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Chapter Four

The Beet Goes On

i) The Way to Play the Ninth

At 6.45 p.m. on Friday, 7 May 1824, a large crowd gathered at a theatre in the centre of Vienna for the first performance of the greatest piece of music ever written. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, composed in almost total deafness, was a work so radical in form and free in spirit that even those who interpret it almost two centuries later never fail to find within it something revelatory. When the world falls apart or unites, this is the music it reaches for.

No one could predict this at the time, of course. Since its construction in 1709, the Theater am Kärntnertor had witnessed premieres by Haydn, Mozart and Salieri, and its audience was versed in high opera. The last great work by Beethoven performed at the theatre had been the newly revised version of Fidelio, which was received rapturously, but that was exactly 10 years before. The composer, now aged 53, the state of his finances always precarious, had accepted many commissions from royal courts and publishers in London, Berlin and St Petersburg, had frequently missed his deadlines, and was thought to be overwhelmed not only with work but also with legal battles over the custody of his nephew Karl. Besides, he had developed a reputation for obstinacy and cantankerousness. So there was no reason to expect that Beethoven’s latest work was going to be much more than another worthy milestone, not least since it became known that the piece was long and complex, involving a larger orchestra than usual, with solo singers and a chorus in the finale, and had undergone less than four days’ rehearsal. And there was one more thing. Despite the announcement that the concert was to be conducted by the theatre’s regular maestro Michael Umlauf, assisted by first violin Ignaz Schuppanzigh, it was agreed that Beethoven would also appear onstage for the entire performance, placing his own conductor’s stand next to Umlauf, ostensibly to guide the orchestra in the dynamics of the symphony’s tempo (or as it said in the official announcement of the concert the day before, ‘Mr Ludwig van Beethoven will himself participate in the general direction’). This would, of course, create a complicated dilemma for the orchestra to negotiate. Where to look? Whose tempo to follow? One eyewitness, the pianist Sigismond Thalberg, claimed that Umlauf instructed his players to honour Beethoven by occasionally looking at him, but then to totally ignore his beating of time.

The evening began well. Before the premiere there were two other recent compositions: the overture Die Weihe des Hauses, which had been commissioned for the opening of another Viennese concert hall two years earlier, and three movements from his great D Major Mass Missa Solemnis. As his new symphony began, Beethoven was a dramatic figure on stage, his hair and arms wild and everywhere – or, in the words of one of the orchestra’s violinists Joseph Böhm, ‘he threw himself back and forth like a madman’. Böhm further remembered, ‘he stretched to his full height, at the next he crouched down to the floor. He flailed about with his hands and feet as though he wanted to play all the instruments and sing all the chorus parts.’ Helène Grebner, a young member of the chorus, recalled that Beethoven’s timekeeping may have been a little tardy: although he ‘appeared to follow the score with his eyes, at the end of each movement he turned several pages together’. On one occasion, possibly at the end of the second movement, the contralto Caroline Unger had to tug on Beethoven’s shirt to alert him to the applause behind him; these days the audience holds its approval until the end of the entire piece, but in those days praise arrived at regular intervals. Beethoven, still facing the orchestra, had apparently not heard the clapping, or was too busy readying his score for the adagio. Could this really have happened? Or was this last story a myth subtly amplified by time?¹ The performance throws up bigger questions too. How could one so profoundly deaf compose a piece of music that would send almost all who heard it into raptures? Beethoven’s secretary Anton Schindler wrote how ‘never in my life did I hear such frenetic yet cordial applause . . . The reception was more than imperial – for the people burst out in a storm four times.’² A reviewer in the Wiener Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung suggested that Beethoven’s ‘inexhaustible genius had shown us a new world’. Everyone – friends, critics, the whipped-up cream of Viennese connoisseurship – had delightedly thrown their hats in the air. But had they heard what the composer intended? And have we?

We know the score. The first movement in sonata form that never settles down, the orchestra in an elemental battle with itself, the hovering tension of the first gentle bars soon colliding with the full swaggering crescendo that announces a work of unshakeable emotional force. The second movement, the scherzo, a juggernaut of engaging and urgent rhythm before the controlled and heart-stoppingly beautiful melody of the slow third. And then the last visionary movement, the stirring optimism of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, thunderous as to Heaven, a rhapsodic symphony in itself, described by the German critic Paul Bekker as rising ‘from the sphere of personal experience to the universal. Not life itself portrayed, but its eternal meaning.’

But how well do we really know the score?

