Teldec

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TELDEC logo, around 1990

The Teldec Schallplatten GmbH was a subsidiary of AEG -Konzerns and counted for decades the largest and oldest German record producers .

Beginnings in the Weimar period

At the beginning of the 1920s, the Telefunken Gesellschaft für wireless Telegraphie mbH played a key role in setting up the first German broadcasting stations and began manufacturing radio sets for end users. In 1930 the company presented the first combination device consisting of a radio receiver and an electric record player under the name “Arcofar” ; In view of the market opportunities of this new technology, the Telefunken-Gesellschaft felt the need to enter the record industry.

The opportunity arose when, at the beginning of 1932, after barely three years of existence, Deutsche Ultraphon AG , a medium-sized record company belonging to a Dutch group, went bankrupt and was looking for a buyer. AEG and Siemens & Halske, as the Telefunken parent companies, took over Deutsche Ultraphon in March 1932 and relocated the record production acquired in this way to Telefunken, which in turn founded Telefunkenplatte GmbH as a subsidiary in July 1932 . The grievances that had driven Ultraphon into bankruptcy, in particular its links with numerous companies outside the industry, were eliminated. However, one took over the ingenious artistic director Herbert Grenzebach and supported his development work in the field of recording technology. Most of the many prominent artists who Deutsche Ultraphon had signed up continued their work at Telefunken. In a time that brought economic ruin for countless small and medium-sized record companies, Telefunken developed into one of the three leading German music groups at astonishing speed; the high technical and artistic quality of the records helped the label to gain a loyal customer base.

Rise to the leading record company during the "Third Reich"

Political developments were paid tribute to in 1933 with the inclusion of some propaganda titles in the catalog program. The new national anthem, the Horst Wessel song , as well as marching songs from the “ fighting time of the movement” appeared under the motto “German Music ”. In 1934, economic considerations were decisive for the introduction of the Telefunken Musikus series, which was very inexpensive at 1.60 Reichsmarks, with a popular to swinging repertoire. The company was the only German record label to adopt the advertising idea, which was widespread in the USA in the 1930s, of producing records from brown instead of black pressed compound; Contrary to popular belief, these products are normal shellac records and not pressed from substitute materials. The brown press material used until 1938 was cheaper and of somewhat poorer quality than the normal record editions, which were published under the Telefunken label until 1943 for prices starting at RM 2.00 . The Musikus series, on the other hand, was discontinued in 1939 due to the war.

Since Telefunken did not have the necessary capacities, a considerable part of the Telefunken records was made as contract presses at Deutsche Grammophon in Hanover , with which Telefunken had made corresponding agreements; Despite several attempts to do so, the attempt to merge the two companies failed in the mid-1930s.

Telefunken produced in the years of Nazi rule , a relatively liberal to the extent possible range of popular music : with Heinz Wehner and his "Telefunken Swing Orchestra", the company made a swing band American-style; From 1936 to 1939 she also had the Swiss swing musician Teddy Stauffer under contract with his "Original Teddies". Through the exchange of matrices with the French and Czech Ultraphon labels, titles by jazz greats such as Django Reinhardt , Jaroslav Ježek , Kamil Běhounek , Fud Candrix , Stan Brenders and Eddie Tower were published in Germany.

The outbreak of the Second World War initially put the company in an unexpectedly favorable position, as the Ultraphon branches in Paris and Prague were transferred to Telefunken under the German occupation. As a result, the company had pressing plants that were largely safe from bombing and not cut off from supplies of raw materials, which was a great advantage over the other German record companies - a significant part of the Telefunken records for the German market was now pressed in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia , and production could still be maintained when the aerial warfare intensified in World War II : in September 1944 the Prague plant was still producing 53,000 records per month. Shortly before the end of the war, the Telefunken company bosses succeeded in relocating the stocks of press dies from Prague and Berlin to a mine tunnel near Dresden , where they survived the collapse of the regime unscathed.

Structural changes after 1945

Just a few months after the end of the war, Grenzebach ordered the dies to be transported back to Berlin, where Telefunken resumed panel production in an AEG plant in Hennigsdorf that was equipped with presses . Initially, only new editions of pre-war titles were produced with Allied permission; only in July 1947 was the recording activity resumed.

