Abstract
The early international record companies considered Central Europe to be a more or less unified market, both before and after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Gramophone Company created a separate catalog for the “non-German” language recordings of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and some neighboring states, and assigned the territory belonging to this catalog, with frequent changes, to the Berlin, Vienna and Budapest Branches, so that in several cases the company's Budapest General Agency was responsible for organizing recording sessions in Bosnia, Serbia and even Bulgaria. With the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, this common market was also fragmented. However, the links have not disappeared: most of the gramophone records of the Hungarian Sternberg company contain recordings by a Czechoslovak record company, a Polish record label is known to have gained rights to reissue some Hungarian recordings, and a close examination of the Edison Bell International Ltd. matrix numbering system reveals that the company's Yugoslav, Hungarian and Romanian recordings are closely linked. In my article, I will present some of the links in the record company network of Central Europe before and after 1920 through short case studies based on archival documents, contemporary printed sources and the repertoire. I will argue that it is not possible to understand the events and recording history of the Central European countries in isolation, without knowledge of the recording history of the surrounding countries. Furthermore, I raise the possibility that, in comparison to written documents, more complex aspects should be taken into account when defining patrioticum in the field of audio media.
Research on the history of Hungarian sound recordings, which started in the last third of the twentieth century, has tried with little success to sort out the international labyrinths of the recording industry, or on the contrary: with clever – or even ambiguous – formulations, the authors have left the origins and national affiliation of a record company in obscurity.1 The majority of works on Hungarian record history focus only on Hungarian events and phenomena, and as a result we often only get half of the histories. Furthermore, due to the difficult structure of the international record companies, these works sometimes generalize incorrectly. Even more typical, of course, is the fact that, in order to glorify the Hungarian recording history, they present something as being entirely Hungarian when it is not.
In the background of these problems we can find the nature of the medium itself. In the case of commercially released discs, the tangible output, that is, the disc itself, is very often the result of the work of several countries. The vast majority of record companies present in Hungary at any given time were international record companies. As a result, the concept of patrioticum – in this case hungaricum – in the case of commercially distributed records must be treated with even greater caution than usual, and the specific characteristics of the medium must therefore be taken into account.2 The problems discussed in this article are of course not only valid in the early decades of the history of sound recordings, but are equally relevant in the CD era or in the world of today's multinational sound recording companies. However, my short case studies are mainly from the early period of the sound recording history, because the historical geographical changes of the first half of the twentieth century – e.g. the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the border revisions of the successor states – make it even more difficult to discuss this topic.3 I would also like to use the case studies to draw attention to the fact that the concept of patrioticum in the field of audio media is much more complex than in the case of written documents.
From the very beginning, the production of records was essentially international. The first record companies were already thinking about international distribution. The first recording tour of The Gramophone Company was an almost symbolic beginning in the history of European gramophone records: in 1899, Fred Gaisberg and Sinkler Darby visited six important musical centres: Leipzig, Budapest, Vienna, Milan, Paris and finally Madrid.4 The discs were pressed in Joseph Berliner's factory in Hannover (the first record factory in Europe); however, the products were distributed internationally, in several European countries. A similar undertaking was the 1905–1906 world tour of the German Beka Records, which recorded in Istanbul, Cairo, Bombay, Calcutta, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo and other places.5
Content-based and media-specific interpretations of patrioticum can sometimes be completely divergent. As Morgan James Luker points out, Columbia Record's Argentine series of recordings of typically Argentinian music are, in fact, records made in the United States, and could therefore be considered American, and nothing provides greater evidence of this than the fact that they are included in the online Discography of American Historical Recordings6 and the Library of Congress' National Jukebox.7 The following conclusion, with a media-theoretical emphasis, testifies to the complexity of Luker's approach to the concept of patrioticum: “what we hear in the T Series is – in a real and fundamental way – ‘American’ (meaning US-based) music.”8
A complex example of the same phenomenon in several respects is the album entitled 2000 Jahre Musik auf der Schallplatte, published in 1930 by the Lindström AG (Parlophone).9 The discs in this series, with their recordings of Jewish and ancient Greek music, liturgical music from Santiago de Compostela, as well as musical works by Dufay, Monteverdi, Byrd and Rameau, can obviously be seen as patriotica of various cultures, including Germany, by reason of the record label. Moreover, through one of the performers, the cellist Pál Hermann, the album can be considered as part of Hungarian music history, in the context of the migration of Hungarian musicians. And since the first German edition of the album has been followed by English, Spanish and American (US) editions, the reissues will include further countries in the discussion.
