Joan Manén’s pioneer recordings: Violin concertos by beethoven, bruch, and mendelssohn

The sound documents of Joan Manén, which are curious because they are handwritten courtesy copies, sparked our interest in situating them both chronologically and geographically. This article also relates Manén’s recordings to the performers whose early recording of Beethoven, Bruch and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concertos, offering important details about the recording of these works and the legacy of the musicians who made it. In short, in the past 40 years, the different scholars of the recordings of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto have assigned the first complete recording of this work to two performers (Josef Wolfsthal (1925) and Fritz Kreisler (1926)), while only some mention Manén (1922) as the first performer of a recording only of the second movement. More recently, Timothy Day stated that Manén had recorded the entire concerto. Thanks to collaborations with various libraries, specifically the Biblioteca de Catalunya, Statsbiblioteket (Copenhagen), and the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (Lepizig) it is now possible to reconstruct the three complete recordings as originally published by His Master’s Voice. With these recordings Manén demonstrates the will to achieve a significant breakthrough in the history of sound recordings.