The notes are one thing, the tempo quite another. The symphony has long become part of the landscape. It has an official title: ‘Symphony No. 9 in D Minor’, and the catalogue number Opus 125; it has a vernacular title: the ‘Choral’, and an insiders’ shorthand title ‘B9’. But what it doesn’t have, through all its thousands of performances, is even the loosest of agreements on its timing. Just how aggressively should the second movement be played? And how sluggishly the third? By what electrifying licence can Toscanini drive home the fourth movement more than five minutes faster than the relatively glacial interpretation by Klemperer? How can one conductor from the nineteenth century get the audience home a comfortable 15 minutes earlier than one in the twenty-first century? How can Felix Weingartner conduct the Ninth with the Vienna Philharmonic in February 1935 at a lick of 62.30, Herbert von Karajan lead the Berlin Philharmonic in the autumn of 1962 in 66.48, and Bernard Haitink and the London Symphony manage 68.09 in April 2006? What about Simon Rattle’s take of 69.46 back in Vienna in 2003? And then there are the live recordings complete with pauses and coughing between movements – most famously Leonard Bernstein conducting a multinational orchestra in Berlin on Christmas Day 1989 to mark the fall of the Wall, the performance at which the word ‘joy’ was replaced by the word ‘freedom’ at the choral finale, clocking in at a remarkable 81 minutes 46 seconds. Has our patience for the symphony expanded against all the faster odds in our modern world? Does our modern appreciation of genius demand that we savour every note?

The glory of music rests as much with its interpretation as its composition, and it is the interpretation that supplies the life force. Art cannot be reduced to absolutes; emotion cannot be measured in a timescale. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the method of interpreting contemporary music changed, and Beethoven’s impatience and radicalism had much to do with it. The composer found a new way of marking time.

Although each movement of the Ninth Symphony carries the usual form of general introductory guidance for tempo and mood, even the casual listener will acknowledge the inadequacy of these instructions for such a varied and unconventional piece. The first movement plumps for ‘Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso’ (lively and joyous, but not too much so, and then a tad stately); the second ‘Molto vivace’ (very fast and forceful); the third ‘Adagio molto e cantabile’ (slow and lyrical); and the fourth, with its groundbreaking choral finale, ‘Presto – Allegro ma non troppo – Vivace – Adagio cantabile’ (trippingly fast, lively but steady, slow and sweet).

Where did these tempos come from? From the human heartbeat and the human stride. Any definition of tempo required a baseline from which to operate – the tempo giusto from where one may either run fast or slow. An accepted average for both a leisurely stroll and a relaxed heart rate stood at around 80 beats per minute (bpm), and this was considered a ‘normal’ place to start. (In 1953 the fabled music historian Curt Sachs suggested that there was an upper and lower limit which prevented a concert performance descending or accelerating into incomprehension. ‘The maximum of slowness, which still allows for a steady step or beat, is possibly 32 (bpm) . . . and the maximum of speed, beyond which the conductor would fidget rather than beat, is probably 132.’ Sachs also made his own table, approximate at best but certainly original, linking precise bpm with vague terminology. Unfortunately, it slightly contradicted his estimation above. Thus he calculated that adagio would be 31 bpm, andantino 38, allegretto 53 ½ and allegro 117.³

It was the Italians who introduced the descriptions of tempo we’re still familiar with (all those vivaces and moderatos), and by 1600 the moods of classical music were well established. Emotions were no longer merely intuited but inscribed: ‘gaily’ (allegro) and ‘at leisure’ (adagio). When he played in Bologna in 1611, Adriano Banchieri’s organ scores already carried very particular instructions for presto, più presto and prestissimo. Fifty years later the musical vocabulary stretched to the most staccato nervoso and the most beautiful fuso (‘melting’). The fabled link to the heartbeat found further resonance in the Italian term for a quarter-rest: sospiro, a breath or a sigh.

But there was a problem: emotions are pliable things, and they didn’t always translate from composer to conductor. Nor did they translate between nations. In the 1750s, C.P.E. Bach, son of Johann Sebastian, found that ‘in certain countries [outside Germany] there is a marked tendency to play adagios too fast and adagios too slow.’ Some twenty years later, a young Mozart found that when he performed in Naples his interpretation of presto was so unparalleled that the Italians assumed that his virtuosity was somehow connected to his magic ring (which he then removed to rule out foul play).

By the 1820s we know that Beethoven regarded these instructions as perfunctory and outmoded. In a letter to the musician and critic Ignaz von Mosel in 1817, he suggested that the Italian terms for tempo had been ‘inherited from times of musical barbarism’.