In 1948, Telefunken Schallplatten GmbH opened a record company in Nortorf in a former leather factory that produced records with a former leather press. In the mid-1960s, the company employed around 1,000 people. Here were, among others, gold records for Peter Maffay (So are you, 1979) and Elvis Presley (1958 Gravierfehler Presly produced). By the time it closed in 1989, around 850 million records had been pressed in the plant. In the same year a record museum was founded in Nortorf. Around 32,000 records and various playback devices can be seen.

Telefunken did not limit itself to marketing the plates to the western zones : until around 1949 its own branch in Erfurt delivered pressings for the Soviet zone of occupation . In 1948 Telefunken succeeded in signing a die exchange contract with the US company Capitol Records . In 1950, the company agreed an intensive collaboration with the traditional British company Decca Records : Telefunken outsourced record production from its own group of companies and transferred it to the newly founded TELDEC Telefunken-Decca Schallplatten GmbH , based in Hamburg . At the time in question, the British Decca had a subsidiary in Switzerland, which in turn had signed some hit stars of the day, including Hans Albers , Vico Torriani and Lys Assia . The corresponding recordings were now released on Telefunken records in Germany and helped the company to a rapid resurgence: as early as 1950, the record output reached the volume of 1935, and Telefunken took second place on the German market after Polydor - gramophone in terms of sound carrier sales . In 1951, Teldec established the Decca label in addition to Telefunken as the second German brand, although there was apparently no clear definition of content. The particularly extensive commissioned production of advertising panels and other pressings under third-party labels (e.g. Christophorus for sacred music) at Telefunken is interesting . An extensive speech record program was also maintained under the series name of word and voice . In 1953 Teldec was the first company in Germany to bring vinyl singles with 45 revolutions onto the market.

  • Shellac record by Decca (1953) in a company perforated cover

  • Telefunken single (1958)

  • Single from Decca (1962)

  • Single from Decca (1966)

The area of ​​serious music

Since the 1950s, numerous classical recordings have been made with German ( Bamberg Symphony , Berlin Symphony , Berlin Philharmonic , Philharmonic State Orchestra Hamburg and others) and international orchestras (e.g. Orchester Symphonique de la Radiodiffusion Nationale Belge ). The conductors signed on were mainly Joseph Keilberth , Artur Rother and Franz André . The American violinist Joan Field recorded the great violin concertos by Bruch, Dvořák, Mendelssohn, Mozart and Spohr for Telefunken. One focus of Teldec's electronic music catalog was the area of early music in historical performance practice , which was marketed under its own sub-label Das Alte Werk from 1958 . The first recordings were made in 1964 with the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt , who became one of the label's main artists with the Concentus Musicus Wien , which he founded, and later with other orchestras. One of the largest projects in this area was the first complete recording of the Bach cantatas , which received multiple record awards and was recorded from 1970 to 1989 by the Concentus Musicus Wien under Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Leonhardt Consort under Gustav Leonhardt together with various soloists and choirs. In the series Das Alte Werk various operas were also published, including the first recordings of the reconstructed versions of Monteverdi's operas L'Orfeo , Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and L'incoronazione di Poppea with the Concentus Musicus under Harnoncourt. The performances of the Zurich Monteverdi and Mozart cycle under Harnoncourt were published by Teldec.

A project in the 1980s was the first recording of the original versions of Anton Bruckner's symphonies with the RSO Frankfurt under the direction of Eliahu Inbal as a co-production with the Hessischer Rundfunk .

Development in the Federal Republic

Exhibition room in the Nortorf Museum

TELDEC continued to exist as an independent record company for decades. In 1983 the parent companies Telefunken and Decca-GB withdrew from Teldec. Since 1987 the company has belonged to the media empire of the Time Warner group, which still uses the brand names Teldec and Telefunken for CD productions. In 1990 Teldec was incorporated into the catalog of East West Records , which at that time were taken over by Time-Warner. The pressing plant for CDs and music cassettes in Nortorf in Schleswig-Holstein was supposed to be closed by Time Warner in 1997. As part of a management buy-out , the operations managers who had been active up to that point continued to run the CD press shop under the name OK Media . DVDs have been produced there since 2001 and memory cards have been written to since 2005 , until the company filed for bankruptcy at the beginning of 2009 for the Nortorf location and only the administration and later the logistics remained at the original location. In the meantime these areas have moved to Hohenwestedt . There is now a shopping center at the original location, and only the former administration building with the famous record clock is a reminder of its former use.

