The Quest for the Holy Grail: the mysteries of Roland Douatte’s recordings of The Four Seasons and the rest of Vivaldi’s opus 8

The Quest for the Holy Grail: the mysteries of Roland Douatte’s recordings of The Four Seasons and the rest of Vivaldi’s opus 8

That Roland Douatte’s recording of The Four Seasons was released on Concerteum CCX 278 is undisputable – it is the copy held at Bibliothèque Nationale de France (which dates it 1956 – link will open new tab to BNF’s listing), the one documented on Discogs.com, and occasionally sold online. The recording was subsequently reissued on various budget labels, Symphonium 3108, Guilde Européenne du Microsillon GEM 8…

 

It was reissued for US distribution on the label Period, Showcase collection, SHO 309, at the end of 1957 (see the excellent entry on Discogs.com), and reviewed in High Fidelity of March 1958 (The Billboard of December 30, 1957 and HiFi & Music Reviews of February 1958 review it as “SPL-309”).

   

Competing against the first stereo versions that came out at the end of the 1950s, and despite the favorable reviews and although reissued in the early 1960s in fake stereo (Sho ST 309), it didn’t stand much of a chance.

Where things get more complicated for the chronology is that the third supplement of WERM (World’s Encyclopedia of Recorded Music), documenting the releases from January 1953 to December 1955 (with a maximum of March 1956 for British releases), lists Douatte’s recording as follows:

So we have not only mentions of numerous other editions of Douatte’s Four Seasons (on LQS 102 – which would be the Label Les Quatre Saisons -, on [Concerteum] CCX 227P, CCX 227 and CCX 278, the latter supposedly with “spoken narration”), but also an indication that Douatte recorded the rest of the opus 8 concertos, published on what seems to be a double LP from Les Quatre Saisons, LQS 103/104.

Douatte’s Seasons on Concerteum CCX-227 (without WERM’s “P”, but with the hyphen) is also mentioned in the French magazine Disques, No. 78 (March-April 1956), but only in passing, in a listing of “earlier recordings” from a review of the newly published versions of I Musici, I Virtuosi di Roma, Reinhardt and Witold. Of these earlier recordings (Münchinger 1951 and Molinari 1942), only the Douatte had not been reviewed in the magazine. It may have been that it had just been published and not yet been sent to and reviewed by the magazine:

But jump to the next batch of Four Seasons reviewed by Disques, in No. 87 of March 1957 (Giulini, Amaducci and Cantelli), Douatte is still listed in the earlier versions – but still unreviewed, and now announced as deleted (“sup.”):

To add to the mystery, famed Vivaldi musicologist Marc Pincherle (the author of the Vivaldi Pincherle catalog that was in use before Peter Ryom’s and his RV numbering), in his 1955 Vivaldi biography, includes a discography by Vivaldi discographer Pietro Berri, and therein, a complete opus 8 by Douatte is referenced as (3 x 30) [Concerteum] CCX 102/104. Note the similarity with WERM 3’s [Les Quatre Saisons] LQS 102 and 103/104. On the other hand Pincherle / Berri do not mention any of the references from WERM 3, neither for the individual Four Seasons (even the attested CCX 278, or Disques’ CCX 227), nor the purported LQS 102/104.

Yet all these references seem extremely dubious to me. In a large part this is because, other than those mentions in various catalogs and discographies, I cannot find a single trace that would confirm that those editions actually existed: no mentions in online library catalogs, no photos online, no sales on eBay or elsewhere. But there are other reasons as well.

Take Werm’s [Concerteum] CCX 227P or CCX 227 (also on Disques). Concerteum – a “French label specializing in releasing foreign records in France” (Discogs.com) – followed a rising numerical sequence, with only the alphabetical prefixes changing to indicate the recording’s origin: those originating from the label Period bore the prefix CPR, Remington had CR as a prefix for 12 inch records and TCR for 10 inch discs; Vox was CVX, Polymusic was CPL, CS was from the label Stradivari and CLL from Lyrichord, and there were more (the great Concerteum online discography on Soundfountain mistakenly attributes to Vox the prefix of Polymusic). CCX appears to have been one of the prefixes for the label’s French productions (Soundfoutain’s discography omits those entirely).

227 had a CR prefix (Remington, then) and was Chopin’s Waltzes by Edward Kilenyi (see entry on Discogs.com). Given the logic of their numbering system, I have to wonder why Concerteum would have re-used the 227 label number with another prefix… The fact that this purported Vivaldi Four Seasons by Douatte CCX 227 doesn’t seem to appear anywhere online, only compounds the doubt.

So, when it comes to Douatte’s Seasons, WERM 3 doesn’t seem a reliable source. In all editions of WERM, the original encyclopedia and its three supplements, the editors complain in the prefaces of the difficulty to gather the information about many records, and to obtain from the un-cooperative “makers” (labels) the information let alone the actual discs, the forced reliance upon label and record catalogs, ads in music magazines, information provided by correspondents in various countries that they couldn’t really double-check. They are very clear that some of their listings may be false: “We may therefore have listed records as existing when they do not, or omitted records which do”…

I had many private exchanges about these issues with the authoritative Vivaldi discographer Roger-Claude Travers. In the first version of his discography of the mono era, published in 2016 (“Le Temps du Monaural : 1948-1959. Premier Âge d’Or Méconnu du Disque Vivaldien”, in Fulgeat sol frontis decorae. Studi in onore di Michael Talbot (“Saggi vivaldiani”, 1), Venice, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 2016, p. 236, available online), he carried over the WERM 3 label numberings and the one from Pincherle / Berri re: the complete opus 8 on Concerteum CCX 102/104. But since then, Travers has corrected some of his mentions.

