The Earliest Violin Recordings

In the acoustic era, recording the violin was always a challenge. Even as the technology improved, the results didn’t always work out the best. In the 1890s, very few recordings of the violin were commercially available, and its difficulty to reproduce caused this. It was often stated that Fred Hager’s first batch of violin recordings in 1898 were the first to be successfully reproduced and put on the market. The story of these and other early attempts at recording the instrument are fascinating.

If you go back to the very beginning of commercial recordings, around 1889, the violin wasn’t a high priority in terms of solo experimentation. Back in 1889, Edison and North American were recording some duets of violin and piano. The violinists were George Schweinfest and A.T. Van Winkle (one of the musicians in Edward Issler’s orchestra). These records have yet to surface. Despite that, they would in fact be the first commercial violin recordings. We have yet to know how successful they were.

It was also around the time these were recorded, that Schweinfest and Issler recorded piano duets. There certainly were some experimental recordings that date between the Issler records and the end of the decade. There likely are some violin parts on orchestras recordings from the time that are just too difficult to hear clearly. Other than these, we don’t hear much of the violin until 1898.

It was in that year that a young bandmaster named Fred Hager somehow got into the recording studio of Harms, Kaiser, and Hagen. It is not known how he got familiar with the phonograph, but he made his first records in the spring of 1898. Once he made these violin solos, they turned out so good that Harms, Kaiser, and Hagen decided to not only sell them commercially, but took them to a large exposition to exhibit their quality.

Toward the end of 1898, an exposition happened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This event was of course funded by the Carnegie family. It was basically a smaller version of the world’s fair. It was here where Harms, Kaiser, and Hagen decided to get involved in a contest that was being held there. There was a contest looking for the best quality violin record, and much of the event was documented in The Phonoscope. There survives a small write up in Hager’s own scrapbook that also documented this event:

Harms Kaiser and Hagen introduced Mr. Frederick W. Hager to the phonograph public in the summer of 1898. Up to that time a violin record was considered an impossibility. They, however, got him interested in the same and after considerable experimenting succeeded in placing on the market a perfect violin record. The demand for the same was so large that other companies immediately followed…When the Pittsburgh exposition was in progress all phonograph makers were invited to compete for a medal which was to be awarded to the one sending in the best violin solo that could be produced on wax. This was won by Mr. Hager’s record, made at Harms Kaiser and Hagen’s laboratory, and the name of the selection the judges awarded the prize to was “Traumerei” by Schumann.

The article in The Phonoscope took up an entire page, and had a nearly full length portrait of Hager to accompany. The above section was a nice condensed account in Hager’s scrapbook. After these experiments, as the above section states, demand for violin records finally had begun. From here Hager was now officially a recording star. He always claimed that his were the first commercial violin recordings ever. While yes there is some truth to this, there had been some made before his. By 1898, it was clearly known that recording the instrument was difficult to say the least. These launched Hager’s nearly 50-year-long career in recording. He was so proud of these recordings that he kept pieces from catalogs in his scrapbook for over half a century. One of these pages includes a detailed description of their quality(which he likely wrote himself), one of them reads thus:

9050–Scene de Ballet. A marvelous and excellent record of this popular violin selection. Every note is clear and sweet…

Hager also made sure to include this rather bold statement:

After months of experimenting, we were able to give the public a violin record, that has never been equaled. Of these records, the tone and quality is very fine and especially free from blast, which, heretofore, made all violin records undesirable.

That is quite a bold and rather pompous statement from Hager, but isn’t that surprising.

Despite the positivity that surrounded these records, recording the violin didn’t get any easier. By 1902, this is when the Stroh violin was finally introduced, and this certainly made this process a lot easier. Many legitimate violinists however thought it was beneath them to use such a strange device for their recordings. Musicians like Fritz Kreisler didn’t prefer to use it. By the middle 1900s however, it seemed essential to use a Stroh for recordings of any kind. If you listen carefully to orchestra recordings at that time, you can certainly hear a difference in the clarity and volume of violin parts, compared to those that Hager made around 1898 to 1900. Some of his occasional later violin solos were certainly made on a Stroh, but that didn’t make the quality of them much better. His playing style is an acquired taste, certainly not for everyone, but at the time he made them his style of playing was common.

Thankfully, violinists like Charles D’Almaine had a much more pleasant style to listen to. He was also overall a better violinist. It seemed like a breeze recording the violin from there, but once electric recording came in, that presented other issues. The thing that had always been so frustrating about reproducing the violin’s sound was the delicacy of the instrument. Even though electric recording could catch its nuances better than a horn, the variation in volume and technique still had to be perfected until the 1930s.