For example, what can be more absurd than Allegro, which once and for all means cheerful, and how far removed we are often from the true meaning of this description, so that the piece of music itself expresses the very opposite of the heading! As far as these four main connotations are concerned [allegro, andante, adagio, presto], which, however, are far from being as right or as true as the main four winds, we would do well to dispense with them.

Mosel agreed with him, and Beethoven feared they would both be ‘decried as violators of tradition’ (although he regarded this as preferable to being accused of ‘feudalism’). Despite these protestations, Beethoven reluctantly persevered with the old style; right to the last quartets his work was proceeded by the Italian settings he despised.⁴ To temper his dissatisfaction he occasionally included slight modifiers in the body of the score: ritard, he writes early on in the first movement of the Ninth Symphony, short for ritardando, a signal to slow down gracefully when the rhythms start running off in all directions. But throughout his score for the Ninth, Beethoven also provided a new and far more significant instruction to the conductor and players – a measure of exact timing supplied by a newly invented musical gadget.

The metronome was as revolutionary to Beethoven as the microscope was to seventeenth-century bacteriologists. It afforded both ultimate steadiness and minute variableness, and it transmitted to the entire orchestra the composer’s precise intentions. What, at the beginning of a musical sequence, could be clearer and more exacting than a notation of regimented beats to the bar and beats to the minute? And what would bring an ageing composer closer to God than the belief that he was transforming the essence of time itself?

In his letter to Mosel, Beethoven credited the invention of the metronome in 1816 to the German pianist and inventor Johann Mälzel, although Mälzel had copied, improved and patented a device developed in Amsterdam several years earlier by a man named Dietrich Winkel. (Winkel had been inspired by the reliable movement of a clock’s pendulum, which had been used as an aid to musical composition since the days of Galileo in the early seventeenth century. But the early musical pendulums were cumbersome, inexact machines closer in appearance to an upright weighing scale than the small pyramids we are used to today. The key innovation of Winkel’s device was the fact that the pendulum pivoted around a lower central point with movable weights; the old machines swung pendulously from the top. When Mälzel took out patents for Winkel’s machine across Europe, his sole innovation appears to have been a newly notched measuring plate.)⁵

Mälzel had a talent for copying and claiming as his own: Beethoven had once accused him of taking undue credit for writing ‘Battle of Vitoria’, his short piece celebrating the Duke of Wellington’s victory over Napoleon in 1813. The two had initially worked on the composition together; Beethoven had intended to use Mälzel’s panharmonicon (a mechanised organ-style box able to reproduce the sound of a marching band), but later expanded the scale of his piece, rendering the new instrument redundant.⁶

Mälzel was the Caractacus Pott of his day. The son of an organ maker, his obsession with mechanical wonders reached both its zenith and nadir in his promotion of the automaton chess-playing ‘Turk’ (a fraud, of course: a small and masterful player sat beneath the Turk in a cabinet controlling every move; intriguingly, the Turk was taken on a European tour lasting several years in the first part of the nineteenth century, and was occasionally demonstrated during the interval of Beethoven’s concerts). Mälzel also developed four ear trumpets for Beethoven, two of which hooked around his head to free both hands, which may explain Beethoven’s later desire to patch up their differences and support his metronome. At the end of his letter to Mosel, the composer envisaged a situation in which ‘every village schoolmaster’ would soon be in need of one. And in this way a familiar musical teaching and performance tool entered common use: ‘It goes without saying that certain persons must take a prominent part in this exercise, so as to arouse enthusiasm. As far as I am concerned, you can count on me with certainty, and it is with pleasure that I await the part which you will assign to me in this undertaking.’

His support did not diminish with the passing years. On 18 January 1826, some 14 months before his death, he wrote to his publisher B. Schott and Sons in Mainz, promising ‘everything adapted for metronome’. And later that year he wrote to his publishers again: ‘The metronome marks will follow soon: do not fail to wait for them. In our century things of this kind are certainly needed. Also, I learn from letters written by friends in Berlin that the first performance of the [Ninth] symphony received enthusiastic applause, which I ascribe mainly to the use of a metronome. It is almost impossible now to preserve the tempi ordinari; instead, the performers must now obey the ideas of unfettered genius . . .’

And that, one may have reasonably believed, would have been the end of it. The unfettered genius would get his way, and henceforth his music would have but one tempo, and almost two centuries later we would sit in a concert hall and hear essentially the same piece of music that an audience heard when the music was new. Fortunately for us, things didn’t work out that way. Beethoven’s metronome marks have been confounding musicians since their ink was wet, and many have responded in the only way they feel able – by almost completely ignoring them.