Now he recognizes that the Concerteum CCX 227P or CCX 227 references found in WERM 3 and Disques are false, a mistake that he traces back to the General Catalog of Disques: in their edition from June 1955, they correctly list Douatte’s version as “(30) Cum. CCX-278”… but in the catalog from September of the same year, through what we suppose was a typing error, that reference has turned into the infamous CCX-227:

Travers conjectures that it was through the mistyping of another Vivaldi disc by Douatte, CCX 277 (note that it is adjacent to the Seasons’ CCX 278; the disc is documented on Discogs.com), turned into 227 (plausible) and through some unfathomable process attributed to The Four Seasons (less plausible). Whatever the truth may be, it is likely that it is from those Disques catalogs that WERM 3 drew their own references: the dates coincide, as WERM 3 lists the releases from January 1953 to December 1955. But at least those mentions in the Disques catalogs enable me – if I make the bold assumption that the listing manifested an actual release – to date the publication of Douatte’s version from June 1955 at the latest, rather than the “early 1956” that its first mention in the magazine Disques No. 78 (see above) suggested.

As regards the other references in WERM 3 to the label Les Quatre Saisons with The Four Seasons (LQS 102) and the rest of opus 8 (LQS 103/104) and the one in Pincherle / Berri about a complete opus 8 on Concerteum CCX 102/104, I sowed doubt in Travers’ mind. In quest of the Holy Grail, he had stuck to the belief that this complete op. 8 existed, both on Les Quatre Saisons (which he treated as three separate discs rather than WERM’s single for the Seasons and double for the rest of opus 8) and on Concerteum CCX 102/104. He even considered that LQS was an earlier edition of Concerteum, and consequently dated Douatte’s Four Seasons and complete op. 8 from 1953. Part of his conjectures were based on the notion that Berri/Pincherle had gathered their own information from WERM. That may be true for Berri’s previous Vivaldi discography, dating from 1953 and obviously tapping into the information from the original WERM (published in 1953); but it couldn’t have been the case with his discography for Pincherle, as Pincherle’s book was published in 1955, and the 3^rd supplement of WERM, although listing the new releases from January ’53 to December ’55, came out only in 1957. Plus, Berri is credited in the Preface of WERM 3 has one of the contributors. So it is more likely that WERM 3 included info provided by Berri, rather than the other way around.

Another argument of Travers was that there is an attested opus 8 No. 5 by Douatte, and he hypothesized (or hoped…) that it was an excerpt from the mysterious complete opus 8. But the only existence of that opus 8-5 that I found, as documented on Internet Archive, on Gallica, the online website of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and on the online catalog of Bibliothèque Nationale de France, was a later issue, from 1958. It was indeed on a label called “les 4 saisons” (published, says the BNF listing, by Nouvelles Editions Publicitaires, Paris, a publisher that seems to have been active from 1956 to 1958), CDD 103. That label and its numbering irresistibly take you back to WERM’s LQS 103 (which purportedly contained opus 8 Nos. 5, 6, 11 and 12)… but this is a 10-inch paired with works of Corelli and Albinoni. Still, Travers treated that recording of Vivaldi as an excerpt from a previous complete opus 8.

Now, he’s not so sure any more, and we are thinking that all those listings in WERM 3 and Pincherle’s book may have been projects that never materialized, but were still communicated in advance (by Berri?) to the WERM editors.

Bottom line for me: with the information I have, I would say Douatte published only The Four Seasons, on Concerteum CCX 278, without narration, at the latest in June 1955 (which allows me to slot his recording, chronologically, between Zazofsky-Zimbler Sinfonietta and Barchet-Reinhardt on Vox). And I would say that the 1958 publication of opus 8-5 on les 4 saisons CDD 103 is an entirely independent recording and that’s it, no Grail, no complete opus 8 by Douatte.

And yet… I find myself doubting my own doubts. I was more than skeptical about the notion, peddled by WERM 3, that the edition of Douatte’s Concerteum CCX 278 came with “spoken narration”. It certainly would have been a great concept and I would love for that edition to have existed, but, as I said above, CCX 278 is attested and documented, copies are sold online, it is the version held at Bibliothèque Nationale de France and made available as digital download by them – and there is no indication of spoken narration nor identification of a narrator.

