Word: mapleson
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...