Now things moved fast. At the Gewandhaus (which still stood next to the Reichsgericht in the “Musicians’ Quarter”), Mirag hired several rooms between the main auditorium and the chamber music hall and fitted them out as a broadcasting studio.

The live broadcast of the Gewandhaus Orchestra‘s New Year Concert on January 1, 1930 proved that the new Mirag outside broadcasting unit was fully functional. On that evening, for the first time, listeners sitting around radio sets all over central Germany heard the Gewandhaus Orchestra under its conductor Bruno Walter join Thomaskirche organist Günther Ramin at the Walcker organ of the New Gewandhaus in Reger‘s Organ Fantasia op. 40 no. 1, in a concert that also included Mozart‘s motet “Exultate, jubilate” K165 and Anton Bruckner‘s Fifth Symphony in B flat major.

In that same year, the Great Depression would drive innumerable German companies into bankruptcy and push unemployment figures towards the six-million mark, threatening the existence of even such large cultural institutions as the Gewandhaus and the Conservatory in Leipzig.

That made Mirag‘s plan for regular broadcasts with the Gewandhaus Orchestra all the more welcome. In July 1931, after protracted negotia- tions, the director of Mirag and the Theatre and Music Department of the City of Leipzig – the body responsible for the Gewandhaus Orchestra – finally signed a contract stipulating that Mirag was to “record live and include in its programme three Gewandhaus concerts per year for 10,000 Reichsmark”.

Recording smaller pieces of from three to four minutes‘ duration was no big problem, but long symphonies and operas presented almost insuper- able obstacles. Radio technicians feverishly sought solutions. How would machines have to function to enable smooth playback in broadcasts? Shellac discs and the recording waxes necessary for their production ran at 78 rpm, allowing at most four and a half minutes of playing time.

In order to eliminate interruptions, the recordings on the wax discs had to be made to coincide in some manner. The solution was to create an overlap area, meaning that the last 30 seconds of what would form one side of a disc also had to be recorded at the beginning of what would be the next side. That necessitated the simultaneous use of two disc cutters. The second machine was started shortly before the first ran out, so that both briefly recorded the same audio signal. The process was repeated until all the waxes required to record the work had been cut.

The broadcast playback of the recording was then effected with the aid of two turntables. The broad- casting technician had to start turntable “B” at the point when the stylus of turntable “A” reached the overlap area and then to judge the most favourable moment within the overlap area to switch over to turntable “B” – a laborious and quite risky procedure. And any overmodulation, clumsy handling or slight fault on one of the warmed wax discs during recording was enough to render the whole exercise useless. The overlap area – not present on commercial recordings – meant that it was not possible to replace one side of a disc by recording a new one. That would have interrupted the flow of the music and broken its continuity, which would have been untenable for a serious concert recording!

This complicated and precarious process would be common practice in radio studios and broadcasting companies for a whole decade until the late 1930s. It also presented archivists with a major problem. The recording of a symphony might take a dozen single-sided, very fragile shellac discs, a whole Wagner opera more than forty – representing an enormous weight (three discs with a diameter of 30 cm – the diameter of the usual long-playing record later – weigh about a kilo!). Each disc was produced in very limited numbers for broadcasting, so that the loss of just one disc often made the whole set unusable. This makes it easy to understand the huge losses to record archives caused by war damage.

Magnetic tape could reproduce sound far better than any shellac disc. At last it was possible to tackle complete recordings of large Romantic operas and extended concert works. What a quantum leap, both technically and artistically! But how were they to be produced? The station‘s own symphony orchestra and radio choir had been disbanded long ago!

Now it was time for the Staatskapelle of Dresden and the Gewandhaus Orchestra to step into the breach! One recording session after another was held in 1944 and 1945. The musicians will surely have altogether welcomed becoming a “radio or- chestra”, though the idea was still a little bizarre for them.
The new function was necessary for their survival – especially in the case of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, for it enabled Abendroth to prevent his musicians from being sent to the front. They literally played for their lives! Especially since the New Gewandhaus, their traditional performing venue, lay in ruins …

Haus Drei Linden in Lindenau and the Capitol Cinema on Petersstrasse in the inner city had served as temporary venues for the Gewandhaus orchestra up to the time when concert activity was officially discontinued at the end of September 1944 in the pursuit of “Total War”. Those provisional concert venues were however unsuitable for radio recordings. The former studio of the Radio Symphony Orchestra in the Alte Handelsbörse would probably have been chosen for the purpose, had not that small building on the Naschmarkt burnt out in the same night of heavy bombing as the New Theatre on Augustusplatz.

Only from the production plans of the Reichsrundfunk do we learn that the microphones for the recordings of the Gewandhaus Orchestra were set up at the Concordia Halls in the Leipzig suburb of Gohlis. There, in a ballroom that was much too cramped for the Gewandhaus Orchestra and unheated because of the coal shortage, the musicians sat on creaking chairs, some of them playing borrowed instruments.
Microphone cables led to an outside broadcasting unit in the street, where tape machines recorded what was being played in the hall.
The recordings were broadcast on Fridays between 17.15 and 18.30 p.m. by Deutschlandsender Berlin – in a programme created specially for the Gewandhaus Orchestra and ominously entitled “Music for the twilight hour”.

The Cello Concerto by d‘Albert, re-released on this CD, and the Moorish Rhapsody by Humperdinck were both featured on that evening programme, transmitted to people sitting behind blackout curtains – provided the broadcast was not interrupted or cancelled by the announcement of “Enemy bombers approaching!”.

All that we have from that dark time are the tapes that have lain in archives for decades.
What was going on in the hearts and minds of the Gewandhaus musicians whilst recording the melancholy Humperdinck work on March 12, 1945 is something that none of us born later can even begin to imagine …