Voices from the Past

It was just after the turn of the century, in the golden age of U.S. opera. On the stage of the Metropolitan the great Australian-born Soprano Nellie Melba was singing Marguerite's spinning-wheel aria in Gounod's Faust. In midphrase Nellie was interrupted by the clatter of half a dozen wax cylinders which smashed down one after the other from the fly floor high above the stage. There, in brown suit and wing collar, crouched a spidery little man over an Edison cylinder gramophone with a horn almost as big as he was. Although he lost the Melba recording he was making that evening, the fruits of many a similar recording session have amazingly survived, have been released on two LP records in a series called Echoes of the Golden Age of Opera.

Waxworks. The recorder of the famous echoes was longtime (48 years) Metropolitan Opera Librarian Lionel Mapleson, an Englishman whose father was librarian to Queen Victoria. Mapleson set out in 1901 to put on wax live performances by all of the opera's greatest stars. More enthusiastic than informed, he at first propped his giant horn in the prompter's box, where it was easily visible to the audience. Then he decided to move it up into the flies, where it was no longer visible, though the grinding of the cylinders was still clearly audible to the singers on the stage. Mapleson ran his machine intermittently for two or three minutes, shutting it off when the singers below moved out of the horn's direct line of hearing. He also lost many a fine aria simply because of the delicacy of his machine: the slightest vibration in the vicinity was enough to break the fine connection of needle with wax.

In the hope of interesting a Victor affiliate in his work, Mapleson sent many of his best cylinders to England, where they were promptly ruined by the climate. The ones he kept were played so often by the singers themselves that they were nearly worn out by the time Mapleson gave up recording (in 1903) and stored them away. The dust-covered cylinders were unearthed in 1937, shortly before Mapleson's death, by a diligent phonographic antiquarian named William H. Seltsam, of Bridgeport, Conn., and some were transferred to 78-r.p.m. disks. These, plus several other Mapleson cylinders never before released, are on a new LP put out by the International Record Collectors' Club, of which Seltsam is founder and president.

Not Hi-Fi. The Mapleson recordings are not for the casual listener or the audiophile ("This is not a high fidelity record," says the album jacket testily). Most of the performances are so badly flawed with a variety of grindings, thumpings and banshee wails that the singers and orchestra are barely audible. Solos break off at tantalizing spots. But for all that, the records offer invaluable testimony to the student of singing on the style, range and phrasing of such otherwise unrecorded golden-agers as Jean De Reszke, Albert Saleza and Georg Anthes, and such better-preserved stars as Lillian Nordica, Emma Eames, Johanna Gadski, Marcella Sembrich and Antonio Scotti. Every so often, the patient listener is suddenly rewarded by hearing the great voices shine through the surface fog--Scotti in Act II of Pagliacci, Melba in the Lucia di Lammermoor Mad Scene--with a beauty and authority that no failings of Mapleson's recording technique can mask.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.