Aug - AmericanRadioHistory.Com

RECORDS
The Golden Age Through Mapleson's Magic Horn
AMONG THE MOST celebrated inheritances
of the common past of opera and
the phonograph are the amateur recordings
made by Lionel Mapleson at the Metropolitan
at the turn of the century. Now they
have become available, for the first time, on
microgroove. Some present day opera
lovers will greet them with rapture. Others
will be disappointed, or simply baffled.
As to why this may be, there is a clue in
the jocular legend on the envelope of the
recording. "THIS IS NOT A HIGH
FIDELITY RECORD,' it says, and there is
cause for the undertone of asperity, for
with the coming of LP and the development
of more and more modern recording
techniques there has grown up a whole
new breed of vocal- record enthusiast, a
breed that not only questions the time -
honored assay of the Golden Age but refuses
the currency. And they write letters.
To one who grew up on a mixed but predominantly
acoustical record library, added
to it as time went by, and made the transition
to LP gradually, it is quite amazing
how many post -1948 devotees of opera -onrecords
regard the Golden Age as pretty
much a dead loss; they have tried to listen
to those old records, they say, but all they
can hear is rumble and distortion.
The discouraging thing is that so many
seem entirely unable to distinguish between
the quality of the singing and the quality
of the recording. Granted, the worse a
recording is technically the harder it is to
get any very complete idea of what a singer
was like, and there is always the unevaluatable
(except by second -hand authority)
factor X - the voice whose quality somehow
did not lend itself well to recording.
But there is in even the least successful
acoustical recording a residue of very positive
evidence that can be heard with a little
intelligent trying. After all, no one with
any sense refuses to look at Brady's Civil
War photographs because they are not in
Kodachrome or to see Garbo in Camille
because it was not filmed in Cinemascope.
Or perhaps they do. And perhaps they are
the same people as the opera enthusiasts
who will have nothing to do with recordings
such as these.
Even as Golden Age acousticals go, these
fragments are very special. Perhaps the
most fascinating single thing about them is
the fact that they were made during
actual opera -house performances. In 1900,
Thomas A. Edison gave a cylinder- recording
machine to Lionel Mapleson, the
Metropolitan Opera orchestra librarian. He
kept it in the opera house and during 19or,
19oz, and 1903 cut cylinders during performances,
a couple of minutes at a time,
from a point high in the wings. Considering
the distance from the stage to the
acoustical horn, it is amazing that he got
anything at all; but though the original
cylinders did not give back a very loud
signal, he got an amazing lot. Subsequently,
the cylinders were played and replayed,
and apparently not always handled with
the greatest care. Some of them developed
grindings and thumpings over and above
56
the normal complement for hill- and -dale
recordings. But, as reproduced by the International
Record Collectors' Club, first
on 78s, and now - with the music brought
forward into somewhat surer audibility -
on LP, the results are sometimes badly
flawed, but always worth hearing.
The general effect is of listening from
backstage, through a door that keeps suddenly
opening and closing, to bits of pieces
of performances. The vantage point is at a
little distance from the singers, and they
Mapleson with the acoustical gramophone Edison gave him.
seem to be heard through a certain amount of
backstage clatter; sometimes they move out
of the line of hearing, and sometimes the
noise obscures the voices. But, mostly, they
can be heard quite well enough for the
listener to get a very definite sense of personalities
and occasionally of the full
impact of virtuosity that, in terms of the
opera house today, is quite literally beyond
the wildest imaginings.
In a sense even
more striking, from the technical point of
view, is the full orchestral sound that somehow
managed to make its way through the
little neck of the recording horn when all
was going well with the machine -suggesting
that the old -time engineers were
quite wrong in thinking that even 1900
acoustical equipment could not carry the
weight of instrumental sonorities.
In fact, all of these factors combine to
make one of the most impressive bands on
this record - the opening of Pagliacci, Act
II. The opening bass drum sounds like
just a resonant thump, but then the orchestra
and chorus play and sing so superbly
well under Philippe Flon (who ever heard
of him ?) and Antonio Scotti's Tonio has
such immense vigor and brio that the
whole thing takes fire as few Pagliacci performances
ever do, or ever could have.
Another wonderful ensemble (again with
Flon conducting) is the Act II Rataplan
from La Pille du Régiment, with Charles
Gilibert doing a really fabulous job in the
buffo part, Thomas Salignac (one, with
Jean de Reszke, Albert Saléza, and Georg
Anthes of the otherwise unrecorded pre -
Caruso tenors represented here) as Tonio,
and Marcella Sembrich rattling off the
coloratura with a style and attack that make
memories of Lily Pons seem terribly pale
by comparison. The Wagner - including
Jean de Reszke's Siegfried (his only recording
apart from the L'Africaine fragment
that is, similarly, Lucienne Bréval's only
one, in spite of her thirty-year reign at the
Paris Opéra) -comes out less well.
The real stunners of the whole record
are the four excerpts from the Act III
Valentin -Marcel duet from Les Huguenots,
Reszke, low E -fiat and all, and even more
the fabulous bit from the
Queen's part, in which,
out of an awful thumping
and grinding noise,
Nellie Melba's voice suddenly
gleams through,
free and full and sure as
she hurls it up an impossible
arpeggiated scale,
with full resonance, ending
on a B that rings in
the ear for seconds after
she has taken the cadence.
Mapleson left the
needle in the groove, and
just as the cylinder ends
the house roars into
applause. And it damn
well should have. No
Golden Age, with Melba,
Sembrich, Calve',
Gadski, Nordica, and
Bréval, to name only
sopranos, and with Schumann -Heink and
Louise Homer and Mathilde Bauermeister
singing Valkyries? Who doubts,
let him listen. To those who care
about singing, not just about singers, this
disk is essential. JAMES HINTON, JR.
ECHOES OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF
OPERA
Fragments of performances recorded in the
Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in
1901 and 1903. Donizetti: La Fille du
Régiment. Verdi: La Traviata. Leoncavallo:
Pagliacci. Meyerbeer: L'Africaine:
Les Huguenots. Wagner: Tristan und
Isolde: Lohengrin: Die Walküre; Siegfried.
Gounod: Faust.
Marcella Sembrich (s), Nellie Melba (s),
Johanna Gadski (s), Lillian Nordica (s),
Emma Calve (s), Lucienne Bréval (s);
Ernestine Schumann -Heink (c), Mathilde
Bauermeister (ms), Louise Homer (c),
Marie van Cauteren (ms), Thomas Salignac
(t), Carlo Dani (t), Georg Anthes
(t), Jean de Reszke (t), Albert Alvarez
(t), Albert Saléza (t), Andreas Dippel
(t), Antonio Scotti (b), Giuseppe Cam -
panari (b) , David Bispham (b) , Charles
Gilibert (b), Edouard de Reszke (bs), and
numerous others. Metropolitan Opera
Chorus and Orchestra, Philippe Flon, Luigi
Mancinelli, Alfred Hertz, Walter Damrosch,
Armando Seppilli, tonds.
INTERNATIONAL RECORD COLLECTORS'
CLUB IRCC L -7006. to -in. $4.00. (Avail-
able from the club, 3 t8 Reservoir Avenue,
Bridgeport 6, Conn. Inquiry as to shipping
details should be made in advance.
HIGH FIDELITY MAGAZINE