Early years Culshaw was born in
Southport, Lancashire, one of at least two children of Percy Ellis Culshaw, a bank inspector, and his first wife, Dorothy
née Royds. He was educated first at
Merchant Taylors' School,
Crosby, which he despised for its snobbery and its sports-obsessed philistinism. His father then sent him to
King George V Grammar School, Southport. When he left school in 1940, aged 16, he followed his father into the staff of the
Midland Bank as a clerk, working at a branch in
Liverpool. He had little aptitude or liking for banking, failing to pass the company's examination in banking theory, He trained as a navigator, was commissioned as an officer, and promoted to lieutenant as a radar instructor. What spare time he had, he devoted to his passionate interest in music. Apart from piano lessons as a child, Culshaw was self-taught musically, and had no ambitions to be a performer. The critic and biographer Richard Osborne wrote of him, "Like many people for whom music is an obsession, Culshaw was a lonely and meticulous person, jealously guarding the sense of personal integrity which his precocious interest in music had helped form and deepen." While in the Fleet Air Arm, Culshaw "wrote articles on music by the dozen and – quite rightly – they came back by the dozen." This led to invitations to broadcast musical talks for the
BBC and to contribute articles to classical music magazines. It was followed by two further books; a popular introduction to concertos (
The Concerto in "The World of Music" series in 1949), and a guide to modern music (
A Century of Music in 1952). , conductor of the Decca
Ring cycle By 1947 Culshaw had been given the chance to produce classical sessions for Decca's rapidly expanding catalogue. At Decca, the musicians whom he recorded included
Ida Haendel,
Eileen Joyce,
Kathleen Ferrier and
Clifford Curzon. In 1948 he first worked with
Georg Solti, a pianist and aspiring conductor. In 1950, after the introduction of the
long-playing record (LP), he produced the first LP versions of the
Savoy Operas with the
D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. In 1951, Culshaw and one of Decca's senior engineers,
Kenneth Wilkinson, were sent to the
Bayreuth Festival to record Wagner's
Parsifal. For Culshaw, Wagner was an abiding passion, and he persuaded Decca and the Bayreuth management to let him record that year's
Ring cycle in addition to
Parsifal. The
Ring recording could not be released, probably for contractual reasons. The
Parsifal recording, on the other hand, was released to great acclaim in 1952. The Decca team returned to Bayreuth to record the 1953 performances of
Lohengrin. The resultant recording was well reviewed, but Culshaw wrote of it:
Capitol From 1953 to 1955 Culshaw headed the European programme for
Capitol Records. As Capitol at that time had commercial ties with Decca, Culshaw's move did not estrange him from the head of Decca,
Edward Lewis, who generally took a dim view when his employees left Decca to join its competitors. Culshaw found his attempts to build up a roster of classical artists for Capitol frustrated by bureaucracy at the company's headquarters in Los Angeles. He was prevented from encouraging the soprano
Kirsten Flagstad to emerge from retirement, or from signing the conductor
Otto Klemperer. The latter misjudgment, as Culshaw noted in his memoirs, was not repeated by
Walter Legge of
EMI, who signed Klemperer up with great artistic and commercial success. Capitol further frustrated Culshaw by ignoring the impending introduction of
stereophony which the major companies were working on. Lewis invited Culshaw to rejoin Decca, which he did in the autumn of 1955.
Stereo and the Decca Ring Finding on his return to Decca that other recording producers were capably filling his former role, Culshaw concentrated on the emerging stereophonic recording technology, and stereo opera in particular. , Culshaw's chosen Brünnhilde By 1958 Decca, with its pre-eminent technical team (
The Times called them "Decca's incomparable engineers") was in a position to embark on a complete studio recording of Wagner's
Ring cycle. Decca decided to begin its cycle with
Das Rheingold, the shortest of the four
Ring operas. It was recorded in 1958 and released in the spring of 1959. Culshaw engaged Solti, the Vienna Philharmonic and a cast of established Wagner singers. The performance won enthusiastic praise from reviewers, and the engineers were generally acknowledged to have surpassed themselves.
The Gramophone described the recording quality as "stupendous" and called the set "wonderful … surpass[ing] anything done before." To the astonishment and envy of Decca's rivals the set outsold popular music releases such as those of
Elvis Presley and
Pat Boone. The cast included Flagstad in one of her last recorded performances, in the role of Fricka, which she had never sung on stage. Culshaw hoped to record her as Fricka in
Die Walküre and Waltraute in
Götterdämmerung, but her health did not permit it. His cast for the remaining three
Ring operas included
Birgit Nilsson,
Hans Hotter,
Gottlob Frick,
Wolfgang Windgassen,
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and
Régine Crespin, with even minor roles sung by such stars as
Joan Sutherland. In these productions Culshaw put into practice his belief that a properly-made sound recording should create what he called "a theatre of the mind". He disliked live recordings such as those attempted at Bayreuth; to him they were technically flawed and, crucially, were merely sound recordings of a theatrical performance. He sought to make recordings that compensated for the lack of the visual element by subtle production techniques, impossible in live recordings, that conjured up the action in the listener's head.
Britten, Karajan and others recorded for Decca in the 1960s Culshaw produced a series of Decca recordings of
Britten's music with the composer as conductor or pianist.
The Times described them as "a priceless heritage for posterity." Culshaw, who was then responsible for recordings in Vienna, was unavailable to produce that pioneering recording, which was also the first modern opera to be recorded in stereo: instead, he "planned it down to the last detail", and passed his detailed instructions to
Erik Smith, who produced the recording. Among the works Culshaw himself recorded with Britten were the operas
Albert Herring (1964), ''
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1967), and Billy Budd'' (1968). Culshaw wrote, "The happiest hours I have spent in any studio were with Ben, for the basic reason that it did not seem that we were trying to make records or video tapes; we were just trying to make music." Culshaw thought of all his recordings, that of Britten's
War Requiem was the finest. Culshaw produced many of the conductor
Herbert von Karajan's best-known operatic and orchestral sets, which remain in the catalogues six decades later. The opera sets include
Tosca,
Carmen,
Aida,
Die Fledermaus and
Otello; among the orchestral sets were
Holst's
The Planets and several Richard Strauss works including the then rarely heard
Also sprach Zarathustra. In the late 1950s Decca entered into a commercial partnership with
RCA, by which Decca teams recorded classical works in European venues on RCA's behalf. Among the recordings supervised by Culshaw for RCA were
Sir Thomas Beecham's lavishly re-orchestrated version of
Handel's
Messiah. Other artists with whom he worked for Decca and RCA included pianists such as
Wilhelm Backhaus,
Arthur Rubinstein and
Julius Katchen; conductors including
Karl Böhm,
Sir Adrian Boult,
Pierre Monteux,
Fritz Reiner, and
George Szell; and singers such as
Carlo Bergonzi,
Jussi Björling,
Lisa Della Casa,
Leontyne Price, and
Renata Tebaldi. ==Later years==