Teldec (Telefunken-Decca Schallplatten
GmbH) is a German
record label
A record label, or record company, is a brand or trademark of music recordings and music videos, or the company that owns it. Sometimes, a record label is also a publishing company that manages such brands and trademarks, coordinates the prod ...
in
Hamburg
Hamburg (, ; nds, label=Hamburg German, Low Saxon, Hamborg ), officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (german: Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg; nds, label=Low Saxon, Friee un Hansestadt Hamborg),. is the List of cities in Germany by popul ...
, Germany. Today the label is a property of
Warner Music Group
Warner Music Group Corp. (trade name, d.b.a. Warner Music Group, commonly abbreviated as WMG) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational entertainment and record label Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in New York C ...
.
History
Teldec was a producer of (first) shellac and (later) vinyl records. The Teldec manufacturing facility was located in
Nortorf near
Kiel
Kiel () is the capital and most populous city in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, with a population of 246,243 (2021).
Kiel lies approximately north of Hamburg. Due to its geographic location in the southeast of the Jutland pe ...
in Germany. The company was founded in 1950 as a co-operation between
Telefunken
Telefunken was a German radio and television apparatus company, founded in Berlin in 1903, as a joint venture of Siemens & Halske and the ''Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft'' (AEG) ('General electricity company').
The name "Telefunken" app ...
and
Decca Records
Decca Records is a British record label established in 1929 by Edward Lewis. Its U.S. label was established in late 1934 by Lewis, Jack Kapp, American Decca's first president, and Milton Rackmil, who later became American Decca's president. ...
. The name Teldec is the result of taking the first three letters of both labels: Telefunken and Decca. Records manufactured by Teldec mostly were released under the Telefunken or Decca label, but normally these records contained no hint that they were made by Teldec. In 1983, Telefunken and Decca pulled out of Teldec and in 1987 Teldec was sold to
Time Warner
Warner Media, LLC ( traded as WarnerMedia) was an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate. It was headquartered at the 30 Hudson Yards complex in New York City, United States.
It was originally established in 1972 by ...
. In 1997, the remaining compact-disc production facility in Nortorf was to be closed by Time Warner, but after a management buyout, the new company OK Media, continued CD production. In 2001, after the merger of AOL & Time Warner, Teldec closed.
TeD video disc
In the early 1970s, Teldec was acting for Telefunken in the development of a disc manufacturing technology for Telefunken's "TeD" video disc player TD1005, released in 1975. The Television Electronic Disc (
TeD) system was more or less a predecessor of the more successful optical Philips
LaserDisc video system, as the TeD system employed the idea of using
FM instead of AM for storing the video signal on a disc for the first time.
The TeD video-disc player used a
piezo-electric pick-up cartridge with a diamond stylus, mechanically sampling the
frequency-modulated,
PAL-encoded audio-video signal from thousands of concentric grooves, vertically recorded into the surface of a very thin, flexible vinyl disc. The disc was freely rotating on a thin cushion of air between the disc and a fixed plate at 1500rpm (25 Hz), the disc being stabilized only by
centrifugal force
In Newtonian mechanics, the centrifugal force is an inertial force (also called a "fictitious" or "pseudo" force) that appears to act on all objects when viewed in a rotating frame of reference. It is directed away from an axis which is parallel ...
. The sampling frequency of the combined audio-video signal was about 2.7 MHz. Maximum video playing time was ten minutes on a 210 mm disc, amounting to about 15,000 concentric grooves on the disc, each storing two half-frame PAL-video-lines.
Direct Metal Mastering
A technological spin-off from the short-lived TeD video system was Teldec's
Direct Metal Mastering technology, called DMM, for the manufacturing of vinyl records: The
cutting lathe engraves and impresses the audio signal (via Blumlein stereo cutting) in the copper-plated
mother disk, instead of in the lacquer coating on an aluminium 'grandmother' disk. This bypasses the need to electroform a father disk, firstly, and reputed allowed better retention of the modulated signals in the groove due to the copper phase not possessing the strong elastic memory of the lacquer coating on traditional blank disks.
Record label
Teldec / Telefunken issued recordings via its own record label from the 1950s. Classical recordings included performances by the
Bamberg Symphony Orchestra,
Berlin Symphony Orchestra,
Berlin Philharmonic,
Hamburg State Philharmonic Orchestra, and from elsewhere in Europe, such as the Orchestre symphonique de la Radiodiffusion Nationale Belge. The conductors under contract included
Joseph Keilberth
Joseph Keilberth (19 April 1908 – 20 July 1968) was a German conductor who specialised in opera.
Career
He started his career in the State Theatre of his native city, Karlsruhe. In 1940 he became director of the German Philharmonic Orches ...
