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It sounds like a thriller: an international network of opera fans exchanged pirated copies. These illegally recorded tapes are stored in the Bern University of the Arts. From a legal point of view, this is not unproblematic.
When you think of music pirates, the first thing that comes to mind is the great bootleg albums of pop and rock history – illegal concert recordings by artists from Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix to David Bowie.
But there were also bootleggers among opera fans: Leroy Ehrenreich was one of them. For 40 years he went to the opera house three times a week: to listen, to watch – and to record.
What is a bootlegger?
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“Bootleg” literally means boot leg and is a term from American Prohibition. It was established over 100 years ago when the sale and consumption of alcohol was banned in the United States. Back then, people smuggled the bottles in their boots.
Today, a bootlegger is someone who makes illegal recordings: at concerts, in the cinema or in the opera house.
A fascination turned into a crime
Ehrenreich lived from 1929 to 2016. As the adopted child of Jewish parents in the Bronx, he was infected by the opera bug as early as the 1950s. Leroy Ehrenreich was fascinated by the operas and wanted to prevent them from disappearing from cultural memory.
At that time there were no studio recordings on vinyl, so he made recordings himself. Most of them at the New York City Opera. At first with a tape machine. So he sat in his black raincoat on his seat in the opera house to hide the device. Pretty noticeable.
A real treasure, but illegal
But nobody said anything. In this way, Ehrenreich was able to amass 10,000 hours of secretly recorded opera over the years. He and a network of like-minded people shared the recordings with one another. There are also recordings from Europe and Russia.
After Ehrenreich’s death, this treasure should be made accessible for research – according to his last wishes. But no one in New York could record Ehrenreich’s archive. Nobody wanted to commit.
How the tapes got to Bern
The son of his estate administrator was working at the Bern University of the Arts (HKB) at the time. And so 50 cases with tapes, cassettes, programmes, books and newspaper reviews finally made it to Switzerland.
The head of the Ehrenreich Collection is Laura Moeckli. She and her team digitized the tapes and wrote a catalog for them. Moeckli says: “It’s a huge treasure. But unfortunately illegal. We can’t release it.”
A virtual tour of the collection
Research work under difficult conditions
This means that anyone who wants to do research on it would have to travel to Bern, even though the recordings would be available in digital form. “If we forward these recordings, they can theoretically be copied countless times. We don’t want that,” explains Moeckli. And it would be illegal.
Swiss law provides that anyone who distributes illegally made recordings is liable to prosecution: fines and imprisonment of up to one year. The BUA, however, is not responsible for the storage, since research on the objects is associated with scientific goals.
This makes research on the recordings difficult – especially international ones. After all, a project of the Swiss association Memoriav is running. The association takes care of the audiovisual heritage of the country. With regard to the Ehrenreich Collection, this means: you want to know which Swiss singers, conductors and composers performed or were performed in New York at the time?
Other projects in Bern are to follow: for example, about the history of the New York City Opera, which went bankrupt in 2013. Ehrenreich’s opera treasure contains many more treasures.
Tags: Bootleggers opera house illegal pirated copies opera fans ended Bern Culture