Recordings
Muck's reputation rests largely on his recorded legacy. In October 1917 he made a series of sound recordings in the U.S.A. with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the Victor Talking Machine Company in their Camden, New Jersey auditorium. Unusually for the time (when the pre-electric purely mechanical “acoustic” process was in use) the orchestra seems to have been recorded at full strength as the 1919 Victor catalogue refers to "approximately a hundred men". Eight short pieces spread over ten 78 r.p.m. sides were selected, including excerpts from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 and two items from Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust.
Muck's most important recordings were made at the 1927 Bayreuth Festival for the English Columbia Gramophone Company and in 1927-29 in Berlin for the Gramophone Company (HMV). At Bayreuth sometime between late June and mid-August 1927,he conducted about 30 minutes of excerpts from Parsifal Acts 1 and 2. His control of phrasing in the Transformation and Grail scenes is regarded as unsurpassed to this day. In December 1927 he led the Berlin State Opera Orchestra in an account of the opera's Prelude, one of the slowest on record. A year later, in December 1928, he made a nearly complete recording of the third act of Parsifal, using the Parsifal and Gurnemanz singers from that year's Bayreuth performances. The music critic Alan Blyth described this as "the most uplifting, superbly executed reading of Act 3 ... in the history of recording" and Robin Holloway commented that "It realizes better than any other Wagner performance the idea of endless melody". In all about 40% of the opera's score was recorded over the 2-and-a-half-year period. HMV also recorded eight further Wagner orchestral pieces, including the Siegfried Idyll, with the Berlin State Opera Orchestra in December 1927, May 1928, and November 1929. These have been reissued on various CDs.
A discography of Muck's original commercial recordings, not including reissues. appeared in 1977.
Several radio recordings allegedly conducted by Muck also exist, including a Faust Overture and Trauermarsch (Götterdämmerung) with the Berlin Radio Orchestra and an excerpt from the Adagio of Bruckner's Symphony No. 7 with the Hamburg Philharmonic.
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“All radio is dead. Which means that these tape recordings I’m making are for the sake of future history. If any.”
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