The dawn of live recording: Lionel Mapleson and his
Edison cylinder machine
The Golden Age from Its Very
Earliest Days
As part of the Audio Encyclopedia available
from the House of Opera (see below), producer Mike Richter is
issuing what he calls 'replacement discs'. As the name implies,
these are designed to supplement or replace some of the larger and
more important anthologies that appeared during the LP era, the
logic being that over time records can become scratched, warped or
otherwise damaged or unplayable. The replacement discs are
designed to give the collector a 'second bite of the apple'
without having to expend the large sums of money it would cost to
re-purchase these sets, especially the ones that are out of print.
They also make for a very convenient way of quickly accessing
material from the original discs. There are currently two
replacement discs: the CD-ROM under consideration here, and
another devoted to the four-volume series 'The Record of Singing'
entitled 'Singing on
Record' (to be reviewed in the future).
This disc,
entitled
'Mapleson Cylinders and
some Wagner Collections', has two prongs.
First, it presents most of the various LP repackagings of the
Mapleson cylinders, the emphasis being on the six-record set
issued by the New York Public Library (NYPL) back in the mid-1980s
and still available. Second, it reissues three large sets of
Wagner excerpts that appeared during the LP era:
'Richard Wagner: Sein Werk
in dokumentarischen Aufnahmen' on Acanta,
the charmingly named
'Sänger auf dem
grünen Hügel' (Singers on the
Green Hill') on German EMI, and
'Wagner on
Record' on British EMI.
Since the disc begins with the Mapleson
cylinder issues, let's start there. First, a little background:
Lionel Mapleson was the Metropolitan Opera's librarian from the
1890s until he died in 1937. Between the years 1900 and 1904 he
had permission from the Metropolitan Opera to place, in the
prompter's box and later on a catwalk 40 feet above the stage, a
cylinder phonograph with which he recorded portions of Met
performances. Only a number of the cylinders he made have come
down to us today; in fact, the ones that do survive were generally
considered to be the 'failures' in terms of technical quality. The
best ones he took to London in the summers; they may still be
floating around somewhere and it is to be hoped that at least some
of them may resurface one day. The cylinders represent our only
recorded examples of some very important Met singers of the
period, notably Jean de Reszke, who was 'the' tenor before Caruso
((in 1905, de Reszke recorded for Fonotipia 'Salut, tombeau' from
Roméo et Juliette and 'O souverain, ô juge, ô
père' from Le Cid; when he heard the playbacks, he ordered
the masters destroyed). Unfortunately, the de Reszke cylinders are
pretty much worn down to a nub, and are among the most
unlistenable of the batch. The Maplesons also contain the only
surviving recordings of Milka Ternina, who sang Tosca at the first
London performance of Puccini's opera and who was Milanov's first
teacher. Another singer only represented on Maplesons is Emilio de
Marchi, the creator of the role of Cavaradossi; among other
things, we get to hear him here in two excerpts from Act II of
Tosca, including 'Vittoria! Vittoria!' Mapleson's recordings are
by far the earliest examples of live opera performances surviving
in sound so he is considered by many to be the 'father of the
pirates', even though he had the Met's permission to make these
records.
My first exposure to the Maplesons was by way
of some early LP transfers on the IRCC (International Record
Collectors' Club) label. My initial reaction to them was that the
surface noise was too great for me to derive any enjoyment, or
even any educational value, from the performances. However, my
ability to listen to old records has improved, and at the same
time more sophisticated means of retrieving the information on the
cylinders have been developed: the NYPL issue represented a step
forward over the IRCCs, and a small German company called
Truesound has presented most of the Maplesons of Lillian Nordica
in better sound yet.
When the NYPL issued the complete surviving
Maplesons, an essay by David Hall, included as part of the
wonderful accompanying booklet, suggested that the best way to
listen to them was over headphones, and I believe this remains
true for those hearing them on the CD-ROM. While I don't recommend
this method of listening to anybody whose tolerance of surface
noise is low (and certainly not to anybody who starts off with a
headache!), I have been able to get more out of the recordings
that way. To give an example, side 12 of the 6-LP set is the
appendix, where the producers put the selections whose surface
noise or other technical problems render them basically inaudible
or unlistenable, as well as the selections that were too obscure
to be identified. (There are also some Mapleson family recordings
made a few years after the Met experiments. They are charming in
their own way, although I am saddened to hear incompletely erased
Met performances in the background on one or two of them.) Among
the 'unlistenables' is a portion of the Dance of the Hours.
Listening to it over speakers I was not even able to tell what
piece of music it was, but over headphones I'm able to follow the
second half of the cylinder; the first half is still too noisy for
me to figure out where in the music I am.