This international nature of the record industry has resulted in similar, if not more complex, cases in the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and its successor states. From the point of view of content, the 1926 His Master's Voice recordings by Imre Magyari and his Gypsy orchestra are obviously Hungarian, although the recordings were made in Milan (matr. BK1825–BK1834), the record company was based in England, the records themselves were produced in Czechoslovakia, and in 1926 the company did not even have a separate Hungarian series.10 In contrast, the Bosnian recordings made in Sarajevo in May and June, 1907 by German sound engineer Franz Hampe, which were published in the 108xxx – non-Hungarian – catalog series by The Gramophone Company in London, may not be considered part of Hungarian record history – even though these recordings were managed by the company's Hungarian branch. At the time, Bosnia was part of the geographical territory of the Hungarian branch of The Gramophone Company, and the recordings were organized directly by the head of the Budapest Branch, Heinrich Conrad (Henrik Konrád), and Hampe was accompanied to the location of the recordings by Conrad's brother Friedrich Conrad (Frigyes Konrád).11
As already shown, most of the major international record companies saw the Central European area as a unified market. The Gramophone Company (later His Master's Voice) used a language-based catalog system, in which the sound recordings of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy were dispensed in at least two separate catalogs: the 40xxx catalog for German-language recordings (which of course included sound recordings made in Germany), and the 70xxx “Central European” catalog, launched in 1902, for the other languages of the Monarchy.12 Not only was the system not adapted to national borders, but it was also completely unsuitable to the countries which used languages outside the mainstream operatic repertoire: the Italian- and German-language Budapest recordings of some foreign-born members of the Royal Hungarian Opera House, such as Italia Molina-Vasquez, were classified into different catalogs;13 not to mention the recordings of the Jewish cantors of Budapest: the 1907 recordings of Dávid Csernovszki (matr. 5371–5378L) were published in the so-called Oriental (11xxx) catalog of The Gramophone Company.
As is well known, the Gramophone Company established a general agency in many cities from Europe to Asia, including Budapest in 1904.14 Each general agency was assigned a territory in which it managed the company's affairs, above all the trade and the organization of recording sessions for that area. As at that time most of the Balkan states were under the Budapest branch, it was up to the head of the Budapest branch to decide whether to make recordings in Belgrade, Sarajevo or even Zombor in a given year. The territories were sometimes reorganized. At the beginning of 1911, for example, Croatia, Serbia, Dalmatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro were all included in the territory of the Budapest branch.15 In March of that year, Bulgaria and Romania, which until then had been directly under the office in Berlin, were also transferred to the Budapest branch.16 As a result, the recordings in Budapest, Belgrade and Sofia in October, 1911 were organized by the head of the Budapest General Agency, Heinrich Conrad. Consequently, the schedule and itinerary of the recording expert can only be understood in an international context. In 1912, the Head Office of the record company entrusted Heinrich Conrad with the management of the Vienna branch, and his position in Budapest was taken over by his brother Friedrich Conrad, thus placing the entire business of Austria and Hungary in the hands of one family.17
With the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this common market was fragmented, with Budapest's regional leadership declining significantly and Prague's increasing; however, the links did not completely disappear. The largest record factory in Central Europe was still that of The Gramophone Company (HMV) in Ústí nad Labem, formerly Aussig. Between 1920 and 1938, the Ústí nad Labem record factory produced around 12,000 records in different languages, including Polish, Romanian, Bulgarian and Hungarian, as well as Czech.18 Since the company had its own factory in Central Europe, it was understandable that it did not use other Hungarian companies that were also set up to produce records. Thus, even in 1935, the Hungarian journal Honi Ipar (National Industry) was still criticizing the pressing of Hungarian HMV records in Czechoslovakia.19
The Ústí nad Labem record factory produced the first releases of the significant 1928 HMV Hungarian music series, which contained an exclusively Hungarian repertoire, ordered by the Hungarian Ministry of Culture.20 Obviously, these releases cannot be considered as “Czechoslovak” records just because of the place of the pressing, not to mention the fact that His Master's Voice was not a Czechoslovak record company. However, it would also be a distortion to present this series of records as an entirely Hungarian achievement. It was precisely the foreign background of the record company that gave the journalist of Honi Ipar a reason to criticize the Minister of Culture for having a foreign record company produce the series while there existed a Hungarian company at the time, Eternola, with the possibility of making gramophone discs.21
