Page 174 - Birgit Nilsson Book

THE GOLDEN RING REMEMBERED
Humphrey Burton
Decca was already well into its epoch-making project of recording the complete Ring cycle when I was placed in charge of music for BBC Television, with the brief to develop new types of programmes for its second network, BBC2, which opened in 1964. John Culshaw, already world-renowned as an imaginative record producer, came to see me with his right-hand man, a visionary engineer named Gordon Parry. Both were Wagner buffs (which at that time I was not) and they more or less demanded a documentary about their work on the Ring. It was impossible not to respond positively to their enthusiasm, but my suitably Wagnerian concept called for virtually total coverage — unheard of in those days. It took a great deal of diplomatic activity to persuade the singers, their advisers and the wary (and wily) Maurice Rosengarten, Decca’s Swiss director, that a television film would help rather than hinder subsequent sales of LP records. I assured Mr Rosengarten rather rashly that if Decca did not collaborate we would go ahead with a similar project involving another European recording company. My bluff was called and we found ourselves obliged to film some distinctly inferior sessions at the Rome Opera, thus providing expensive but effective proof that the BBC meant business.
Still a little apprehensive, the Vienna Philharmonic fell into line behind Decca. The BBC’s colleagues in ORF, the Austrian television service, enthusiastically agreed on collaboration under the leadership of Dr Wilfried Scheib, who did the interviews for the German language version of the programme. The Austrians provided the five-camera unit usually employed for sport relays and for eight straight days we witnessed the actual recording sessions in Decca’s studio, situated rather incongruously — given the grandeur of the music — in Vienna’s best-loved dance-hall complex, the Sofiensäle. The BBC flew out a sixteen millimetre film crew to cover the backstage stuff, the comings and goings of the singers and the banalities of everyday life in the Vienna streets. My associate producer was a fledgling director named John Drummond who later achieved renown as Artistic Director of the Edinburgh Festival and Control- ler of BBC’s Radio Three network. (Later, in the assembly stage, I was greatly assisted by another young director who subsequently enjoyed a notable career in music and film: Tony Palmer.)
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