In a landmark talk to the New York Musicological Society in December 1942, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch addressed the issue of Beethoven’s tempo with wry understatement. ‘These marks have not been generally accepted as altogether valid expressions of his intentions or been uniformly adopted in performance. On the contrary, their existence has failed to enter the consciousness of musicians, and in most editions they are lacking. The traditions and conventions of performance deviate widely from the tempi denoted by the marks.’ In other words, musicians and conductors placed their own interpretations above those of the original composer. They preferred, Kolisch suggested, the traditionally vague Italian markings over the more precise, newfangled ones. ‘This strange situation,’ the speaker reasoned, ‘deserves investigation’.

A common reason offered for the decision to ignore Beethoven’s sense of timing is that the marks do not accurately convey his musical desires; Schumann is commonly cited as someone else who wrote metronomic marks he couldn’t have possibly meant. Other non-adopters claim that Beethoven’s metronome was different to the one that came factory-built in the twentieth century; it was probably slower, so that the marks it threw up are now too fast, and almost impossible to play; critics find it useful to refer to them as ‘impressionistic’ and mere ‘abstractions’. And then there is a more philosophical suggestion: the feeling that using a metronome was somehow rigidly mathematical and therefore ‘inartistic’. Beethoven seemed to be working against himself; according to Kolisch’s talk, such a free-spirited organic composition ‘cannot . . . be forced into so mechanical a frame’.

When a revised version of Rudolf Kolisch’s talk was published in the Musical Quarterly fifty years later, it included Beethoven’s earliest written reference to Mälzel’s metronome. He called it ‘a welcome means of assuring that the performance of my compositions everywhere will be in the tempi that I conceived, which to my regret have so often been misunderstood.’⁷ We shouldn’t forget that Beethoven had a maniacally high opinion of himself; he once derailed one critic of his work with the suggestion, ‘Even my shit is better than anything you could create.’ (And of course his opinions changed over time. Before he championed the metronome, the value he attached to the tempo of his compositions appeared much looser: on one occasion he suggested that his markings should apply only to the first few bars; on another he wrote, ‘Either they are good musicians and ought to know how to play my music, or they are bad musicians and in that case my indications would be of no avail.’)

Perhaps only the most challenging and gifted of composers deserve to be reinterpreted anew at each performance; perhaps only a masterpiece can withstand this new scrutiny on a regular basis. Or perhaps even the most exacting of a composer’s musical timings should provide only the loosest guidelines: to provide, as the aesthetics professor Thomas Y. Levin has suggested, a frame within which music may simply live. Because everything else, ‘its breathing, its phrasing, the endlessly complex and subtle structuring of time within this constitutive constraint remains, as always, the responsibility of the performer’.⁸

But does the responsibility of the performer vary with the generations? Our innate measurement of time today may be quite different from two centuries before. The Swiss-born American conductor Leon Botstein confronted these issues in 1993 when he was in a great hurry to catch a train. ‘I was driving a car on a back-country road and found myself behind a black semi-covered carriage pulled by two horses,’ he wrote in the Musical Quarterly a few months later. ‘What struck me was that the horses seemed to be going really quite fast. This was not a Central Park tourist drive. Yet as I tailgated the contraption I became painfully aware how intolerably slow it moved.’

Botstein grew agitated, and began to wonder how long it would take him to reach his destination if this was the top speed of all forms of travel – which once, of course, it was. ‘By the time I could pass it, my anger turned to free association. Was it at all significant that Beethoven probably never experienced motion any faster than the velocity of this carriage – that his expectations with respect to time, duration, and the relative possibilities of how events and spaces might be related to one another in time might be radically different from our own?’

Beethoven’s metronome marks, which appeared to Botstein much too fast, are countered by many works that appear too slow. Schumann’s markings for Manfred appear sluggish; Mendelssohn’s marks in parts of St Paul painfully so; Dvořák’s final movement of the Sixth Symphony also has markings that appear to the musician to be quite out of keeping with the energy of the music. It begs yet another unanswerable question: should the musical time allotted to a work at a particular period in history necessarily feel correct in a modern, faster life many decades later? Will innovation always date? The world spins and the impact of an artistic revolution turns from shock to analysis. Cubism is a movement not a controversy; the Rolling Stones are not a scary parental proposition.

And there is, of course, more to an interpretation of a masterpiece than mere timings on a manuscript or CD insert. There is intent. When Wilhelm Furtwängler famously chased down the final movement of the Ninth Symphony at the Bayreuth Festival in 1951, he was following more than a metronome. He was following the Second World War. Contemporary accounts suggest that sometimes he appeared not even to be paying heed to the notes, let alone the tempo, with his direction carrying enough indignation to burn through the score. Passion is an overused word these days, but Furtwängler’s audience and his orchestra may have been reminded of the passion of Beethoven himself, flailing at the premiere, furious at the noise in his head.

