Monday, Jan. 01, 1940

Antique Voice

Greatest operatic tenor of the past century was tall, handsome, Polish-born Jean de Reszke, who retired in 1901. In the late 1890s, when Tenor de Reszke was at his peak, the phonograph was a scratchy-voiced toy. Said he: "Jean de Reszke will never be preserved on wax."

Jean de Reszke was preserved, nevertheless. While he sang his Tristans and Romeos on the Metropolitan Opera House stage, the Metropolitan's librarian, Lionel Mapleson, had been experimenting with a flimsy Edison cylinder machine, making squeaky little records for his own amusement. When he was through he had samples of most of the Metropolitan's glittering voices on wax cylinders, neatly filed and labeled.

Shortly before Recorder Mapleson died, in 1937, a deaf but diligent phonographic antiquarian named William H. Seltsam got permission to go through the Mapleson records. There, Collector Seltsam found not only peeping vocal relics of such golden-agers as Emma Eames, Johanna Gadski, Marcella Sembrich, but 16 records of the otherwise unrecorded* Jean de Reszke. Thrilled Phonographer Seltsam started raising money to re-record Mapleson's de Reszke samples on modern discs.

Last week, Seltsam issued to the public his first de Reszke discs: a part of the Forge Song from Wagner's Siegfried, a snatch of the aria O Paradiso from Meyerbeer's L'Africaine. Both records sounded as if Tenor de Reszke were singing under water during a hurricane. Nevertheless, Seltsam's fellow antiquarians strained their ears reverently at every foggy syllable.

* Except for a single privately recorded disc known to have belonged to Queen Alexandra of Britain.

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