The most interesting recent development in the hitherto torpid world of American classical recording has been the flood of reissues from the fabled RCA Victor Red Seal backlist. RCA Victor, known as just plain Victor when it was started ninety years ago in Camden, New Jersey, was a pioneer in classical-music recording on 778 RPM shellac discs. Its first star was tenor Enrico Caruso, who made his first recordings for the old Victor company in 1904. In a sense, Caruso made Victor, but he was by no means the only great artist to grace its catologue.

Victor recorded most if not all of the figures of the golden age of singing before 1925. When the future electronics giant RCA took over Victor in the late 1920s, the parent company continued to record the greatest artists–singers, conductors, and instrumentalists alike–on the American scene. Thus it is to the RCA Victor Red Seal list that we owe the great recordings of pianists Sergei Rachmaninov and Vladimir Horowitz, violinist Jascha Heifetz, conductors Leopold Stokowski, Serge Koussevistky, Arturo Toscanini, and Pierre Monteux, and the Boston and Philadelphia orchestras in their greatest days. And along with these immortal figures, Victor recorded a plethora of other great artists not quite so famous but equally distinguished.

When the LP record came along around 1950, RCA Victor quickly made many of the treasures from its backlist available in the new format. These records were eagerly seized upon by music lovers, but as the years passed, however, the corpoation clearly lost interest in its indispensable task of rendering homage to an era of remarkable musical performances. Such transfers as RCA did make were mostly of poor technical quality and limited public availability.

Now this sorry state of affairs has been changed by the sale of the RCA Victor backlist and name to the Bertelsmann Music Group, a giant German recording combine. Whatever the implications for new original recordings of this sale of an American recording company to foreign interests might be–in this context must also be mentioned the sale of CBS Records to Sony, the Japanese mega-giant–the effect of the new ownership on the availability of the RCA Victor backlist has been massive and beneficial, and for this music lovers can only be grateful.

Of particular interest among the RCA/Bertelsmann rereleases are newly available Toscanini performances, all in excellent sound. Here, on CDs, are not only the familiar Toscanini standbys of Beethoven and Brahms symphonies, but also of the Beethoven Concerto with Heifetz and the Beethoven Third Piano Concerto with Arthur Rubinstein. Even more interesting is a smashing filmed version–in excellent suodn and picture quality, and available both on LaserDisc and VHS videocassette–of Toscanini’s mythic 1949 broadcast (and telecast!) of Verdi’s Aida.

One should not think that the RCA/Bertelsmann rerelases are restricted to Toscanini, important as his performances undoubtedly are. Now too we have available (among many others CDs), marvelous versions of the American recordings of the now little-discussed tenor Tito Schipa, the extraordinary Rubinstein-Heifetz-Piatigorsky performances of the Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky piano trios, and the important 1947 Rubinstein performance of the Karol Szymanowki Symphonie Concertante (1932), also known as the Piano Concerto No. 4.

One nagging question remains. Why has the German Bertelsmann firm chosen to do so brilliantly what the American RCA so clearly scorned? Can it be that Bertelsmann has found a way to make money out of these musical treasuers, a way known in the past to RCA but forgotten recently? it seems hard to believe that Germans would have any special answers, answers now denied to Americans, about how to make money. Instead, a quite different kind of answer must be suggested to this question: it is highly likely that the Bertelsmann Music Group, for all its natural corporate desire to turn a profit, might be motivated by a recognition of the cultural value of just what is contained in the RCA backlist. There can be little doubt that such recognition was not present in the RCA boardroom: if this supposition indeed be true, it would go far to suggest that RCA, like so many other private and public institutions in American life today, was quite content to participate in the trashing of American and world civilization, a trashing that we see taking place all around us. At least we should be thankful that we have now been saved, in the area of these wonderful old performances, by these welcome foreigners from across the ocean.