There is yet another realm of exploration: the notion that there was, in Vienna in 1824, very little acceptance of what the concepts of speed and quickening time might yet entail. Viennese society was not yet a modern one, and conducted itself much as it did two or three centuries before. Clocks were not always accurate timepieces, time ran liberally fast and slow, and there was little need for greater accuracy and synchronisation. The railways and the telegraph had not yet transformed the city. Throw a precise and unforgiving metronome into this mix and you had an explosion big enough to deafen the world.

Perhaps it is inevitable with Beethoven that the story always returns to deafness. Stanley Dodds, a second violin with the Berlin Philharmonic, has wondered whether it isn’t freedom itself that underlies the key mysteries of Beethoven’s Ninth: ‘I ask myself sometimes if when you become completely deaf and music exists only in its imaginary form in your head, it of course loses a certain physical quality. The mind is completely free, and this would explain and helps maybe to understand where this enormous creativity, this freedom in his compositional creativity, came from.’ Dodds was interviewed for a digital tablet app that forensically contrasts performances of the Ninth by Ferenc Fricsay from 1958, Herbert von Karajan from 1962, Leonard Bernstein from 1979 and John Eliot Gardiner from 1992.⁹ He also finds Beethoven’s metronome values to be ‘rather ridiculous’ and much too quick. The recordings that attempt to honour those values ‘sound a little bit like music notation programmes which just play it off as a machine would play it off’, and humans require something else.

Music itself, when executed in its physical form, has a little bit of weight. That weight could be defined as the weight of a bow, which needs to moved up and down and turned at every bow change, or even just the few grams of the lips which need to vibrate to cause the brass instrument to sound, or the timpani skin which needs to oscillate. A double bass sound, for example, seems to take longer to travel.

The sum of all these slight practical delays might mean that Beethoven’s notations are not actually physically realisable. ‘But because Beethoven was imagining it in his mind, in your mind you are completely free. I know from my own experience that I can think about music in a way that is much faster than actually when I am playing the music.’

Beethoven died three years after his Ninth Symphony first brought the house down in Vienna.¹⁰ The city came to a standstill for his funeral; the clocks stopped in his honour. His final months were spent revising earlier works specifically to add marks for the metronome, for he could think of nothing more important to fortify the future performances of his work. We know things didn’t work out that way. But there is one further peculiar twist to the story, and it didn’t happen for another 150 years.

ii) Just How Long Should a CD Be?

On 27 August 1979, the chief executives and leading engineers of Philips and Sony sat around a table in Eindhoven with the simple intent to alter the way we listen to music. Decades before the term was invented, they planned disruptive technology on a grand scale. The grooved vinyl LP had hardly changed in 30 years, and was blighted by dirt, dust, scratches and warping, and a truly tedious limitation: how could you lose yourself in even the shortest symphony if halfway through you had to lift the needle, remove the fluff, flip the disc and start anew? (The LP was, of course, also beautiful, tactile, warm of sound and transformative, but progress is progress.)

And so the compact disc was born, or at least conceived. The idea was to combine the neat modern ease of the compact cassette with the aural durability and random access of the videodisc, and in so doing persuade music lovers to become gadget lovers.¹¹ The CD was to be a smaller object, a digital recording read optically by a laser, and what it lacked in aural warmth it made up for in dynamism, accuracy, random access and a wipe-clean surface. (It was also a cool new thing, and although few who handed over their money for Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms could have anticipated it, the CD was also the public on-ramp to the nascent digital universe.)

There was one problem to overcome before this could happen: the format. Stung by the video wars between Betamax and VHS, during which two competing technologies slugged it out for the consumer to the detriment of all, Philips and Sony now agreed to work together on an unprecedented scale.¹² Both had developed a similar technology and announced it to the world in March 1979, but they differed on the specs; consumers would again face an incompatible choice of players. They needed a united front, particularly if they were to convince music lovers to buy the same music they already owned.

But precisely how compact should the disc be? And how much digital information should it contain?

