The reader must forgive some initial reference to autobiographical matters. My early publications included a discography of Albert Coates (1975) and my first book, on Felix Weingartner (1976). When researching material during the 1960s for these and other publications I had the distinct feeling of being little more than a fossil hunter. Interest in recordings by conductors so much of the past was minimal, even considered by the then critical mainstream as rather eccentric. And I well recall the merriment with which my extramural interest in ‘discographies’ was met by professional colleagues. Who had ever heard of such a ridiculous made-up word, so they thought; and that despite the fact that Gramophone had been publishing lists of 78rpm discs so labelled since at least 1928. Vocal recordings were in a different category: the scholarship was already considerable, the limitations of pre- and early electric recordings more easily overlooked.

It was easy enough, then, for some very odd views about what conductors got up to in former times to obtain currency. During my collecting days, again in the 1960s, I got hold of wonderful, mint 78rpm copies of one Max Fiedler conducting the Second and Fourth Symphonies of Brahms and was puzzled by what I heard. All those little – occasionally monstrous – stops and starts, the Luftpausen; and what about those first few bars of the Fourth, where the conductor increased the tempo at bar 8 by one-half and resumed his opening tempo at bar 12 as if nothing untoward had occurred? Surely something remarkably eccentric was going on here? Not at all, said a well-informed friend: ‘They all did that sort of thing in those days.’ But that was clearly at best only partly correct, as my knowledge of recordings by Weingartner and Karl Muck made obvious.

Eventually I determined to consult the most eminent British authority with the longest and clearest memories of the conductors of his youth, Sir Adrian Boult, who kindly received me in his Wigmore Street office in September 1972. Before switching on my recorder, I made some preliminary remarks about the purpose of my visit and in that context described Fiedler's opening of the Brahms Fourth Symphony – ‘Extraordinary’, said Sir Adrian; ‘why did he do that?’