TIME CAPSULE UNCAPPED

posted by James Reel

Have you read about those acoustical recordings, mostly vocal, buried in a time capsule at the Paris Opera a century ago, recently unearthed and being prepared for issue on an EMI CD? They document the work of Enrico Caruso, Nellie Melba, a prime Parisian wind band and other performers. It isn’t as though the recordings have been missing for a hundred years; most were commercially available at the time. But the sound quality of these unworn copies is much better than you’ll find on other surviving versions (although there’s a great deal of hiss). If you’d like to sample the recordings before the CD comes out, visit this French EMI site and click on the images. The performers and compositions will be identified in French on a little bar above the graphics as you roll your cursor over them.

Listening to old recordings like these, you can realize how free and personal interpretations were back then, compared to today’s nose-glued-to-the-score practice; but you can also hear how technical standards of performance have improved in the interim. Some of the professional singing on the old recordings sounds amateurish compared to what you can hear today in any music school or conservatory.