The meetings between chief executives and engineers took place over several days in Eindhoven and Tokyo, and resulted in the industry standard manual known as the Red Book. Summarising the agreement years later in IEEE Communications, the journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a long-standing member of the Philips audio team named Hans B. Peek took great pride in contributing to a product that nudged the culture. Peek suggested that the LP was simply out of time: in an age of miniaturisation it just stood there, the records stout in the stacks and the player bulky on the sideboard. Peek wrote of the tiny ‘pits and lands’ of the CD grooves and how the pitfalls of the digital registration of audio signals were mastered. Unlike the LP, a CD would be read from the inside to the outside edge. Skipping, clicking, dropouts – all the errors of optical reading that could be caused by such a simple thing as fingerprints on the disc – had to be overcome, and an agreement had to be reached on information density. Prior to Sony’s involvement, the diameter of the disc was agreed at 11.5cm, the same as the diagonal length of a cassette. The initial playing time was set at one hour, a nice round figure and a considerable improvement on the LP.

In February 1979, prototypes of a CD player and discs were played to audio experts at PolyGram, the newly formed record company founded by Philips and Siemens (a synergy that provided access to the entire catalogue of Deutsche Grammophon). The PolyGram people loved it: crucially, when several samples of music were played, they could detect no difference between the playback of a CD and the playback of the original master tapes. Journalists got to hear a CD for the first time a month later; again, the sound astonished: on one of the earliest recordings, a complete collection of Chopin waltzes, one could hear the pianist’s assistant turn the pages. The media also liked what they didn’t hear – there was no sound at all as they paused music in the middle of a track: the precision pause button, the suspension and elongation of musical time, was itself revolutionary. The CD also offered something else: a whole new consciousness of musical time. It’s a thrill, really – seeing the first seconds of the track appear on a digital read-out in green or red, with the ability not only to pause, but also to repeat and scan back. The operator was in charge of time in a novel way, everyone a DJ with precise control, Abbey Road in everyone’s road.

Philips then went to Japan to talk manufacturing partnerships. Representatives spoke to JVC, Pioneer, Hitachi and Matsushita, but only Sony signed a deal. Norio Ohga, Sony’s vice-chairman, arrived in Eindhoven in August 1979 to begin hammering out the details of what would become the industry standard, and it wasn’t until further meetings had concluded in Tokyo in June 1980 that an agreement was reached and final patent applications were filed. By then, the original formats proposed by Philips had changed. According to J.P. Sinjou, who led a team of 35 at the Philips CD lab, the 11.5cm disc was changed to 12cm on the personal wish of Norio Ohga. The extra width would allow Ohga, who was a trained baritone and passionate classical music lover, to extend the duration of the disc by a crucial amount. ‘Using a 12cm disc,’ Hans B. Peek wrote, ‘a particular performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a favourite of N. Ohga with a length of 74 minutes, could be recorded.’ Other issues were met with even neater solutions: ‘J. Sinjou put a Dutch coin, a dime, on the table. All agreed that this was a fine size for the hole [in the middle of the disc]. Compared with other lengthy discussions, this was a piece of cake.’¹³

Could it be that its initial length was really inspired by a lengthy recording – Furtwängler’s interpretation at Bayreuth in 1951 – of Beethoven’s Ninth? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? The story is quoted only as an ‘anecdote’ by an engineer, and doubts have crept in. Another version suggests the Beethoven fan was not Mr Ohga, but his wife. It may be that the Beethoven story was concocted in retrospect, an inspired marketing wheeze. And there was one further twist: Furtwängler’s 74-minute performance could technically be accommodated on a single CD, but it couldn’t be played; the earliest CD players could only handle 72 minutes. It was a fate the conductor was to share with Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland: today both masterpieces fit on a single disc, but initially they were split between two.

But who buys CDs these days? Who but the purist has time to visit a record shop and buy a physical product when a song may be downloaded in three seconds? In an age of SoundCloud and Spotify, who has time to even listen to an entire uncompressed album as it was conceived by the artist? The format no longer restricts the art form; but once, as we shall see from the records kept by the cashier at Abbey Road, the format used to be very strict indeed.

iii) Revolver

A little hush now please: the Beatles are about to record their first LP. It is early in the morning on Monday, 11 February 1963, and Studio 2 at Abbey Road is booked for three sessions: 10 a.m.–1 p.m., 2.30–5.30 p.m. and 6.30–9.30 p.m. The timings comply with standard Musicians’ Union rules. A session may last no more than three hours, from which no more than 20 minutes of recorded material may be used. Each artiste will be paid the same amount per session – 7 pounds and 10 shillings – and you have to sign your chit at the end of the day to get your Musicians Union Fees from Mr Mitchell, the Abbey Road cashier. When they first register for payment, the band are an unfamiliar presence: John Lennon gives his details as J.W. Lewnow of 251 Mew Love Ave; the role of bass guitarist is credited to George Harrison.

