Henry Fogel, general manager of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, has been collecting records for quite some decades now.
I can't think of any area of classical music that isn't well-represented in the collection; however, it is particularly strong in pre-war operatic and vocal recordings, the conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, and a lot of Scandinavian music you probably haven't heard of unless you collect it too.
Starting in the late 1980's, he began entering the collection into a computer database. After a marathon spree of cataloguing, during which we both typed in information from thousands of discs, the whole thing was done, and he has kept it up-to-date ever since as new acquisitions come in. Unfortunately, the one area that still hasn't been completely entered into the catalog is his opera aria recordings (discs generally devoted to one singer performing a variety of arias and songs), which are a major portion of the collection. He's not ruling out all hope of getting those finished too someday, but don't hold your breath. It is a formidable task, because each song on each disc must be typed in by hand, and some of the discs hold ten or twenty arias!
Periodically, I update this searchable WWW mirror of his database. Why might you want to search? Perhaps you want to experience a fine record collection vicariously. More practically, perhaps you need to know how long some piece of music lasts, or who has recorded it. Whatever your reason, if you use this page on a regular basis, please email me. I'm curious to know whether or not this is a useful resource.
The search is not very sophisticated right now -- just enter a string of characters and it'll give you every entry containing that string. Fancier (and speedier!) search and listing capabilities may be added in the future, depending on demand.
The format of search results should be self-explanatory. Note that DATE is the date the recording was made, whereas DATECAT is the date the recording was catalogued in this database. And FILEDUNDER tells you where this piece is located in Henry's record library (i.e., if this piece apppears on a multi-composer disc, you'd need to know which name the disc is filed under to physically find it on Henry's shelves).
Download a file:
(Back to Karl Fogel's home page.)