In 2001 the two groups AOL and Time Warner merged . At the end of 2001, the TELDEC label was closed for new productions by the newly created parent company AOL Time Warner . The increasingly difficult economic situation of the record companies due to falling sales, the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000 and various austerity measures by the parent company were probably decisive factors for this development. Numerous artist contracts were terminated. A few musicians were able to continue to publish music productions under the Warner Music label. Older recordings from the field of serious music are still marketed by Warner Music under the labels Teldec and Das Alte Werk . The Teldec recording studio in Berlin was renamed Teldex and has been running its business as an independent recording studio since 2002.

TELDEC sales 1950–1988

Especially in the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, Teldec played a decisive role in establishing primarily American artists in Germany. As the distributor of the US record labels RCA and Warner Bros. and the British labels Decca and London Records , TELDEC played a leading role in Germany both as a distributor and as a producer of records. All of the sound carriers that TELDEC had sold until 1988 were also manufactured in the company's own press shop in Nortorf.

Telefunken (1950–1988)

The traditional German label was able to bring the first two hit stars to the newly founded company in 1950 with Lys Assia and Vico Torriani. In the following 20 years, however, folk music artists such as Maria Hellwig , Ernst Mosch or Slavko Avsenik and his Original Oberkrainer were constant sales drivers. With Renate Holm , Ronny and Manuela , Telefunken has been able to score again and again over the years with the success of German-speaking artists. From 1971 Peter Maffay published his records with Telefunken.

Other musicians were u. a. Gitta Lind , Erich Kleiber , Max Rostal , Béla Sanders , Sylvia Dahl, Evelyn Künneke , Nicolaus Harnoncourt , Ulrich Roski , Truck Stop , Jürgen Marcus , UKW and Frank Duval .

Capitol Records (1950–1956)

Telefunken had been selling the still young US label in Germany since the end of 1948. With the founding of TELDEC, Capitol Records went into their distribution. This enabled TELDEC to release a number of musicians from the genres of jazz , blues and country for the first time in Germany. In addition to the very early Miles Davis , musicians such as Benny Goodman , Stan Kenton and Nat King Cole , but also Leadbelly , Peggy Lee , Johnny Mercer , Mel Tormé and also Frank Sinatra and Les Paul were in the Capitol portfolio. 1956 bought the British EMI Capitol Records, whereby the distribution contract with TELDEC was terminated.

Decca (1951-1980)

The English part of the joint venture with Telefunken was initially able to score primarily with artists from the classical music field. In addition to Mantovani , Wilhelm Backhaus , Georg Solti , Karl Böhm and Friedrich Gulda have to be mentioned here. From the entertainment sector, the label brought Vera Lynn and later Tom Jones and Lulu to Germany via the channel. German musicians who released under the Decca label were, besides Hans Albers and Will Glahé, above all Caterina Valente , Hildegard Knef , the Les Humphries Singers and Drafi Deutscher .

In the 1960s, however, it was mainly the Rolling Stones that brought TELDEC good sales in Germany until 1970, when the band left the label. In addition, TELDEC was allowed to market their Decca repertoire until the 1980s. B. Issued licenses to the state GDR label Amiga . From the mid-1960s onwards, there were also rock bands such as The Small Faces , The Moody Blues , The Alan Price Set , The Animals , John Mayall , Ten Years After and also The Zombies . In addition, a ten-year collaboration with Udo Lindenberg began in 1971 .

Decca was sold to PolyGram in January 1980 , ending the joint venture with Telefunken. Nevertheless, due to a special regulation, TELDEC was allowed to continue to evaluate the repertoire for a while.