The fact that the Beatles are there at all that day is unusual. When the studio was booked, the group had released only one single; when Parlophone’s label chief George Martin broke the news that the band were going to make a long-player, it was a remarkable announcement. Pop music was restricted to singles. The biggest-selling LPs in Britain over the previous two years were not by Cliff Richard or Adam Faith, or even Elvis Presley: they were by the George Mitchell Minstrels with songs from The Black And White Minstrel Show.

The morning session began with the Beatles recording an original song called ‘There’s a Place’, inspired by ‘Somewhere’ from West Side Story.¹⁴ There were seven full takes, and three false starts, with the last take, lasting 1.50, being credited on the studio recording sheet as ‘best’. Then it was straight into a song listed as ‘17’. There were nine takes in all, including false starts, and after playback it was decided that the first take had been the best, and within a few days the title had changed to ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and it was decided that the song should open the album, just as it opened many of their live shows. But George Martin sensed there was something missing – a certain dynamism that the Beatles displayed when he had recently seen them play live at Liverpool’s Cavern Club. So at the very beginning of take one he spliced in the four words that Paul McCartney had used at the start of take nine: ‘One-two-three-FOUR!’ And then it was time for lunch.

So much happened in 1948 – the establishment of the state of Israel, the Berlin airlift, the birth of the NHS and the Marshall Plan – that the launch of a 12-inch record that spun at 33¹ 3 revolutions per minute seems like a minor thing in comparison. But the impact of the LP was astounding. The possibilities of 22 minutes per side, rather than 4 or 6 on the older 10-inch or 12-inch 78 rpm records, changed the way composers and musicians thought about music and wrote it. It changed the way a generation obtained much of their pleasure and enlightenment, and it’s not for nothing that Philip Larkin dates the start of sexual intercourse around the time of the Beatles’ first LP.

It would be simplistic to claim that the standard lengths of musical performances have been determined largely by the technical constraints of recording them. But before the wax recording cylinder and the gramophone there was certainly far less need for structure. Songlines on the African plains rang continuously through the centuries; in medieval courts, entertainment lasted for as long as it pleased the throne, or until the money ran out. In more recent times, performance merely tested human patience: how much could we concentrate, and how long would we behave ourselves? A concert would often end when the candles ran down. It was the same with ancient theatre: how long would an audience sit in an unheated space without demanding the Roman equivalent of a choc ice?

But the recording of music – which effectively began in the 1870s – did change our capacity to hear it. The two-minute and then four-minute limit of the early Edison and Columbia wax cylinders concentrated the mind like a guillotine. Likewise the 10-inch shellac 78 rpm record lasted about three minutes; the 12-inch record (before the micro-grooved long-player) ran about four-and-a-half. The 7-inch 45 rpm vinyl single, introduced in 1949, varied little from this, perhaps three minutes, before the grooves wound so tightly that the sound would deteriorate and the needle would skip.¹⁵

Mark Katz, a leading historian of recorded sound, has noted that listening to music at home before the LP was a distinct nuisance.¹⁶ He quotes the blues singer Son House from the 1920s, who bemoaned ‘gettin’ up, settin’ it back, turnin’ it around, crankin’ the crank, primin’ it up and lettin’ the horn down’. Bad enough for blues and jazz, fairly catastrophic for classical, for which a recording of a symphony was split into 20 sides on 10 discs (which is how the ‘album’ got its name – a collection of 78s in a folder).

One got used to it, of course, and in the early days recorded sound must have seemed like a miracle. But creatively it was more than a nuisance; it was a hindrance. An opera or a concerto was no longer split up into the acts or movements intended by the composer, but into false movements created by the limitations of a four-minute wax cylinder or disc. Music would suddenly stop, and the only way it would continue was when someone got up from the armchair. What was the effect of this? Shorter recordings, or more recordings of shorter pieces. Mark Katz has noted that while concerts in the early half of the twentieth century contained the usual array of symphonies and operas, ‘any survey of record catalogues . . . will reveal the dominance of character pieces, arias, marches and brief popular song and dance numbers . . . It was not long before the time limitation affected not only what musicians recorded but also what they performed in public.’ Audiences increasingly wanted the short pieces they knew from their records.¹⁷ The length of the three-minute pop song was cemented, if not created, by the ability to record little more, but it is more surprising that this practice existed both before and beyond pop.

When Igor Stravinsky composed his Serenade for Piano in 1925, there was a specific reason why the piece only lasted 12 minutes and appeared in four almost equal segments. ‘In America I had arranged with a gramophone firm [Brunswick] to make records of some of my music,’ Stravinsky explained. ‘This suggested the idea that I should compose something whose length should be determined by the capacity of the record.’ Hence four movements of under three minutes, each of which fit snugly on one side of a 10-inch, 78 rpm disc.¹⁸ Composers were also willing to cut their own work to fit the limitations of a record. In 1916, Edward Elgar reduced the score of his Violin Concerto to fit four 78s; an uncut performance would easily last more than twice that length.