,
Artur Rother, Belgian conductor
Franz André and the German electronic organist/pianist
Klaus Wunderlich who recorded solo
Hammond organ
The Hammond organ is an electric organ invented by Laurens Hammond and John M. Hanert and first manufactured in 1935. Multiple models have been produced, most of which use sliding #Drawbars, drawbars to vary sounds. Until 1975, Hammond organs ...
recordings and early
Moog synthesizer
The Moog synthesizer is a modular synthesizer developed by the American engineer Robert Moog. Moog debuted it in 1964, and Moog's company R. A. Moog Co. (later known as Moog Music) produced numerous models from 1965 to 1981, and again from 2014 ...
recordings (whilst recording for Teldec he earned 13 gold discs). The American violinist
Joan Field recorded, for Telefunken, the violin concertos of
Bruch,
Dvorak,
Mendelssohn
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (3 February 18094 November 1847), born and widely known as Felix Mendelssohn, was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period. Mendelssohn's compositions include sym ...
,
Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 17565 December 1791), baptised as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition r ...
and
Spohr. A project of the 1980s was the first recording of the original versions of the symphonies of
Anton Bruckner with the
Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra
The Frankfurt Radio Symphony (german: hr-Sinfonieorchester) is the radio orchestra of Hessischer Rundfunk, the public broadcasting network of the German state of Hesse. From 1929 to 1950 it was named ''Frankfurter Rundfunk-Symphonie-Orchester''. F ...
conducted by
Eliahu Inbal.
Das Alte Werk
A feature of the Teldec catalogue was its coverage of
early music
Early music generally comprises Medieval music (500–1400) and Renaissance music (1400–1600), but can also include Baroque music (1600–1750). Originating in Europe, early music is a broad musical era for the beginning of Western classic ...
and promotion of
Historically informed performances, which were marketed from 1958 under its own sub-label Das Alte Werk. The first significant recordings were by
Nikolaus Harnoncourt
Johann Nikolaus Harnoncourt or historically Johann Nikolaus Graf de la Fontaine und d'Harnoncourt-Unverzagt; () (6 December 1929 – 5 March 2016) was an Austrian conductor, particularly known for his historically informed performances of music ...
and his
Concentus Musicus Wien, then later also with other orchestras, who became one of the main artists of the label. Teldec's largest project in this area was the prize-winning complete recording of
Bach cantatas, which were recorded from 1970–1989 jointly by the
Concentus Musicus Wien conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and by the
Leonhardt-Consort Leonhardt-Consort, also known as the Leonhardt Baroque Ensemble, was a group of instrumentalists which its director, the keyboard player Gustav Leonhardt founded in 1955 to play baroque music. The Consort was active until around 1990, although some ...
with
Gustav Leonhardt. Teldec did not however achieve the distinction of completing the first set of these works, losing to the rival series by
Hänssler Classic on conventional modern instruments by
Helmuth Rilling. (This started later in 1975 but managed to meet Teldec's original 1985 Bach tercentary year deadline for completion).
Richard Taruskin
Richard Filler Taruskin (April 2, 1945 – July 1, 2022) was an American musicologist and music critic who was among the leading and most prominent music historians of his generation. The breadth of his scrutiny into source material as well as ...
''Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance'' 1995 Page 308 "Meanwhile, a competing series, inaugurated in 1975 under the leadership of the German choral specialist Helmuth Rilling, did make it to the finish line in time." Das Alte Werk also produced the first recordings of reconstructed versions of
Monteverdi
Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi (baptized 15 May 1567 – 29 November 1643) was an Italian composer, choirmaster and string player. A composer of both secular and sacred music, and a pioneer in the development of opera, he is conside ...
's operas ''
L'Orfeo
''L'Orfeo'' ( SV 318) (), sometimes called ''La favola d'Orfeo'' , is a late Renaissance/early Baroque ''favola in musica'', or opera, by Claudio Monteverdi, with a libretto by Alessandro Striggio. It is based on the Greek legend of Orpheus, ...
'', ''
Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria
''Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria'' ( SV 325, ''The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland'') is an opera consisting of a prologue and five acts (later revised to three), set by Claudio Monteverdi to a libretto by Giacomo Badoaro. The opera was first ...
'' and ''
L'incoronazione di Poppea'' in a
Zurich Opera cycle under Harnoncourt. In the 1990s Das Alte Werk recorded a few newer artists such as the ensembles
Tragicomedia and
Chanticleer, but effectively ceased new projects after Teldec's acquisition by
Warner Classics.
References
External links
Teldec exhibition in the museum of Nortorf
*
ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb1VvoPGUX4 Video of the internal functions of a working TED player
{{Authority control
German record labels
Companies based in Hamburg
Record labels established in 1950
Warner Music labels
Classical music record labels
Early music record labels