How Alban Berg, With the Complicity of Alma Mahler and a Trusted Friend in Greenwich Village, Made the Journey from Vienna to Buenos Aires.

The names printed on the sleeve send me back to a townhouse in Greenwich Village on New Year’s Eve, 1979. I was twenty. My father had taken me along to visit Peter Fritsch, who ran Lyrichord Discs — the small classical and world-music label he had founded in 1950. Peter was Austrian, born somewhere outside Vienna, displaced to America in the 1930s. He had worked at Musicraft Records before starting Lyrichord. By 1979, the label had been running for nearly thirty years, quietly, the way the best small labels run.

Discos Qualiton. Colección Privada. CP-002: Alban Berg.

At some point that New Year's Eve, Theresa brought out a small spoon, a candle, a piece of lead, and a metal bucket of cold water.

That was my first Bleigießen experience. I understood only that this was something the Fritsches did on New Year's Eve. The lead went into the spoon. The candle was lit. The spoon was held over the flame. The lead softened, then ran. Theresa tilted the spoon over the bucket, and the molten metal dropped into the cold water with a hiss. She fished out the cooled shape with a slotted spoon and held it up to the candle.

This is the part of the ritual that mattered, of course. The pour was just the pour. What followed was reading. A heart meant love in the coming year. A ship meant travel. A key meant a door. A bird meant a letter. There was an entire small folk-vocabulary of shapes, and Peter and Theresa and my father stood there interpreting with the seriousness that men of a certain age bring to small rituals because they have understood, by then, that the small rituals matter.

Bleigießen

The European Union banned Bleigießen in 2018 because of the lead or because they love regulating everything. By then Peter and Theresa had been gone for some years and the question was moot in their kitchen, but the ban was a small cultural detail with larger implications: it meant that the ritual, having survived two world wars, the partition of half the continent, the diasporas that scattered Vienna across three other cities, and the long quiet erosion of family customs by television had finally been pushed out of European life by regulations. It took a directive on heavy metals to finish what history had not.

But in 1979, it was alive in a Greenwich Village townhouse, and the people performing it were two record producers whose entire working lives had been an act of Bleigießen in a different medium. You took something molten — a recording session, a live performance, a master tape from another country — and you poured it into the cold water of a pressing plant, and what came out was a frozen shape that would later be lifted up and read. A symphony. A field recording from the Ituri rainforest. A Berg chamber concerto recorded in Vienna in 1954. The labels were each in the business of fixing brief, unrepeatable events into objects that could be held in a hand and interpreted long after.

It is not an accident, I think, that two men whose work was that gesture should have wanted to do it once a year with their hands, in front of their wives and their friends and their sons.

Hans Bernstein

The recording my father pressed in 1970 was made on March 30th, 1954, in the Mittlerer Konzerthaussaal in Vienna. Ivry Gitlis on the violin, Charlotte Zelka on the piano, the wind instruments of the Pro Musica Symphony Orchestra of Vienna, and a conductor whose name on the sleeve reads Harold Byrns.

Ivry Gitlis at 95. Photo by Ben Bonouvrier

Byrns was born Hans Bernstein in Hannover in 1903. He fled Germany in 1933 and arrived in the United States in 1936, where he changed his name from Bernstein to Byrns because he believed an American conducting career would be impossible under a Jewish surname. Leonard Bernstein, then a teenager in Boston, would prove him wrong within a decade.

My mother was a Bernstein, too. She would have been tickled by the joke buried inside Byrns’s name — that's what he had had to hide, my family carried in plain sight.

In Los Angeles, Byrn founded the Los Angeles Chamber Symphony in 1949. He worked uncredited as a Hollywood orchestrator on Portrait of Jennie, Above and Beyond, and The Wild North. In Los Angeles, he became a close friend of Alma Mahler. When Deryck Cooke prepared the first performing version of Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony, Alma at first refused even to listen to the studio tape; she felt it was a private love letter from Gustav to her and that she had no obligation to share it with the world. Byrns persuaded her to listen. She listened, and then she gave her approval, and the modern Mahler reception turned a corner.

In October 1954, six months after the Berg recording, Byrns conducted the first public performance of Korngold's Symphony in F-sharp on Austrian radio.

This is the man on the podium of the Berg recording. By 1954, he was working in Vienna again, recording the most famously ciphered work in the Second Viennese repertoire — the Kammerkonzert, whose opening theme spells, in German musical notation, the names of the three friends who made the school: A-r-n-o-l-D S-C-H-ö-n-B-E-r-G, A-n-t-o-n W-E-B-E-r-n, A-l-B-A-n B-E-r-G. A coded act of friendship, performed twenty years after the friendships themselves had been broken by war, exile, and death.

Alban Berg

That recording made its way to New York. Peter Fritsch licensed it for Lyrichord. He, who had also crossed the same map a decade earlier, put the recording into his catalogue alongside ragas, motets, Korean court music, and Renaissance lute songs — Fritsch's taste was governed by the certainty that what would otherwise vanish was worth pressing into vinyl.

In 1970, my father asked for the license to the Berg recording for Argentina. They had met the year before in New York. This Berg recording was, in all likelihood, the first exchange of licensed recordings between Lyrichord of New York and Qualiton of Buenos Aires. The recording was then pressed and distributed to a select number of subscribers of Discos Qualiton.

Nine years later, I was sitting at the table in Peter’s Greenwich Village kitchen on New Year’s Eve, watching the lead drop into the bucket.

Part of the exchange between Lyrichord and Qualiton

Needless to say, I did not know most of these historical details back then. And what I am doing today, looking at this sleeve at midnight in Charlottesville, is what they did, lifting the cooled shape up to the candle and reading it.

The lead cools quickly in the cold water. The shape it takes is the shape of the year you are about to enter. You hold it up to the candle, and you decide what it means. A heart for love. A ship for travel. A key for a door.

A vinyl, in the right hands, for everything that survives when the people who poured it are gone.

Colección Privada / Private Stock

A total of five titles were released by Fonema S.A. under Colección Privada (Private Stock). The concept was a subscription model limited to a fixed number of members, initially set at 500 in a deliberate echo of the Fortune 500. The idea of exclusivity was already in the air in Argentina at the time, propelled in part by membership programs from credit cards like Diners Club and American Express. The logo featured a key and the number 500 — a visual reminder of the privacy reserved for its members. At launch, Colección Privada announced a new release every month.