The performance offered by musicians may also change from a concert recital to a recorded version. The visual texture of a live performance may have to be somehow recreated in the listener’s mind by the introduction of vibrato and other resonances. The conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt believes that ‘if you don’t see the musicians . . . you have to add something which makes the process of music making somehow visible in the imagination of the listener.’ The timing may also change, not least the gaps between movements or other dramatic pauses. A silent musician in a concert hall may provide drama to proceedings by wiping a bow or brow, or damping percussion; on CD this would be dead air. In becoming tighter, a performance may become less broad, and the rhetorical effect reduced.

When the Beatles returned to Studio 2 after lunch they recorded ‘A Taste of Honey’, ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’ and ‘Misery’. Then there was another break for supper, and in a marathon evening session between 6.30 and 10.45 p.m., for which they would have been paid overtime, they recorded ‘Hold Me Tight’, ‘Anna (Go To Him)’, ‘Boys’, ‘Chains’, ‘Baby It’s You’ and ‘Twist and Shout’, most of them in one or two takes.

‘It’s amazing really how creative we could be in those circumstances,’ George Martin said in 2011, reminiscing with Paul McCartney about their time in the studio. McCartney replied, ‘I say to people now, “10.30 a.m. to 1.30 p.m., two songs”. And you would just remind us about halfway through the three-hour period, “Well, it’s just about enough on that one, chaps, let’s wrap it up.” And so you learnt to be brilliant, he said modestly, in one-and-a-half hours.’

‘But I was under pressure because I got so little time with you,’ Martin remembered. ‘You were running all over the world, and I would say to Brian [Epstein], “I need more time in the studio.” And he said, “Well, I can give you Friday afternoon, or Saturday evening,” and he would dole out time to me like giving scraps to a mouse.’¹⁹

Nothing was wasted. Every song recorded on 11 February 1963 was used on the album, which was called Please Please Me. To the 10 new tracks were added 4 songs already recorded as A- and B-sides for two singles (‘Love Me Do’/‘P.S. I Love You’ and ‘Please Please Me’/‘Ask Me Why’).²⁰

And then Monday, 11 February 1963 was over. The first LP from what would become the biggest and greatest and most influential band in the world was ready for remixing and then a release 39 days later. In a few years, the recording of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ would require more than two dozen takes over five weeks. But the entire first album, excluding the singles, had taken just one day.

Mark Lewisohn, on the other hand, is taking rather longer to tell the story of that album and all the others in the Beatles’ phenomenal seven-year recording history (only seven years – one has to pinch oneself every time one thinks of that). Lewisohn is the author of All These Years, a forensic and compelling account of the Beatles and their world. It may turn out to be a 30-year project. It was planned as a three-volume endeavour ending in 1970, but the author is now considering a fourth to accommodate solo projects and the aftermath.

‘It was a stab in the dark,’ he says. ‘When I began in 2004 it was originally going to be a 12-year project, but . . . insanely bad judgement on that score.’ The publication dates of the three volumes were once planned as 2008, 2012 and 2016. ‘So this year ought to be seeing the conclusion of the series.’ The revised timeline now suggests volume two in 2020 and volume three in 2028. ‘And if I do a fourth one it will be into 2030-something.’ When we met in 2016, Lewisohn was 57; a fourth title will take him well into his 70s. ‘The usual parallel that Americans make is the series of books by Robert Caro on Lyndon B. Johnson,’ he says. ‘He still has one to do and he’s 80-something, so he has a battle against time.’²¹

Lewisohn works from home in Berkhamsted, an ancient market town in Hertfordshire. When he sits at his desk he almost disappears among the books, music papers, tapes, boxes, filing cabinets and the rest of the gear, by far the greatest amassment of Beatles documents in private hands, so that a visitor has only one spot of four square inches to rest a cup of tea. Lewisohn’s laptop is perched on a stand so as to free more space beneath it. And then there is the noise in his mind. ‘It’s like plate-spinning at the circus,’ he says of the parallel timelines. In Volume One, ‘there are simultaneous events happening in London, Liverpool and Hamburg, but in Volumes Two and Three the number of plates will multiply. While I’m off telling the Beatles’ impact in Indonesia or New Zealand or Argentina, I could lose the readers with what’s going on in London or Liverpool or anywhere else. I know that I’m stacking problems for myself all down the line in terms of weight of material and how to assimilate it all.’