However, searching online information about Douatte, I chanced on an article published in The Gramophone of November 1954 : not an actual review, which may be why Travers missed it, but an editorial article by Igor B. Maslowski, “Letter from France”, surveying the recent releases in France:

So this seems to be the source of WERM 3’s indication. How WERM came to associate that versions “with spoken narration” to the label number CCX 278, I don’t know (no label number is mentioned in the article). It also implies that this edition was published at the end of 1954, rather than in the middle of 1955 as the Disques catalog suggested. One could easily dismiss The Gramophone’s description as pure invention (it would be neither the first nor the last time that a critic would review a production without having listened or read or seen it), but the way the author characterizes Douatte’s interpretation – “lively”, “very different from Münchinger’s” suggests that he actually listened to the actual performance.

I’ve tried to follow the lead of the author of that letter from France: Igor B. Maslowski (1914-1999). His Wikipedia entry (in French) indicates that he was born in Russia and established in France, and was married to harpsichordist Blandine Verlet. I also found out that in 1954 he created a music magazine, “microsillon et haute-fidélité”, which was short-lived (ten issues). I was lucky to find a cheap offer of No.2 from December 1954, hoping to find a review of Douatte’s Four Seasons and some clarification about the “narration” claim. No luck, although it came close : the magazine (another reviewer than Maslowski) reviewed the companion Concerteum release CCX 277 that I’ve already mentioned, Douatte again conducting Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Trumpets with Roger Delmotte and the young Maurice André and more (the LP is well-documented on Discogs.com). But one thing makes the mystery still thicker: the review didn’t indicate the disc’s label number, just “Concerteum CCX, 30 cm”, as if the record had been reviewed from a test-pressing and before being marketed; very likely, in view of the fact that, in the magazine’s roster of critics, there was… Roland Douatte. There is, however, on the next page, an advertisement for the record. And there, it is attributed the apparently ubiquitous label number… CCX 227 – you know, the same one that was later mistakenly attributed to Douatte’s Seasons. Nonetheless, Both WERM 3 and the Disques catalogs of June and September 1955 have it right, listing the disc as CCX 277. I’m not sure what to make out of this.

Incidentally, I realized that Douatte was also a provider of information to WERM 3. By 1955 three different labels offered his recording of the String Concerto “Alla Rustica” and WERM notes that “M. Douatte informs us these are all different recordings”. The information opens an abyss of conjectures: if Douatte could inform them of that, is he also the source for all the other information about his Vivaldi recordings, the complete opus 8, the LQS label, the narrator? If so, is he lying? Was he announcing, as completed, projects that ultimately never came into existence?

The memory of the anecdotes of everyday interactions in the sprouting LP industry in mid-1950s Paris that may account for those quirks and enigmas is irretrievably lost. Doing my online research I chanced (on the website of Qobuz.com) on an autobiographical sketch written by Michel Bernstein (1931-2006, link to Wikipedia), the famous founder of the “deluxe” labels Valois, Astrée and Arcana. Bernstein recalls how, when he founded his first label, Vendôme, at the end of 1954, he went to Maslowski at microsillon et haute fidélité to submit his three first releases – Bach by Cochereau, Bach on the harpsichord by Christopher Wood, and Songs of Debussy by Flore Wend. And sure enough, there’s the ad for Vendôme in my December ’54 issue, as well as eight mentions of Concerteum productions (either in the form of reviews, or ads, all of US origin except for Douatte’s recording). As Bernstein reminisces, these were the times when you just walked in the offices of the record magazines with your freshly printed discs under the arm. I’ve checked in the competing magazine Disques for those Concerteum releases: and while most of them are indeed listed in the Disques catalogs, none, not one, were actually reviewed. I conjecture (or phantasize…) that there were some petty rivalries between the teams of microsillon et haute fidelité / Concerteum (Douatte), and those of Disques. Would that account for the false label numberings and outlandish claims? I don’t know…

So far my research for more information in microsillon et haute-fidélité has been unfruitful, and I need to consult copies of Nos. 1 and 3 to see if Douatte’s Seasons are reviewed or mentioned. But, going back to Maslowski’s Letter from France, I’m still totally fazed that he should mention a narration (narrating what? Presumably, Vivaldi’s sonnets and stage indications… but who is the narrator? What language?). Since, apparently, Douatte was his buddy (or at least his fellow reviewer in the magazine), did Douatte dictate the note in The Gramophone on The Four Seasons that Maslowski hadn’t even listened to (and sure, Douatte would know that his own recording was very different from Münchinger’s, and more lively) and did Douatte, through his mouthpiece Maslowski, announce a version with narrator that may have been then a project but never materialized? I would be inclined to believe so and maintain my skepticism about the existence of that chimerical version with narrator. And yet…

…as I indicate in my review, there are editing quirks in the digital download version made available by Bibliothèque Nationale de France, that first made me wonder if they derived from side-breaks of what would have originally been an edition on 78s, but on second thought suggest indeed that a spoken narration could have been excised to make way for a “normal”, purely instrumental Seasons. At this point, for me, the mystery of the version with spoken narration remains.

But, if what appeared at first as the totally outlandish claim of WERM 3 that a version with spoken narration was published, turns out to be true, then who am I to doubt that Douatte recorded the complete opus 8 and that it was first published on LQS 102/104 and then (or simultaneously) on Concerteum CCX 102/104? The quest for the Holy Grail continues. I just hope it doesn’t last as long as the waiting for the resurrection of Jesus.

Back to the review.