Of course, Eternola was not an entirely Hungarian record company, and the Eternola Edison Bell discs were not pressed in Hungary either.22 Eternola Mechanikai Rt. was founded in July, 1927 in Budapest as an enterprise of Gyula (Julius) Liedl. Originally it produced gramophones and only experimented with a flexible disc for recording purposes. When the idea of making its own recordings arose, the company contacted the British Edison Bell Phonograph Corporation Ltd., due to a lack of suitable equipment and production capacity. However, Edison Bell was already present in Central Europe. In 1926, the British company had set up a record factory in Zagreb, in collaboration with the Yugoslav inventor Slavoljub Penkala's company,23 and in the following year Edison Bell International Ltd. was established as a subsidiary of Edison Bell to handle international distribution.24 The first recording session of Eternola began in Budapest in October, 1928, in a collaboration between Edison Bell and Eternola. Edison Bell sent its own sound engineer, Paul Voigt, to Central Europe, and he made recordings for Edison Bell in Zagreb, Budapest and Bucuresti. On the basis of the archive documents of Edison Bell Penkala (Zagreb) and Eternola Mechanikai Rt., it seems that Edison Bell was negotiating with Eternola in Budapest and with Penkala in Zagreb at the same time, presumably in order to secure the best terms for its business in Central Europe. Since Penkala had been in contact with the British company earlier than Eternola, it was understandably at an advantage in the negotiations. However, if one reads the documents, it seems that Edison Bell's people even played the two Central European companies off against each other when business needs dictated it. The collaboration between the Zagreb and Budapest record companies is evidenced by a number of Hungarian Eternola recordings reissued by Edison Bell Penkala under its own label, included into the Yugoslav Edison Bell Penkala catalog.
The executives at Eternola Mechanikai Rt. had ambitious plans: they wanted to supply the entire Hungarian record market with recordings of all kinds of music and prose repertoire. The interpreters were the most outstanding – mostly young – Hungarian performers of the period. Several famous Hungarian artists, including, for example, Louis Kentner and Alexander Svéd made their first gramophone recordings at Eternola. The orchestra of the Budapest Operetta Theater was conducted by the 36-year-old Pál Ábrahám. There were, of course, some notable absences: although the company reported that recordings would be made with Béla Bartók, this did not materialize.25 The Hungarian Eternola Edison Bell records were initially pressed in London by Edison Bell and later at the Edison Bell Penkala record factory in Zagreb. This has led to misunderstandings in at least one case, which resulted in a recording rarity of Hungarian music historical significance.26
According to former Hungarian discographical research, Ernő Dohnányi made two recordings for Edison Bell, Beethoven's Für Elise and his own March op. 17 no. 1. The disc survived in the original couplings with several different catalog numbers, but, quite unusually, with three different pairs of matrix numbers. In the case of a reissue, the company would in principle retain the previous matrix numbers. However, if the recordings are different, the question arises as to why the record company would release two or three different recordings of the same repertoire with the same performer. Empirically, two of the three recordings with different matrix numbers are identical; the new matrix numbers were in fact control numbers for the later reissue. Detailed computational analysis of the two different recordings revealed two interesting phenomena: on the one hand, the recordings are almost identical down to the last agogical detail, which is quite surprising since Dohnányi's performance style is considered to be notoriously spontaneous; on the other hand, a close listening to the recording with the lowest matrix number has revealed two mistakes by Dohnányi in his own composition, which are not audible on the recording with the higher matrix number. The fortunately preserved and extremely valuable notes of sound engineer Paul Voigt provided further evidence: he himself noted that Dohnányi's Edison Bell recording in Budapest had not been well done technically. Nevertheless, the record was pressed in the London factory. It seems that some time later, Dohnányi re-recorded the two piano pieces, but these recordings were sent to the Zagreb record factory for production and the matrices were stored there. And in 1934, when Edison Bell was part of Decca, they reissued the earlier recordings from the matrices preserved in London, very likely unaware that a better, improved recording existed.