London Records (1951–1980)

London Records was distributed by TELDEC as a sub-label of Decca. The label was originally founded as the US branch of the British company to release its program in America. At the same time, the label also hired US musicians, who thus found a sales market in Europe for the first time. Here the label makers excelled with blues and jazz, but also brought rock'n'roll to Europe. With Bill Haley , Jerry Lee Lewis , Chuck Berry and Little Richard , only small sales were initially achieved in Germany. In the 1960s, in addition to Billy Vaughn, it was above all the various Phil Spector productions ( The Ronettes , The Crystals ) and Roy Orbison that led the label to success in Germany.

In the 1970s, however, the label lost its importance and was sold to PolyGram in 1980 together with the parent company. Other musicians were u. a. Ma Rainey , Ida Cox , Blind Lemon Jefferson , Louis Armstrong , Fats Waller , Floyd Cramer , Carl Perkins , Pat Boone , Fats Domino , Ray Charles , Ike & Tina Turner , Herb Alpert and Al Green .

Deram (1967–1980)

The Decca sub-label for progressive rock music added a whole range of new and popular musicians to the TELDEC repertoire. With Procol Harum's debut album, the early material by Cat Stevens , the Moody Blues, Amen Corner , The Move , Keef Hartley or East Of Eden , it was possible to successfully appeal to a whole new group of buyers.

RCA Victor (1956-1977)

With RCA, the Hamburg-based company was able to add a US label with a long tradition to their portfolio. Until then, RCA was hardly represented on the European market. The TELDEC-RCA-Group was founded, which was responsible for the sales markets Austria , Switzerland , Sweden , Norway , Finland , Holland , Belgium and Luxembourg . TELDEC supplied all of these markets and published the records initially under the label name RCA , and from 1963 under RCA Victor .

Elvis Presley came to Germany with RCA . Even if those responsible for TELDEC had little to do with his music at first, he became the company's top-selling musician alongside the Rolling Stones. But RCA was also able to enrich the German music market with a wide range of classical recordings. Musicians like Arturo Toscanini , Jascha Heifetz , Artur Rubinstein and Leopold Stokowski supplemented the already quite good classical music program of TELDEC. The country music repertoire initially received little attention in Germany. It was not until the 1960s that TELDEC was able to establish musicians like Waylon Jennings , Willie Nelson , Don Gibson , Hank Snow or Jim Reeves , while pop musicians like Paul Anka , Neil Sedaka , Duane Eddy , Rita Pavone and Peggy March were already in the German charts had established.

In the increasingly popular area of ​​rock music, RCA finally appeared successfully with bands and musicians such as Jefferson Airplane , The Youngbloods , Lou Reed , David Bowie and The Sweet . Other sales successes were achieved with José Feliciano , John Denver , George McCrae and the Danish singer Gitte .

RCA Schallplatten GmbH was founded in Hamburg in 1977 and TELDEC lost the distribution of the label, but was initially able to continue manufacturing the RCA products in Nortorf.

Warner Bros. Records (1960–1971)

Apart from the Everly Brothers , the US label founded two years earlier in 1960 didn't have much to offer in terms of successful material. With musicians like Bill Haley, Bob Luman , Connie Stevens , John Buck And His Blazers, Peter, Paul & Mary , Buddy Cole or Van Morrison , you could only gain a foothold in Germany.

In 1963, Warner Bros. bought the Reprise Records label, founded by Frank Sinatra in 1960 , which TELDEC not only brought the American singer back into the repertoire, but also with musicians such as Dean Martin , Sammy Davis, Jr. , Trini Lopez , Nancy Sinatra , Lee Hazlewood and later also Neil Young , Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention or, from England, Family brought good sales in Germany.

When Warner Bros. took over the Atlantic Records label in 1967 , the existing distribution contract with Metronome for Germany remained , but TELDEC took over production from then on.

In 1971 TELDEC lost the distribution contract with Warner Bros., but the recordings continued to be manufactured at TELDEC in Nortorf until the second half of the 1970s.

MCA Records (1965-1969 / 1970-1976)

In 1962 the American company MCA took over the US branch of the British Decca and sold its repertoire in Europe under the name Coral Records . With this label, musicians like Xavier Cougat and Rick Nelson came to German record stores. About the label UNI was Neil Diamond offer its music and MCA itself bands had in Germany Wishbone Ash or Matthews' Southern Comfort can capture a market in Germany.

