Fred Gaisberg (born January 1, 1873; died September 2, 1951). It is with deep regret that we have to announce the death of Fred Gaisberg who has been a trusted friend of Gramophone since its inception. We are pleased to publish the following appreciations. 

The death of Fred Gaisberg is so recent that it has left me completely bewildered at the loss of one I had come to regard as my best friend, for Fred had proved his friendship in so many ways. 

I think it would have been in 1928 that I first met him, when I was commissioned by Gramophone to interview him as the second of my series, 'Round the Recording Studios'. The photograph accompanying that article might well have been called 'the long and short of it', for we see him in his familiar bowler hat, modestly beaming as he faces the camera, with Chaliapin's huge hand on his shoulder. Though small of stature Fred was always impressive, without the necessity to push himself forward, a trait so common among little but lesser men. I shall always regard Fred Gaisberg as the perfect blend of simplicity and shrewdness. One had only to hear his views on world politics, of which he was a voracious student, or see him quietly at work in the Abbey Road Studios, to realise that he always knew his subject and was an expert at his job. 

It must have been two years later when I met him again, this time at Covent Garden, where I was in charge of publicity during the lnternational Season when Gigli, a close friend of his, made such a successful debut. And in the singer, as in my friend, I found, a man quietly conclous of his powers but utterly without conceit of any kind.

Gaisberg and Gigli had one characteristic in common, a sympathy with, and understanding of, one might say, the chorus, in which I include the rank and file of employees in a great business like HMV and also the waiter or waitress in a public restaurant. I was once lunching with Fred in wartime when the staff were working at high pressure, and one of the waitresses was being bullied by the manageress. That was enough. To hear Fred, as we would say in Ireland, 'walk into the affections' of that manageress, in modern parlance 'to tell her off', was as good as a play.

Though an American citizen to the day of his death, Gaisberg had his roots firmly planted in British soil, and he liked nothing better than being on terms of intimate friendship with that 100 per cent Englishman, Sir Edward Elgar, for whose work he had a wholehearted admiration. I wrote of his consideration for others. Here are two or three instances. During the recent World War, I had occasion to bring in a British operatic soprano from the Carl Rosa Company for an audition. The poor girl had previously been treated with scant courtesy by the BBC on just such an occasion. Not so with Fred Gaisberg at Abbey Road. Nothing could have exceeded his kindness and gentleness in introducing her to the microphone and getting her on almost familiar terms with that formidable instrument. 

Over in this village of King's Langley, where I am writing these lines against time, he was with us for the best part of a year, when his house in Hampstead was blitzed. Here again the innate friendliness of the man came out. Busy with his writing and advisory duties, he yet found time to give a typical gramophone lecture to our musical people at the vicarage, where our padre, the Rev Rex Parkin, a great nephew of Lily Langtry and founder of the famous Drama Christi Players, had given our Music Circle leave to use his church for our Saturday concerts. Mrs Parkin still treasures some drops of a costly perfume that remain from a Christmas present he gave her. Into our microcosm, Fred Gaisberg, a world-traveller – an internationalist but no cosmopolitan, fitted like a glove. He was always a grand 'mixer' and therefore ideal for the positions he filled with HMV so long, so honourably and with such distinction. I think I was one of the last of Fred's friends to see him alive, and one of my last and liveliest recollections of him was out in his garden when he was instructing the Italian maid which suckers to snip off his standard roses. As an improving amateur gardener, I am quite sure that with this occupation, he was not nearly so much at home as he was in one of his recording studios, and warned him to consult an expert before proceeding too far with his 'deletions'. 

And now he is gone and the world is poorer for his passing. His funeral service at Golder's Green Crematorium was quite in keeping with the character of the man, simple, beautiful and impressive. 

Perceval Graves

I worked closely with Fred Gaisberg for a number of years, and I shall always think of it as a particularly fortunate experience. 

I met him first in 1921, when, as a very young man I began to bombard the Gramophone Company with suggestions for improving their then very limited repertoire. Although the suggestions were not always couched in diplomatic language Fred always was sympathetic and in our many discussions never showed the slightest impatience. By the time electrical recording was introduced I had joined HMV myself, and in 1928 I took on the dual post of understudying Fred and the responsibility of putting HMV's international recording repertoire on a fully planned basis. 

Until that time HMV's 'international' recorded repertoire had been run, mainly by Fred himself, on an ad hoc basis. With the rapid growth of the market and the greatly increased interest in large-scale works, it became necessary for the repertoire to be planned out as a long term programme. 

In dealing with artists Fred could have given most professional diplomats a lesson, particularly those of the modern school. I will not say that he was always a miracle of tact; he could be as bluntly outspoken as anyone I have met, but on his day he dealt with the most difficult of artists in a way that suggested sheer hypnotism. To the onlooker there never was any question as to who was going to prevail. It was not so much what he said, for he never wasted much time beating about the bush, as the conviction with which he said it. Yet for all his directness I never knew him to hurt anyone's feelings wittingly, let alone make an enemy. 

I think he was really to be seen at his best in dealing with someone such as Chaliapin. Fred was not very tall and Chaliapin, who must have been six foot three or thereabouts, used to tower over him. But even when Chaliapin was not singing well and knew it, and when the studio personnel crept about like mutes, Fred, had only to come into the room and the storms would subside. There was, of course, a lighter side to Fred Gaisberg. He had a dry, sly humour that crept into many things he did. Working with him could never have been called dull. There was, for instance, his famous 'self-answering' file, into which he put all (or a good many of) the really tiresome, difficult letters. When, weeks or even months later, we found them again, the crisis would invariably have solved itself. 

About the first thing he would do when he came into the office in the morning was to take out of his pockets a mass of old pieces of paper, envelopes, bills, programmes and letters, on all of which he had scribbled notes in a characteristically spidery hand either the evening before or on his way down to Hayes in the train that morning. I think a great deal of the wide knowledge of music he had gathered was the product of years of note-making in this way at all hours of the day and night. Let there be no doubt about it, without Fred's restless enthusiasm the repertoire of the gramophone would have been infinitely poorer today. Fred never stopped thinking about his work, and I feel the inscription he wrote on the fly leaf of my copy of his book Music on Record sums up perfectly his whole attitude: 'What fun we used to have...' 

Bernard Wratten

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