There are many further examples of the links of the record production and record trade in the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. A unified Central European distribution was the idea of Duophon Ltd. of London, which set up the Central European Duophon Factory Limited in Budapest in 1929. From the statutes of the company we know that it was granted the use of the patent registered under the Duophon trademark not only in Hungary but also in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria.27 The relations between the Czechoslovak and Hungarian recording history could be traced at length. The Czechoslovak record company Esta produced records for the Hungarian market which contained not only Hungarian-related repertoire, but also recordings of international interest, for example Antonín Dvořák's well-known Humoresque, released in Hungary (Esta D 529, matr. 720 E).28 Hungarian jazz bands made recordings in Prague during the interwar period for several international labels, and in the 1950s, many Hungarian artists, such as Annie Fischer, György Cziffra and József Simándy, made recordings in Prague for Supraphon.29 Finally, some recordings of the Hungarian Radiola Disc Factory were reissued in Poland on the Balto label – a connection which still has to be researched.30
However, even if it seems that for an all-Hungarian record company it is enough to know the Hungarian conditions, we might be wrong. Első Magyar Hanglemezgyár (First Hungarian Record Factory), founded in 1908, was the only independent Hungarian record company before 1918; however, its activities were not confined to the territory of Hungary at the time.31 Most of the sound engineers of Első Magyar Hanglemezgyár – at least those we know of – were certainly not Hungarian, for example the German Max Winter (formerly sound engineer at Lyrophon),32 the Swede Karl Johann Amandus Sandahl,33 or the Englishman Ivor Robert Holmes.34
As a first step towards an international presence, the Hungarian record company opened a branch in Vienna in August, 1908, where the long and complicated Hungarian company name, which was not suitable for foreign distribution, was replaced by the shorter Premier Record.35 The Vienna branch used, besides the original label, a special black art nouveau label to distribute the company's Vienna-related recordings. As early as September, 1908, the idea of expanding the business eastwards, mainly into Russia and the Balkans, was mooted.36 The Sofia firm Georges S. Ghineff undertook to represent the Hungarian company in Bulgaria, Serbia and the European part of Turkey.37 Furthermore, from a letter from June, 1909 we know that the Warsaw firm Handelshaus A. Kustin represented the Hungarian record company in Russia.38
Not only did the company have a wide repertoire covering all genres, but non-Hungarian recordings also made up a significant part of its catalog. It is remarkable how seriously the company undertook to supply records to the nationalities living in Hungary at the time, but it also operated beyond the borders of the Monarchy. The most detailed list of the linguistic diversity of its publications can be found in the February, 1912 issue of Phonographische Zeitschrift, which listed Hungarian, German (Austrian), Serbian, Romanian, Slovenian, Slovak, Czech, Croatian, Turkish, Armenian, Russian, Polish, Tatar, Yiddish and Hebrew recordings.39 The German-language discs include not only Viennese repertoire, but also musical and prose recordings by Germans in Hungary. By 1912, the repertoire of the company included all the languages of the Balkan states, making it a major player in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy's record trade.40
The Tatar language may at first sight seem surprising in the above list, but it is confirmed by other sources. As Will Prentice has pointed out on the basis of the documents of the EMI Archives, Frederick Tyler, the representative of The Gramophone Company in Tbilisi, considered the Hungarian record company as a significant local competitor between 1909 and 1911. At the end of the summer of 1909, The Gramophone Company's sound engineer Franz Hampe was in competition with a local representative of the Hungarian Premier Record to record the best performers on gramophone records in the area across the Caspian Sea.41 A year later, Frederick Tyler wrote to his superior complaining that the First Hungarian Record Company not only had an excellent local repertoire, but had also made excellent business deals with local dealers.42 Furthermore, Első Magyar Hanglemezgyár had a representative even in Samarkand (today Uzbekistan), and was very active: in April, 1910, it brought 10,000 Premier Record discs to the city.43
Első Magyar Hanglemezgyár advertised its recordings in different languages in separate catalogs and loose leafs, and based on the currently available copies, we must even add Italian to the languages listed above. The company's recordings were not only made in Budapest: in addition to the above-mentioned recordings in the Caucasus, Antal Greiner made recordings in Turkey and Lemberg (today Lviv) in the autumn of 1911,44 and there were recordings made by the company in Novi Sad, Bucuresti, Ljubljana etc. Moreover, although Első Magyar Hanglemezgyár initially advertised that it did not take over licensed recordings, but only marketed its own recordings,45 it has recently come to light that the company's general agency in Russia had also been releasing discs under its own brand name during 1910–1911 as licensed or, in the worst case, pirated copies of the Russian record company Syrena in Warsaw.46 On these seemingly Hungarian discs we find, for example, recordings of Russian opera singers from Warsaw and St. Petersburg. The history and exploration of these, as well as the activities of Első Magyar Hanglemezgyár in the Caucasus, require further international research.
