Manuel De Falla plays De Falla 1912 Welte piano roll Aragonesa

Manuel De Falla plays his own composition Aragonesa from Pièces Espagnoles on a 1912 Welte piano roll. The recording -- issued on a Columbia Masterworks LP in 1950 -- was part of a pioneering effort spearheaded by Richard Simonton to preserve and disseminate the historic recordings captured on piano roll by the Welte-Mignon company. Between 1904 and 1932 Welte recorded prominent musicians and composers (such as Mahler, Debussy and Scriabin) playing their own works.

This recording is not of the highest sonic quality, and questions may yet remain about the accuracy of the roll playback. Nevertheless, what came to be known as the Columbia Masterworks series, "Great Masters of the Keyboard" constitutes an important landmark in the preservation of significant piano roll recordings that has continued since the end of WWII.

Below is a summary of how this De Falla Welte recording came to be realized on LP:

The Welte firm suffered heavily in World War II. After the war, Simonton wrote to Edwin Welte (1876-1958) in an attempt to locate music rolls Welte and Karl Bockisch (1874-1952. He and Edwin Welte registered the process for the production of the reproduction pianos as German Reich Patent 162.708) had lost nearly everything in the war, but had hidden some of the piano rolls in a barn in the Black Forest. In 1948 Simonton travelled to Germany and went with Welte to the remains of the factory, which had been completely destroyed by bombing in 1944. Nothing remained standing; only the hidden master rolls in the Black Forest had survived. Simonton worked with Welte and Bockisch to rescue the rolls. They played them on Bockisch's Steinway-Welte piano and Simonton recorded the sound onto a tape recorder. These tapes were released as LPs by Columbia Records in 1950.