Listening to Melba…

Part One of Two

Listening to Melba… a brief review of the voice recordings on compact disc, 100 Years after her Covent Garden Farewell where she made some of her last recordings. This article has been written to accompany OWLS presentations about Melba’s life and career. It gives ready access to things that might (though not necessarily) be difficult to find in a Google or other internet search. Having several examples available in one place might encourage hesitant people to listen. 

What follows here is a brief introduction to some of the recordings of Dame Nellie Melba. It commences with the Lionel Mapleson cylinders made at the Metropolitan Opera in 1901/1902 and finishes with Melba’s Covent Garden Farewell, one hundred years ago on 8 June, 1926. It will be a useful reminder of the great singer’s contribution to an international awareness of Australia and Australians.

The year 1926 saw Melba’s Farewell to the Covent Garden opera stage and, in effect, her farewell to opera. (Late in that year she made her last sound recording.) To celebrate the centenary of these events, the NFSA Owls has assembled this overview of some of the compact disc recordings of Melba’s voice from some of the earliest to the last attempt to capture it. It seems likely that in the late 1890s an entrepreneurial sound recordist, Gianni Bettini made a few Melba cylinders, though none of these appears to have survived. (That might change.)

Early in 1901 another man with a primitive domestic sound recording apparatus - the Metropolitan Opera’s librarian, Lionel Mapleson - captured some of the singing from live performances at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York.  These recordings include rarities such as Melba’s essaying Marguerite de Valois air from Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. It is also interesting to hear something of the power of Melba’s voice when singing with a tenor and baritone in the Finale from Faust (Charles Gounod)

In addition, recordings made in 1926 at Covent Garden, toward the end of Melba’s life, provide an opportunity to hear Melba’s voice as it was captured in some of the earliest use of a microphone. And, we are lucky enough to have access to recently discovered well-preserved metal parts that were a component of the pressing process for shellac and (later) vinyl records. 

Many of these performances have been released in audio formats that pre-date the CD. The NFSA used examples from the Archive’s Hogarth Melba Collection to make the master for the first Melba CD in 1988. This selection is an overview of the CD’s that have followed, culminating in Melba’s First Recordings.

As shops sell diminishing numbers of compact discs and CD players are no longer ‘standard’ in motor cars, there is value in examining what has been available to listeners in the several decades, just passed. CD players have been customary pieces of equipment in vehicles for about forty years, from about 1980 to 2020. But in homes and cars, they have been replaced with connections for pen drives and internet access on computers.  

At the centenary of Melba’s Covent Garden Farewell, is useful to undertake a short critical survey of Dame Nellie’s singing, recorded on the technology as it became available to her near the peak of her powers as a singer, especially in the first couple of decades of the 20th century. After initial resistance she felt that there might be some use in preserving samples of her singing for students to study when she was not present. (She even made a few recordings of vocal exercises to augment songs and aria she had already recorded.) 

The history of sound recording is marked by evolving fidelity to the sound source. 

Initially, Melba rejected attempt to secure and fix her singing. (It is said that she asked that recordings made for Bettini in New York in the middle-1890s be destroyed, and that she was dissatisfied with the early discs made in 1904. The latter might be useful, she is supposed to have already noted, as adjuncts to teaching vocal arts.

The Gramophone and Typewriter Company (later HMV and then EMI), in the year that Melba endorsed the notion sound recordings might preserve something of her vocal quality made an released a special Melba record player. In the fashion of the times, it was probably used to attract Melba to the G and T company… and the ploy worked. This video from a North American collector, illustrates and demonstrates, perhaps, what so caused Melba to change her mind.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWxPYIln2lc

Changes in how sounds are recorded and disseminated has shown steady progress over the years… the transition from shellac 78s in the 1950s and 60s to vinyl long playing discs, the CD supplanting vinyl in the 1980s. The resurgence of vinyl and the apparent phasing out of CDs, are all possibly a part of an inevitable evolution, though the move seems likely to be driven by some sort of commercial imperative.

In 1926, the company that became (I think) EMI, determined to capture something of a voice that had entertained and sometimes astonished the world. It was likely to be the last opportunity to secure the most up-to-date and hence technologically advanced recordings possible at the time. So, to mark that innovative thinking and Melba’s farewell to the opera stage, we are able to trace her progress in the sound recording industry with reference to the remastering of early recordings to make them available to new audiences. Often that meant various sorts of filtering out of surface noise. At times, there have been efforts at digital reconstruction. And also, there have been attempts at a sort of minimal interference with the ‘original’ sound: playing records of historically ‘correct’ record players (that were roughly contemporary with the discs being played on them). There is one example here, though the CD catalogues once had numerous records where a digital recording of an old record player playing vintage records were offered as some sort of access to the close hearing of the original recording.

But why might we bother listening to heritage material such as the tracks available here?

Part of the answer is to do with Melba’s national and international significance. There is little doubt that Melba was the first Australian singer to become very well-known on the majority of the World’s continents. We might even say that she was the first internationally known Australian. First, it was her singing in live performances (especially opera) that established her fame. This was followed towards the end of her career as a recording artist.