Overall, it can be said that in the history of commercial record production, it is not at all clear what is national and what is not. Since recorded sound is not necessarily language-specific, exporting and distributing records internationally is an essential part of the business. Except for a few extreme cases, we cannot really talk about record production being exclusively linked to one country, especially in Central Europe. This problem has a particular impact in two areas: research methodology and library science.
Patrioticum is one of the key concepts of library science. However, it is not at all easy to determine what is considered to be patrioticum in a Central European context. The content- and language-based aspects seem clear, but the specificity of the medium must be taken into account when properly defining the personal and territorial aspects, thus widening the scope of patrioticum.
These peculiarities are also partly due to the difference between written and audio documents. A sound recording has more authors (or rather “creators”) than a written work: in addition to the composer(s) and text author(s), the performer(s) and the creators of the sound recording (sound engineer[s], music director, etc.) must be taken into account. The question of personal patrioticum also arises in relation to the identity of the record collector. Private record collections purely related to a nation are relatively rare. When the question arises whether such a major collection should be included in a national library, it is often asked whether the library should also take into its collection recordings that do not belong to the patrioticum of the country concerned. It is worth considering that, as with the book collections of important historical figures or artists, the identity of the former owner (in this case, the record collector) may make a document that would otherwise be outside the scope of the library's collection part of the patrioticum.
As this article has shown, territorial patrioticum is a very complex issue in the case of sound media. The label (record company), the catalog of the foreign record company, the place where the recording was made and pressed can all be Hungarian. The dealer stamps add one more geographical area to those mentioned so far.47 The stamps affixed to the record label by the record dealer(s) provide information on the various stages in the life of a particular record.48 A foreign record on which a Hungarian dealer's stamp has been affixed is part of Hungarian cultural history, since it was commercialized in Hungary. Since the former dealer thought that this record would be of interest to Hungarian customers, it is a document of the Hungarian cultural history and a testimony to Hungarian taste at the time.
Another aspect of the problems raised is in the field of musicological research, especially in the field of discology and discography. I think that the history of the Hungarian recording industry is worth examining, at least in a Central European context. Indeed, I would argue that the discographers of the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy are interdependent. In order for discographies and recording histories to be as complete as possible, they need to be informed about the discological research in the neighboring states, and be in contact with each other. There is much fascinating data on the activity and local reception of Elektroton and Jugoton in the Hungarian-language newspapers of Yugoslavia, and the same can be said about Supraphon and Electrecord in the Hungarian journals of Czechoslovakia and Romania. As in many other fields of musicology – see fragmentology, for example – in discology it is not enough for researchers to be familiar only with the national conditions and phenomena of their own field of research. They also need to be informed about the structure and history of the surrounding countries' record companies, as well as of the international record companies present in their own country in order to understand the connections and to suspect what may seem to be obvious but turns out, in fact, to be exceptional.
Works Cited
Borsos, Tibor, Klára Bajnai and Géza Gábor Simon. Hanglemez bélyegek (Budapest: Jazz Oktatási és Kutatási Alapítvány, 2020).
Ceribašić, Naila. “Music as Recording, Music in Culture, and the Study of Early Recording Industry in Ethnomusicology,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 52/2 (2021), 323–354.
Elste, Martin and Carsten Schmidt (eds.). 2000 Jahre Musik auf der Schallplatte. Two Thousand Years of Music. Alte Musik anno 1930. Eine diskologische Dokumentation zur Interpretationsgeschichte (Wien: Gesellschaft für Historische Tonträger, 2018) = Contributions to the History of the Record Industry. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Schallplattenindustrie, vol. 8.
Gronow, Pekka, Christiane Hofer and Frank Wonneberg (eds.). Our Trip around the World – Unsere Reise um die Erde: The Oriental Expedition of Beka Records in 1905–1906 (Wien: Gesellschaft für Historische Tonträger, 2015) = Contributions to the History of the Record Industry / Beiträge zur Geschichte der Schallplattenindustrie, vol. 6.
Hoffmann, Frank (ed.). Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound, vol. 1 (New York, NY and London: Routledge, 2/2005).
