Piotr Beczala: Records That Changed My Life

Growing up in Poland in the 1970s, we had no access to original recordings. We couldn’t just go to the shop and buy, you know, Led Zeppelin or whatever was popular at the time. So the first recording that I was able to get was “A Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum.  

My uncle had the record and I used an old tape recorder to record the song. I played it so many times because it was just amazing. The sound of the Hammond organ was just so wonderful. I played the recording so many times that I broke it! 

I’m a very big fan of The Beatles. You know, they say you can divide the population into two groups, The Beatles fans and Rolling Stones fans. I was definitely into The Beatles. When I was 14 or 15 I got my first record player from my uncle. I got one single long play, it was “Let It Be” from The Beatles. 

It was actually broken, the edge of the record must have been too close to the heater or something so it damaged the record. So I actually couldn’t hear the first song, I always started from the second song, and not even the beginning of it! It really annoyed my dad. One day he just got fed up and broke the record completely. 

That was my first experience of The Beatles, I guess somebody had gone on holiday in the West and brought the record back to Poland for us. But it was really hard to get any original records at that time. Normally if you know someone who had an original record, you would go with your tape recorder and make your own recording of it.  

This was my first opera recording. Now I’m actually studying Turandot! I’ll perform it for the first time in three months in Zurich. So I’m coming back to this recording now, but I first discovered it as a student. In my opinion it’s still one of the best recordings of Turandot. 

We played it every night, and the same thing happened as with Procol Harum—we broke it. It was played so many times that the tape was just completely destroyed! 

You know, when we were students we had nothing to do, just study music and listen to music and sing. That was all we had to do at the time.  

After my first year of study, it was 1987 I think, I went for the first time to Germany—still East Germany, in Weimar—and I got my first recording from Fritz Wunderlich. He was a German tenor. I had just started studying vocal, and I was really impressed with his sound.  

I used all my money to get this record. I still have it, it was before CD times so it was vinyl. So I started to make a little collection of rare stuff. There was a moment where CDs were coming on the market and there were all these interesting LPs that I was trying to find.  

I discovered that way back, in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, there are a lot of old-fashioned records, LPs but in a different speed, so I have a small collection of these. Caruso, Tito Schipa, tenors from the early 1900s.  

It’s easy today because you can go to YouTube or Spotify and find all these recordings, but it’s nice to have a physical collection. Of course, when I’m traveling it’s good to have things on my iPad. But at home I love to listen to LPs, they just have another quality to the sound. 

About 12 years ago I was in Metropolitan Opera and they were cleaning the archives. One of the people working on this process knew I was interested in old LPs and they said, “Well, we have a lot of recordings from the 1960s.” The Metropolitan Opera recorded many of the performances in the 1950s and 1960s and they had maybe 40 LPs. Of course, I couldn’t take them all—my luggage wasn’t big enough—but I picked out a few. It was so interesting because in these recordings there was all the history of the Metropolitan Opera, like who sang the first run of which opera, for example. Some really interesting stories in these LPs!  

Of course, modern technology is very cool, too. In 2010 or 2011, I recorded a tribute to Richard Tauber in London.  

There was a video clip with Natalie Cole and her father singing together. He had already been dead for maybe 20 years but they used an old recording of him and a newer one of her and put them together as though they sang a duet.  

We decided to make the same thing with Richard Tauber. We took an opera aria, composed by him, “Du bist die Welt für mich”. It was difficult to separate his voice from the orchestra at the time and then put our orchestra to play in his tempo, and then I sang too. But the result was fantastic. And so I had the pleasure to sing with Richard Tauber, decades after his death.