On the CD-ROM, the Maplesons are arranged
alphabetically by composer and opera, and then in order of
placement of the excerpt in the opera. There are links in the
appropriate places on the index to the corresponding recordings on
IRCC for easy comparison; overall, there were five IRCC LPs
containing one or more Mapleson cylinders, and the three that were
completely devoted to Maplesons are represented here. For the
record, those are L-7004, L-7006 and L-7032; there were many
duplications among these three discs and all the duplications are
included here as well. (Of the two IRCC LPs not represented here,
L-7015 contains both Mapleson and non-Mapleson recordings, and
L-7028 contains only one Mapleson.) The IRCCs, since they were
made between 1938 and 1966, present the cylinders at an earlier
stage of their lives, and accordingly they sometimes preserve a
little better sound. However, the improved transfer techniques on
the NYPL set usually more than compensate for the difference in
the condition of the original cylinders. The listener can also
access an alternative indexing of the Maplesons by singer or, by
playing the CD-ROM on a machine such as the Philips Expanium or
the Sonic Blue RioVolt, can hear the recordings in the NYPL order,
beginning with the waltz from Faust. Following are the IRCC discs,
presumably also in the sequence contained on each individual
record, and then the three Wagner sets. (On the Expanium, the
Maplesons are in album 1, and the Wagner items are in album 2; the
RioVolt does not distinguish between albums.)
I was already familiar with the Maplesons from
having heard some of the IRCC transfers and owning the box set. On
the other hand, the only one of the three sets of Wagner excerpts
on this disc that I was aware of prior to getting this disc was
the British EMI set 'Wagner on Record', of which I have the
Seraphim pressings.
All three of these sets are valuable because
of the reminder they give that top-notch Wagner singing used to be
taken for granted. For example, one of the heldentenors in the
Mapleson set, one Emil Gerhäuser, was brought over to the Met
for a trial run, but the Met retained the option of canceling his
contract at any time during or after his first three appearances,
which it indeed did. On the basis of his Maplesons, I suspect that
if Gerhäuser were singing today, the Met and other companies
would be more than happy to have him on their roster. Along the
same lines, it's truly amazing how many really good Wagner singers
there were in the first half of the century, and it's interesting
to hear singers who were highly respected in their day and mostly
forgotten in ours. One such singer is Nanny Larsen-Todsen, mostly
remembered today through the words of a critic who, having heard
Flagstad early in her career, said something to the effect of
"She's okay, but she'll never be another Nanny Larsen-Todsen".
Flagstad, by the way, was excluded from the British EMI set for
contractual reasons, but thanks to the other two sets we do get to
hear her here in excerpts from Walküre and Siegfried, as well
as the five Wesendonk Lieder. And what would a historic Wagner set
be without Flagstad?
The two 'new' Wagner sets were a revelation to
me for a couple of reasons. While 'Wagner on Record' concentrated
on the 'big' numbers of the Wagner operas, I discovered from
listening to the Acanta and the German EMI sets that a number of
lesser-known excerpts also received recordings at one time or
another. For example, the Acanta set contains early 1940s
recordings of some of the Rhinemaidens' music from the first scene
of Rheingold, and the German EMI set, which also contains a 1904
recording of some of the Rhinemaidens' music from that scene (and
where one of the trio goes spectacularly flat at the end!),
contains as well a 1913 recording of Paul Knüpfer in the very
beginning of Act I of Parsifal.
Something else I discovered was that, contrary
to the general impression that Wagner recordings only really got
off the ground with the advent of electrical recordings, there
were quite a few acoustical recordings made of his music, and the
assiduous acoustical collector could assemble sizable chunks of
Wagner's operas, even before the era of the complete acts (three
of which are chronicled on the CD-ROM 'From Which We Came'), the
potted Rings (the earlier, acoustic one also finding a place on
that same CD-ROM) and the complete operas.
The transfers of all three sets maintain the
order of the respective LP editions. For the Acanta transfers, one
can listen to all the excerpts from a given opera in order by
clicking on 'playlist'; I would have welcomed a playlist for the
other two sets as well. Of course, one can listen to the
recordings in their original order without having to restart the
disc after each excerpt by playing the recordings on the Philips
Expanium or on an upgraded version of the Sonic Blue RioVolt (the
'out of the box' version only plays the first 255 files of any
given disc, and this set has 508 files.) And the computer listener
can also access the three sets combined, either alphabetically by
singer, or by opera and position of the excerpt.
Out of respect for the copyright of the
supporting texts and biographies from the original LP sets, these
are not reproduced on the disc. And there are some minor technical
glitches on the CD-ROM. In one or two instances, the IRCC
recordings don't line up perfectly with the NYPL ones, or a
playlist doesn't play exactly what it says it does. However, Mike
Richter considers his CD-ROMs to be works in progress, and thus he
welcomes suggestions about corrections and incorporates them in
future pressings of the same disc. By the time you read these
words, an upgraded and corrected version of this CD-ROM should be
available.
Even though 'Mapleson/Wagner' is called a
'replacement disc', there are likely to be few collectors who own
all the recordings represented here. Accordingly, this disc is
highly recommended for those interested in singing, and especially
Wagner singing (roughly one-third of the Maplesons are also of
Wagner), from the first half of this century. And an added bonus:
after listening to Mapleson cylinders for a couple of hours, any
other recordings are going to sound like audiophile pressings!
'Mapleson Cylinders and Some
Wagner Collections' is a CD-ROM published by Mike Richter, MW101
US$ 8.50.
Related website:
Additional information and a source for
ordering can be found at Mike Richter www.mrichter.com/