Horváth, Tibor and István Papp (eds.). Könyvtárosok kézikönyve, vol. 1 (Budapest: Osiris, 2003).
Kelly, Alan. “Introduction,” in His Master’s Voice / La Voce del Padrone: The Italian Catalogue: A Complete Numerical Catalogue of Italian Gramophone Recordings Made from 1898 to 1929 in Italy and Elsewhere by The Gramophone Company Ltd. (Published by the Author on CD-ROM, 2002), IX–XV.
Kelly, Alan. The Gramophone Company Catalogue, 1898–1954 (Published by the Author on CD-ROM, 2002).
Luker, Morgan James. “Matrix Listening; or, What and How We Can Learn from Historical Sound Recordings,” Ethnomusicology 66/2 (Summer, 2022), 290–318.
Martland, Peter. Recording History: The British Record Industry, 1888–1931 (London: Scarecrow Press, 2012).
Marton, Gyula and Klára Bajnai. Első Magyar Hanglemezgyár: Premier Record (Budapest: Jazz Oktatási és Kutatási Alapítvány, 2008).
Meyer-Rähnitz, Bernd. Label-Logos für die Lupe: Lizenzen auf Grammophon-Schallplatten in Deutschland: Marken – Stempel – Aufdrucke – Werbeaufkleber (Dresden and Ústí: Albis-International, 2011).
Molnár, Tibor. “Gramofónia,” Sztereó 3/2 (April–May, 1996), 34–35, 3/3 (August, 1996), 42; 3/4 (October, 1996), 35; 3/5 (November, 1996), 27; 4/2 (April–May, 1997), 15; 4/3 (July–August, 1997), 37; 4/5 (October, 1997), 32; 4/6 (December, 1997), 41; 5/1 (February, 1998), 40.
Oldal, Gábor. “Kis magyar gramofonológia,” in Gramofon 25. Zenetudományi és zenekritikai antológia, ed. by Attila Retkes (Budapest: Gramofon Könyvek, 2021), 9–67.
Oldal, Gábor. “Kis magyar gramofonológia,” Gramofon 2/3 (March, 1997), 36–37; 2/4 (April, 1997), 6–7; 2/5 (May, 1997), 6–7; 2/6 (June, 1997), 6–7; 2/7 (July, 1997), 6–7; 2/9 (September, 1997), 8–9; 2/10 (October, 1997), 8–9; 2/11 (November, 1997), 10–11; 2/12 (December, 1997), 8–9; 3/1 (January, 1998), 8–9; 3/2 (February, 1998), 8–9; 3/3 (March, 1998), 8–9; 3/4 (April, 1998), 8–9; 3/5 (May, 1998), 8–9; 3/6 (June, 1998), 8–9; 3/7–8 (July, 1998), 8–9.
Pennanen, Risto Pekka. “Immortalised on Wax: Professional Folk Musicians and Their Gramophone Recordings Made in Sarajevo, 1907 and 1908,” in Europe and Its Other: Notes on the Balkans, ed. by Božidar Jezernik, Rajko Muršič and Alenka Bartulović (Ljubljana: Filozofska fakulteta, 2007), 107–148.
Simon, Géza Gábor. Magyar Hanglemeztörténet. 100 éves a magyar hanglemez, 1908–2008 (Budapest: Jazz Oktatási és Kutatási Alapítvány, 2008).
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Simon, Géza Gábor. “A gramofonlemez-gyártás és -forgalmazás,” in Klára Bajnai, Tibor Borsos, Géza Gábor Simon and Róbert Török, ed. by A Sternberg császári és királyi udvari hangszergyár története és gramofonlemezeinek diszkográfiája (Budapest: Jazz Oktatási és Kutatási Alapítvány, 2017), 51–58.
Szabó, Ferenc János. “At the Very Beginning: The First Hungarian Operatic Recordings on the Gramophon Label between 1902 and 1905,” in The Lindström Project: Contributions to the History of the Record Industry. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Schallplattenindustrie, vol. 4 , ed. by Pekka Gronow and Christiane Hofer (Wien: Gesellschaft für Historische Tonträger, 2012), 51–60.
Szabó, Ferenc János. “‘Technically Excellent, Musically Deficient.’ A Case Study of the Hungarian Sound Recordings of The Gramophone Company Made in 1911,” in The Lindström Project: Contributions to the History of the Record Industry. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Schallplattenindustrie, vol. 12, ed. by Pekka Gronow, Christiane Hofer, James Mitchell and Mathias Böhm (Wien: Gesellschaft für Historische Tonträger, 2022), 38–45.
