Talk story about turn-of-the-century recordings of the Metropolitan Opera, made on an Edison Home Phongraph by the Met's company librarian, Lionel Mapleson. He began his work on Jan. 16, 1901 & abandoned his hobby in 1903. His legacy, 135 wax cylinders from the golden age of opera, was assembled over a 25 year period at the New York Public Library & the sounds to be heard on those cylinders were recently issued as a 6-record set by the Library's Rodgers & Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound. The Mapleson cylinders are unique in that they provide the only live stage performances that have survived from the first decade of the century. They provide the only known records of Milka Ternina, a Croatian soprano; Emilio De Marchi, an Italian tenor; & Jean de Reszke, a Polish tenor Tom Owen & David Hamilton, who produced the album with David Hall, discussed the technical difficulties of transferring the sound on cylinders to a modern tape deck. "Voices in those days had more sound-pressure level than their modern counterparts," Mr. Owen said. "I spent 1 1/2 years doing acoustical analyses of these cylinders and I find that when I compare the results with modern test cylinders, I find that singers in the 1900's projected better from a technical standpoint than singers do now... Those live performances are much better than most of the recent material that I work with, so they must have been doing something right."
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