph, he wangled a meeting with Edison and even managed to procure a phonograph to take back.
Block, a fine pianist, had bigger ideas than selling a dictation machine. “From the first the phonograph appeared to me an invention of untold value for the musical and scientific world,” he wrote in his memoirs.
As outlined in the memoirs and letters exchanged with Edison, Block embarked on a musical recording spree in Russia, filling hundreds of wax cylinders. He even managed to obtain an audience with the czar and arranged to present him with a phonograph.
Block kept leather-bound volumes, which still exist, to record reactions. “The phonograph is certainly the most surprising, the most beautiful and the most interesting among all inventions that circumscribe the 19th century,” Tchaikovsky wrote on Oct. 26, 1889. “Honor to the great inventor Edison!”
Block moved to Berlin in 1899 and continued making recordings. He died in 1934, and his cylinders were divided between archives in Berlin and Warsaw. A library in Bern, Switzerland, received mostly scores and manuscripts. In an introduction to the memoirs, Walter E. Block, his son, said the papers survived, but the cylinders were destroyed in the war.
The story shifts to 1971, when the violinist John Maltese and John A. Maltese, his 11-year-old son, visited Eddy Brown. Mr. Brown was a classmate of Heifetz’s in the legendary St. Petersburg Conservatory class of Leopold Auer. Mr. Maltese was a major Heifetz fan. During that visit Mr. Brown mentioned that he had made cylinder recordings in 1914 at a private home in Berlin. So had Heifetz.
Father and son never forgot the story. Over the years, as they grew to share a passion for Heifetz and all matters violinistic, they searched for the cylinders, to no avail. They went on to write the booklet notes for “The Jascha Heifetz Collection,” a 65-CD series from BMG Classics, and to work together on other historic recording projects.
Separately, Mr. Wile, the phonograph expert at Queens College, dug up a batch of correspondence between Block and Edison at the Edison archives in West Orange, N.J. Harold C. Schonberg, then the chief music critic of The New York Times, wrote about the find in 1979, describing Block’s efforts to make recordings. Mr. Schonberg speculated about the juicy possibilities of what could be on them. “None of it has survived,” he wrote.
In 1992 about two dozen other Block cylinders surfaced at a London auction. They were bought by a New York collector, Allen Koenigsberg. Little of the music was identified.
The trail grew hot in 2001. The Malteses provided material for a Heifetz exhibition in Los Angeles. At the opening, members of the Heifetz family mentioned that a Russian scholar, Galina Kopytova, was writing a book about Heifetz’s years in Russia. The younger Mr. Maltese, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, exchanged e-mail messages with Ms. Kopytova. At the end of one, he casually mentioned Brown’s story about making the cylinders.
“She answered and said they were in an archive down the street,” Mr. Maltese said. “I fell off my chair.” She followed up to confirm that a slew of other cylinders were in the archive, the Institute of Russian Literature, also known as Pushkin House.
Mr. Maltese tracked down the Block manuscript. It corroborated the contents of the St. Petersburg cylinders. He traced their provenance. They were taken from the Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin to Silesia for safekeeping in 1944. After the war, they were taken to St. Petersburg. A catalog from the Berlin archive matched the contents of the cylinders in St. Petersburg, Mr. Maltese said.
The project’s backers and other experts are convinced of the cylinders’ authenticity. “There’s no chance that this is a bogus thing,” said Gregor Benko, a founder of the International Piano Archives and a coordinator, with the Marston partner Scott Kessler, of the release.
Richard Warren, curator of the Historical Sound Recordings Collection at Yale University and a panelist on an archivists’ committee that awarded Marston a grant for the project, said it would take “an incredible amount of work” to fake the cylinders, for little chance of financial gain.
After contacting Mr. Marston, Mr. Maltese traveled to St. Petersburg in 2003, examined the cylinders and listened to tapes of them. He and Mr. Marston returned two years later. Mr. Marston oversaw the transfer to computer files by Russian engineers. The Malteses are co-producers of the CD issue.
“When we put the first cylinder on,” Mr. Marston said, “my hair stood on end.”
Since then, Mr. Marston has been working painstakingly to restore the recordings but only minimally reducing the surface noise to keep a sense of authenticity. The spoken words had to be transcribed and translated. The proper playback speed had to be determined; Mr. Marston, examining scores, estimated the pitch to be 435 cycles for the tuning note A, which is slightly lower than typical current practice. The proper tempos flowed from that determination.
So what about the music?
Mr. Marston, in his second-floor studio, played excerpts. Blind since birth, he sent his fingers fluttering over the consoles, punching in numbers and adjusting knobs. Up came a dreamy and nimble piano solo by Pabst, a paraphrase of a theme from Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty.”
Taneyev plays Mozart’s C minor Fantasy tautly and dramatically on an 1895 recording. Hofmann plays the Magic Fire Music from Wagner’s “Walküre.” A forgotten soprano known as Mademoiselle Nikita, famous in her day, sings “Quando, rapito in estasi” from Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor.” She ladles on the embellishment, turning simple intervals into intricate runs, in the style of the day.
Most intriguing is the Arensky trio, which the composer plays with Jan Hrimaly, violinist, and Anatoly Brandukov, cellist. The cylinders contain bits of only the first three movements, not the fourth. The performance is fast-paced, free, almost over the top, and must-hearing for any performer of this piece.
Another cylinder has speakers listed as Tchaikovsky, the composer-pianist Anton Rubinstein and other musicians, but Mr. Marston acknowledges that the identifications of the voices are not ironclad. The cylinder was previously extracted for a 1998 release on the Koch Schwann label.
And the one who started it all, a 19-year-old Eddy Brown, is there in a series of violin bonbons, accompanied by Block himself.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 2, 2008
An article last Sunday about the discovery of wax cylinder recordings dating from 1890 to 1927 misstated the year that commercial recording began. It was roughly 1889; it was not 1899, the year that classical commercial recordings began.
G Roald Smeets 