Szabó, Ferenc János. “Ernő Dohnányi: A Discography of the Performer,” Studia Musicologica 63/1–2 (2022), 17–85.
Szabó, Ferenc János. His Master's Voice, 1928: A Vallás- és Közoktatásügyi Minisztérium gramofonakciója (Budapest: HUN-REN Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont Zenetudományi Intézet, 2024) = Dalos, Anna (ed.). Musicologia Hungarica, vol. 6.
Szabó, Ferenc János, “Edison Bell in Hungary. Eternola Mechanikai Rt,” in Contributions to the History of the Record Industry. Beiträge Zur Geschichte Der Schallplattenindustrie, vol. 13, ed. by Pekka Gronow, Christiane Hofer and Mathias Böhm (Vienna: Gesellschaft für Historische Tonträger, 2024), 84–93.
On the Hungarian recording history, an unpublished overview by Enikő VEÖREÖS is available only at the Archives for 20th- and 21st-Century Hungarian Music, Institute for Musicology, HUN-REN RCH: A magyar hanglemezgyártás története 1900–1920 között [A history of Hungarian sound recording production between 1900 and 1920] and A magyar hanglemezgyártás története. Második rész (1920–1945) [A History of Hungarian sound recording production, Part 2: 1920–1945]. The published secondary literature includes SIMON, Magyar Hanglemeztörténet; OLDAL, Kis magyar gramofonológia (originally published in the 1997–1998 issues of Gramofon) and MOLNÁR, Gramofónia which was published in the 1996–1998 issues of Sztereó.
The general term for the collection interest of a national library is patrioticum, i.e. all documents related to a given country. Obviously the same is true for the national sound archives, if it works as a separate institution. HORVÁTH and PAPP (eds.), Könyvtárosok kézikönyve, vol. 1, 222.
Certainly similar case studies could be made of the record history of some colonial countries.
KELLY, “Introduction,” X.
GRONOW, HOFER and WONNEBERG (eds.), Our Trip around the World.
https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/ (accessed: January 15, 2024).
https://www.loc.gov/collections/national-jukebox/ (accessed: January 15, 2024). Cf. LUKER, “Matrix Listening,” 302–303.
Ibid., 302.
ELSTE and SCHMIDT (eds.), 2000 Jahre Musik.
The May, 1926 recordings of Imre Magyari and his orchestra were published first in the AM series of The Gramophone Company. Four sides were later reissued as part of the HU series.
PENNANEN, “Immortalised on Wax,” 107–148.
On the catalog system of The Gramophone Company, see KELLY, The Gramophone Company.
SZABÓ, “At the Very Beginning.”
On the circumstances of the founding of the Hungarian branch see SZABÓ, “Technically Excellent.”
See the correspondence among the 1911 Budapest documents of the EMI Archives: Head Office – Budapest, February 8, 1911 (ref. no. 5759) and Head Office – Budapest, March 16, 1911 (ref. no. 10799).
EMI Archives, Head Office – Budapest, March 16, 1911 (ref. no. 10799).
SZABÓ, “Technically Excellent.”
For a history of the record factory in Ústí nad Labem, see Gramofonový průmysl, https://www.usti-nad-labem.cz/dejiny/19stol/ul-5-31.htm (accessed: March 4, 2022).
See, for example, N. N., “Miről zenél a gramofón?”, Honi Ipar 28/4 (February 15, 1935), 9.
On the 1928 HMV Series of Hungarian Music see SZABÓ, His Master's Voice, 1928.
N. N., “A magyar dal – külföldi beszélőgépen,” Honi Ipar 21/20–21 (November 15, 1928), 15–16.
On the history of Eternola Mechanikai Rt., see SZABÓ, “Edison Bell in Hungary.”
About Edison Bell Penkala, see CERIBAŠIĆ, “Music as Recording.”
Established in October, 1928, Edison Bell International Ltd. was responsible for the international business relations of the London-based Edison Bell record company; “Edison Bell International Ltd.,” in HOFFMANN, Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound, vol. 1, 353, and MARTLAND, Recording History, 247.
N. N., “A magyar gramofonéletnek…,” Az Est 19/236 (October 17, 1928), 12.
SZABÓ, “Ernő Dohnányi,” 49–50.
