Word: mapleson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
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...
Security. The ethics of Jane Mapleson (Margaret Anglin) include the familiarly dangerous tenet that evil may be conveniently forgotten when it is not publicly known. Thus when James Mapleson's pregnant paramour commits suicide, Mrs. Mapleson commits perjury in the Coroner's Court and saves her husband. But the remorseful fellow insists on babbling about his sins to his wife and begging her forgiveness. Disgusted, she explains to him her diabolical philosophy of security. Then Jim Mapleson crawls off and shoots himself. The play peters out in a subplot...
...satire, it is not surprising that this has entrenched itself as one of the very best of comic operas. It was a stock opera with such companies as the Boston Ideals and Emma Abbott's. It was last sung in Boston, as a grand production, by the Mapleson company. The Baker Opera Company, with William Wolff, gave its last performance here two years ago at the Bowdoin Square Theatre. The hero, Fra Diavolo, is a brigand, who is discovered in the first scene personating the Marquis of San Marco, in which disguise he has been tracking the course...