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Decca Records is a British record label established in 1929 by Edward Lewis. Its US label was established in late 1934 by Lewis, Jack Kapp and Milton Rackmil, who later became American Decca's president too. In 1937, anticipating Nazi aggression leading to World War II, Lewis sold American Decca, and the link between the UK and US Decca label was broken for several decades. The British label was renowned for its development of recording methods, while the American company developed the concept of cast albums in the musical genre.
Sir Georg Solti was a Hungarian-British orchestral and operatic conductor, known for his appearances with opera companies in Munich, Frankfurt, and London, and as a long-serving music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Born in Budapest, he studied there with Béla Bartók, Leó Weiner, and Ernő Dohnányi. In the 1930s, he was a répétiteur at the Hungarian State Opera and worked at the Salzburg Festival for Arturo Toscanini. His career was interrupted by the rise of the Nazis' influence on Hungarian politics, and being of Jewish background, he fled the increasingly harsh Hungarian anti-Jewish laws in 1938. After conducting a season of Russian ballet in London at the Royal Opera House, he found refuge in Switzerland, where he remained during the Second World War. Prohibited from conducting there, he earned a living as a pianist.
Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, was an Australian dramatic coloratura soprano known for her contribution to the renaissance of the bel canto repertoire from the late 1950s to the 1980s.
Dame Kiri Jeanette Claire Te Kanawa, , born Claire Mary Teresa Rawstron, is a New Zealand opera singer. She had a full lyric soprano voice, which has been described as "mellow yet vibrant, warm, ample and unforced". On 1 December 1971 she was recognised internationally when she appeared as the Countess in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro at the Royal Opera House in London.
Harry Walter Legge was an English classical music record producer, most especially associated with EMI. His recordings include many sets later regarded as classics and reissued by EMI as "Great Recordings of the Century". He worked in the recording industry from 1927, combining this with the post of junior music critic of The Manchester Guardian. He was assistant to Sir Thomas Beecham at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and in World War II played a role in bringing music to the armed forces and civilians.
Hans Knappertsbusch was a German conductor, best known for his performances of the music of Wagner, Bruckner and Richard Strauss.
Gottlob Frick was a German operatic bass. He was known for his wide repertory including Wagner and Mozart roles. Some of his most celebrated roles were Wagnerian villains such as Hunding and Hagen in Der Ring des Nibelungen, but others were noble characters like Sarastro in The Magic Flute or Gurnemanz in Parsifal or comic figures such as Osmin in Die Entführung aus dem Serail or Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor. He sang at the leading European opera houses in the 1950s and 1960s and recorded all his major roles.
Joan Carlyle was a Welsh operatic soprano singer. She was born in Upton on the Wirral, Cheshire. After auditioning for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London, she was put under contract by the musical director Rafael Kubelík and made her debut in 1955, appearing also under him in The Magic Flute in 1956 and as Ascagne in Les Troyens.
Lucia Popp was a Slovak operatic soprano. She began her career as a soubrette, and later moved into the light-lyric and lyric coloratura soprano repertoire and then the lighter Richard Strauss and Wagner operas. Her career included performances at Vienna State Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden, and La Scala. Popp was also a highly regarded recitalist and lieder singer.
Ljuba Welitsch was an operatic soprano. She was born in Borisovo, Bulgaria, studied in Sofia and Vienna, and sang in opera houses in Austria and Germany in the late 1930s and early and mid-1940s. In 1946 she became an Austrian citizen.
John Royds Culshaw, OBE was a pioneering English classical record producer for Decca Records. He produced a wide range of music, but is best known for masterminding the first studio recording of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, begun in 1958.
Wolfgang Windgassen was a German heldentenor internationally known for his performances in Wagner operas.
Sir Edward Roberts Lewis was an English businessman, best known for leading the Decca recording and technology group for five decades from 1929. He built the company up from nothing to one of the major record labels of the world.
Kenneth Ernest Wilkinson was an audio engineer for Decca Records, known for engineering classical recordings with superb sound quality.
This is a discography of The Merry Widow, an operetta by the Austro–Hungarian composer Franz Lehár. It was first performed at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna on 30 December 1905. The operetta has been recorded both live and in the studio many times, and several video recordings have been made. The first recording of a substantially complete version of the score was made in 1907 with Marie Ottmann and Gustav Matzner in the lead roles. The next full recording was issued in 1950, in English with Dorothy Kirsten and Robert Rounseville in the leading roles.
Victor Olof was an English musician, known first as a violinist and conductor and later as a record producer for Decca Records and subsequently for HMV Records.
The conductor Sir Georg Solti recorded throughout his career for the British Decca Record Company. During the 1950s and 1960s, Decca had an alliance with RCA Victor in the United States; some of Solti's Decca recordings were first issued on the RCA Victor label.
Britten's War Requiem (1963) is the first recording of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. It featured Galina Vishnevskaya, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Peter Pears with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Melos Ensemble, The Bach Choir and the Highgate School Choir, and was conducted by Britten himself. The recording took place in the Kingsway Hall in London and was produced by John Culshaw for Decca. Within five months of its release in May 1963 it sold 200,000 copies, an unheard-of number for a piece of contemporary classical music at that time.
Walter Kreppel was a German bass singer, known for his performances in operatic roles in Europe and the US. Starting his career in his native Nuremberg he progressed to membership of major opera companies, including the Bavarian State Opera and the Vienna State Opera. Among his roles on record, the best known is Fasolt in the first published recording of Das Rheingold (1958).
Between 1958 and 1965 the Decca record company made the first complete recording to be released of Richard Wagner's tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Of the four component operas, there had been two previous studio recordings of Die Walküre, and a monaural radio recording of Götterdämmerung, which was released on record in 1956, but Decca's was the first Ring cycle planned and recorded for the gramophone.