Statutes of Középeurópai Duophon Gyár Részvénytársaság, Budapest, February 25, 1929. Budapest City Archives (Budapest Főváros Levéltára), XV.20.48 VII.2.e. Cg. 30323.
The Hungarian recordings of Esta were distributed by the Sternberg Instrument Factory in Budapest. On the recording activity of the Sternberg Instrument Factory, see SIMON, “A gramofonlemez-gyártás,” 51–58.
See the review by Géza Gábor Simon of Gabriel GÖSSEL, Illustrated Discography of Hot Dance and Jazz Music in Czechoslovakia 1920–1950 – 78-rpm (Praha: private edition, 2009): SIMON, Szösszenetek, 227–230.
I have to offer my thanks to Michał Pieńkowski (Filmoteka Narodowa Instytut Audiowizualny) for this information.
For a history of Első Magyar Hanglemezgyár see SIMON, Szösszenetek, 278–288.
N. N., “Eine neue ungarische Plattenfabrik,” Phonographische Zeitschrift 9/8 (February 20, 1908), 227.
N. N., “Erste ungarische Schallplattenfabrik Budapest,” Phonographische Zeitschrift 9/32 (August 6, 1908), 938.
GARDE, “Új hanglemezekről,” Zenekereskedelmi Közlöny 3/4 (April 1, 1913), 3. For the biographical data of Ivor Robert Holmes, see Hugo STRÖTBAUM's Recording Pioneers website: http://recordingpioneers.com/RP_HOLMES1.html (accessed: March 4, 2022).
STRÖTBAUM, “Goulash, Wiener Snitzel,” 129.
Ibid.
N. N., “Die Erste ungarische Schallplattenfabrik in Budapest,” Phonographische Zeitschrift 9/27 (September 10, 1908), 1142.
For details of the Warsaw head office, see the company letterhead: MARTON and BAJNAI, Első Magyar Hanglemezgyár, 278.
See the advertisement of the company: Phonographische Zeitschrift 13/5 (February 1, 1912), 92.
“Die bekannte Premier-Schallplatte ist mit dem reichhaltigen Repertoir in allen Sprachen der Balkan-Länder ein gerngekaufter Artikel für die österreichisch-ungarischen Grossisten.” N. N., “Leipziger Messe,” Phonographische Zeitschrift 13/14 (April 4, 1912), 339.
Letter of Alfred Micheles to Sydney W. Dixon, London, September 14, 1909. EMI Archives, quoted by Will Prentice, http://www.recordingpioneers.com/RP_SANDAHL1.html (accessed: March 4, 2022).
“You told me some time ago that this firm [Premier Records] had failed but it appears that the business has been taken over by someone else and I enclose their catalog from which you will see that they have a fairly good repertoire of local records. Practically all our clients also sell Premier records which they buy franco at 90 kopecks and retail at any price they like.” Letter of Frederick Tyler to Alfred Micheles, Tiflis (today: Tbilisi), October 21, 1910. EMI Archives, quoted by Will Prentice, http://www.recordingpioneers.com/RP_SANDAHL1.html (accessed: March 4, 2022).
Letter of Frederick Tyler to Sydney W. Dixon, Tiflis (today: Tbilisi), April 14, 1910. EMI Archives, quoted by Will Prentice, http://www.recordingpioneers.com/RP_SANDAHL1.html (accessed: March 4, 2022).
N. N., “Terjeszkedés,” Zenekereskedelmi Közlöny 2/1 (January 1, 1912), 19. For a detailed article about the Turkish recordings of Első Magyar Hanglemezgyár, see STRÖTBAUM, “Goulash, Wiener Snitzel.”
See the advertisement of Első Magyar Hanglemezgyár: Phonographische Zeitschrift 9/22 (May 28, 1908), 657.
See details of Premier Record's Russian releases on Russian-Records.com: https://www.russian-records.com/categories.php?cat_id=59 (accessed: March 4, 2022).
On the various stamps affixed to the label of the gramophone discs, see MEYER-RÄHNITZ, Label-Logos für die Lupe.
These stamps can sometimes contain historical information, for example the disc with the stamp of the record dealer A. Klingbeil from Litzmannstadt on its label, since Litzmannstadt was the German name of Łódź during its German occupation between 1940 and 1945. See the stamp in BORSOS, BAJNAI and SIMON, Hanglemez bélyegek, 198.
