The 1889 Edison Recording of Johannes Brahms: Restoration and Analysis

Analysis: The 1889 Edison Recording of Brahms This recording has become quite famous in recent years, with a majority of “experts“ stating that they simply do not believe that the second person speaking here is the actual voice of Johannes Brahms. In this post we hope, through analysis, to bring this question into clearer focus. Recordings from the 1880s have the problem of extremely low latency. In other words, they do not sound the same as they did when new, and, contrary to most understanding, it is not entirely due to wear. The early recordings were not acoustically balanced. They were also recorded on fragile, and potentially unstable, media; as the cylinders dry out, impurities in the wax become noisier, and the waveshapes bleed. This makes early recordings difficult to analyze due to the patina of noise which obscures them. In our current method we are removing this noise, with relatively little side effects , to reveal the actual noise floors of these recordings, and that can tell us much that has never been known before. In this case, it was always believed, based upon testimony, that there is one only edit, or stoppage, in the recording. Many believed that this precluded the possibility that Brahms could be the second voice due to the orientation required for the immediate piano playing which follows it. In this new restoration we can actually detect that there are TWO edits. Listen to the room tones and diaphragm orientations. The changes in room tone are quite clear. The first lines spoken by Wangemann are off-diaphragm, there is a pause, the second speech by Brahms is made directly into the mouthpiece, then there is another pause, followed by the piano recording, made through a bullhorn. Wangemann probably made this zero-cut tight to save as much recording time as possible, if you listen closely, you can hear the edit joint between Brahms speaking directly into the mouthpiece, and the piano music that follows. The room ambiance changes as the horn is put over the mouthpiece during the second pause. This could only be done in 1889 with a stoppage edit; mixing signals was still over a half century away, and the difference is quite noticeable in the clean track. Up until now nobody has ever been able to hear this. Imagine what talking into a recording machine was like in the 1880s. The one thing that everybody in all early recordings seem to have in common is how intimidated and excited they were when making them. Even Queen Victoria was clearly intimidated, and so were Tchaikovsky, Rubinstein, and most others when they tried it. Brahms spoke directly into the mouthpiece with so much energy that he actually clipped the stylus by 2-3 db. This has been corrected in the restoration. Another new discovery here is speech between the two piano pieces, possibly by a woman or child. As to whether or not this is Brahms, aside from the evidence of the recording itself, the most evocative evidence is the statement of Dr. Fellinger’s son, Richard, made in 1935. He was present at the session, and describes Wangemann and the engineer’s actions in great detail, (Including things which a layperson would not know.), and stated that it is actually Brahms speaking just before the music. Even though his statement is forty years later, why would he forget details about something as extraordinary as Brahms making a recording in his father’s parlor? If you had the once-in-a-lifetime chance to record Brahms actual voice, would you? Wangemann probably made the same decision at the time. The rumble we hear is the motor of the recorder, in even closer examination the Edison company had not yet worked out how to make the sleeve bearings as quiet as they should be; the squeak and chirp is the bearings. This was a constant issue on these early cylinder recorders, which tended to squeak like a music box crank. Of course, nobody alive can say definitively whether this is Brahms or not, but the evidence, and the fact that the voice seems consistent with the physical description of Brahms at the time, is very strong evidence that it is. None of the statements or assessments based upon the nomenclature of the intro, the fact that Brahms refers to himself as “Doktor Brahms“, nor German language syntax changes the value of this new evidence. This is a very excited, intimidated, and nervous Johannes Brahms doing what only a handful of people had the chance or distinction to try at that time. Personally, my gut feeling here is that this is indeed Johannes Brahms who is speaking, and what a treat for history if it is. Johannes Brahms left us only one little, tiny, precious recording of his voice, in the absence of any other real evidence, that is something quite special. For more information you can go to: If you wish to offer support for this kind of music and sound, you can buy us a cup of coffee at: