Word: mapleson
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...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...
...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 Saléza and Georg Anthes, and such better-preserved stars as Lillian Nordica, Emma...