MCA Records also had a large selection of film soundtracks in its program. In addition to Easy Rider , the extremely popular double albums for the musical Jesus Christ Superstar , both the regular release in 1970 and its filming three years later, have to be highlighted.

MCA Records left TELDEC sales at the end of 1969 in order to have their products marketed in Germany by Miller International . But the cheap label could not meet the expectations of the Americans and on October 1, 1970, TELDEC had MCA under its roof again. From January 1977, the Hamburg Metronome took over MCA sales.

Further labels in TELDEC sales

TELDEC tried to lose the big labels like RCA and MCA in the second half of the 1970s through contracts with small ones, e.g. T. to compensate for independent labels. So one secured z. B. the distribution rights of the Ahorn label from Achim Reichel ( Novalis , Stefan Waggershausen ), published GDR bands such as the Puhdys , City or Karat on Pool and presented musicians such as Elvis Costello or Ian to the German record buyer quite successfully via the British Stiff label Dury . In addition, contracts were signed with the French labels Vogue and Aquarius ( Patrick Hernandez ).

Other labels were u. a. Storyville , CNR, Creole Records ( Peter Green ), Pinnacle ( Nick Straker ), Rialto, Yep, Gryphon, Beserkley Records , H&L, Jupiter by Ralph Siegel , Ariston, Attic, Magnet ( Chris Rea ), Buddah , Uwe Tessnows Line Records, Repertoire and zomba.

However, all of this did not bring back the previous successes for TELDEC. Only with the Austrian label GIG , which released the Falco recordings , the success came again at short notice.

After Decca left, TELDEC also operated as a label from 1980. TELDEC signed singers such as Stéphanie von Monaco , Sabrina , Brigitte Nielsen , La Toya Jackson and Samantha Fox , while the previous repertoire of Ernst Mosch, Heino and Gotthilf Fischer could now be profitably re-released on CD .

After the takeover of TELDEC by WEA in 1988, the TELDEC repertoire was absorbed into the specially reactivated Warner label EastWest Records in 1990 . WEA also took over some distribution contracts (e.g. Magnet Records, GIG).

See also

literature

  • Ludwig Hartmann: History of historical performance practice in outline. Part I: From the beginning to Harnoncourt. Pro Musica Antiqua, Regensburg 1988.
  • Franz Schorn: Old record brands in Germany. Noetzel, Wilhelmshaven 1988, ISBN 3-7959-0551-6 .
  • Hansfried Sieben: Herbert Grenzebach: A life for the Telefunken record. Sieben, Düsseldorf 1991.
  • Erdmann Thiele (Ed.): Telefunken after 100 years. Nicolai, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-87584-961-2 .
  • Rüdiger Bloemeke: The TELDEC story. How a record company changed our lives. Voodoo, St. Dionys 2018, ISBN 978-3-00-059698-8

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ventus . The magazine for Generation50plus. Kiel December 2015.
  2. ^ The TELDEC in Nortorf. (PDF) Förderverein Museum Nortorf, accessed on December 29, 2015 .
  3. ↑ Recordable - Sounding Post
  4. ↑ Where we come from | OK Media. In: www.okmedia.de. Retrieved November 25, 2016 .
  5. ^ Announcement on the insolvency of OK Media Disc Service GmbH & Co KG ( Memento from September 11, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ), Der Prignitzer, March 16, 2009, accessed on November 15, 2015.
  6. ↑ Christian Robohm: Logistics division leaves Nortorf | shz.de . In: shz . ( shz.de [accessed on November 25, 2016]).
  7. ↑ Hans-Jürgen Kühl: Ok Media move almost complete | shz.de . In: shz . ( shz.de [accessed on November 25, 2016]).
  8. ↑ Christian Robohm: City Council: Nortorf changed shopping | shz.de . In: shz . ( shz.de [accessed on November 25, 2016]).
  9. ↑ Teldex Studio
  10. ↑ All information in the “Sales” section was taken from the book The TELDEC Story. How a record company changed our lives (by Rüdiger Bloemeke, Voodoo Verlag 2018, ISBN 978-3-00-059698-8 ).