Word and voice

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Word and Voice was a series of phonograph records from the record company Telefunken and Decca from the 1950s . Along with the literary archive of the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft, it is one of the first and most extensive series of literary speech records in Germany.

Goal setting

The series name word and voice initially refers, as can be read on the first record covers, to a specific objective: " To preserve the voice of great actors in the words of important poets for the present and the future, that is the purpose of our record series".

Soon, however, in addition to actors ' voices , poets' voices such as Werner Bergengruens , Rudolf Kinaus , Alexander Spoerl or Kurt Kusenberg or recordings by exceptional reciter like Ernst Hameister were included in the series.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Hans-Günther Martens, at the time a broadcaster and known for his series "Hans-Günther Martens opens his record cabinet" ( North German Broadcasting ), took over the "Word and Voice" department at TELDEC. He was able to add some significant word recordings to the series, including Heinrich George , Ernst Reuter, Ernst Deutsch. Wort records did not have many fans at the time and so the series was discontinued after four years. The sales figures amounted to 4 to max. 6000 pieces and are therefore considered an absolute rarity today. Teldec tried a new edition about ten years later with new covers that were available in stores until the 1980s.

First publications

The first records that were published in the series were Werner Krauss ' recitation of the defense speech of Socrates , Will Quadflieg speaks Rainer Maria Rilke , Rudolf Forster with a scene from "Der Kammersänger" by Frank Wedekind and poetry and prose by Matthias Claudius and Hölderlin with Mathias Wieman .

More speakers

Archival recordings by Heinrich George and Gustaf Gründgens are also among the early publications. The particularly successful speakers for the series in the 1960s included Oskar Werner and the author Robert T. Odeman , as well as Hilde Krahl, Joana Maria Gorvin, OEHasse, Werner Fink, Bertha Drews, Martin Held and many more.

Documents & complete recordings

Documentary recordings from the theater environment were also published as a word and voice record as a sub- series of documents , e.g. E.g. a birthday speech by Gustaf Gründgens to the director Jürgen Fehling or biographical stories by Werner Krauss.

From the 1960s onwards, after primarily poetry, prose and individual scenes and monologues had appeared on individual records, complete recordings of theater plays were added. Particularly noteworthy in this regard are Schiller's Don Karlos in the Sellner production and Martin Held (who was also the " regular speaker" for Tucholsky texts in word and voice ) as Theobald Mask in Carl Sternheim's Die Hose .

format

Word and Voice initially published mainly 25 cm long-playing records, but soon also 17 cm and 30 cm LPs and finally also double LPs and LP box sets for the complete recordings. The cover design of the series had a high recognition value in the 50s and 60s , so that word and voice can at times almost be referred to as a sub-label of Telefunken . From the late 1960s , the characteristic black, white and gold were given up in favor of more individual cover images for literary speech records, but not to the designation "Word and Voice".