Listening to Melba…
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 thing 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.
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 recording 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 (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 what so attracted Melba.
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 and now a strange resurgence of vinyl and the apparent phasing out of CDs, are all a part of an inevitable evolution, perhaps.
In 1926, the company 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 record 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 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.
And so, let’s begin as close as we are able to come to the beginning of Melba’s recording career.
DISC ONE (Two tracks):
The first item here is an Eklipse compact disc published in 1992. It contains both those final Covent Garden microphone recordings and, at the other end of the chronology items recorded at the Metropolitan Opera in 1901. (It also includes Melba’s very last recording made in New York in December 1926. This is included here from a more recent transfer to CD and might be compared with the early digitization on the Eklipse CD.) The difference in sound quality is, of course (and as might be expected) very marked. In the 1901 recordings Melba’s voice cuts through the heavy ‘chip frying’ surface noise, common, though not always as pronounced, as it is on early wax, ‘field’ recordings. (It is sometimes said that too much digital interference with the old recording is likely to remove some of the qualities of the recorded voice.) If you are unfamiliar with the sound of recordings from the first decade or so of sound recorded history, then it is worth adjusting your ears. If your listening was conditioned in the years of relative high fidelity to a sound source, then patience is recommended.
The first example, then, was recorded from the orchestra pit (perhaps) at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. This is the trio finale of Faust (Charles Gounod). The other singers are Edouard se Reszke and Albert Saleza. The audible surface noise is characteristic of early cylinder recordings that usually rotate at about 160 revolutions per minute. (this is the unfamiliar surface noise you will hear.) Mapleson was able to make numerous recordings at the Met between 1901 and 1903. He caught the power, flexibility and range of Melba’s voice.
AUDIO 2: Eklipse, Second Example: Donde lieta usci. This is one of Mimi’s arias from La Bohéme, the Puccini opera that became standard repertoire for Melba. (Tr 4: 3 minutes 2 seconds)
At the other end of the Melba recording ‘chronology’, then, are the Covent Garden recordings that are also presented on this recording. Melba is assisted in this performance by three other Australian singers, in addition to Melba, who sang Mimi, the recording includes her fellow Australian artists Browning Mummery (Rudolpho), John Brownlee (Marcello) and Fred Collier (Schaunard).
This recording demonstrates the effect of a few technical difficulties experienced with early, live recording. Apparently, nobody bothered to set up an intercom between recording van, parked outside the Royal Opera House, and anyone inside the building who might have been able to cue the engineers to ‘start’ or to ‘stop’ recording, by signalling ‘Record’ of “stop recording, now’! Still, it’s a wonderful collection of historical sounds and includes a couple of speeches. That means we have access to Melba’s speaking voice. (OWLS might look more closely at these Covent Garden Farewell recordings as a group later.)
At her 1926 Covent Garden Farwell Concert Melba sang Act 2 of Romeo and Juliet, Act IV of Verdi’s Otello and Acts 111 and IV of the work she had made her own, La Bohéme. Because the recording apparatus was housed in a truck outside the Royal Opera House, there was minimal contact with the activity on the Covent Garden stage. As a result, there is occasional awkwardness about the start and finish of recordings. Romeo and Juliet was not recorded as the tenor (Romeo) was contracted to another recording company at the time. Our loss! However, we will be able to compare this extract with the 1910 American recordings.
(Audio 6, here).
Audio 3: Tr 1 Comin’ through the rye – 1 min 44 secs
This was, as far as we can tell, the very first published CD dedicated to Melba’s singing. It was made at the NFSA in 1988. It drew on recordings available in the Archive’s Hogarth-Melba Collection of (mainly) shellac discs Melba made between 1904 and 1926. This was the first of the Archive’s releases of re-mastered 78rpm recordings on CD. It was processed in the NFSA studios. Considerable effort was expended on determining the correct playback speed that was based on discovering the likely original pitch. NFSA sound engineer, Wanda Lazar played a crucial role in determining a variety of technical issues such as these.
Re-release of Disc Two (I996)
In 1996 the NFSA-mastered CD record was released for a second time under a new title, Hello Covent Garden. A note claims that it was produced by Kingfisher Records.
The original release had been from the NFSA and Larrikin. It was now a Warren Fahey product, the NFSA acknowledged in largely unaltered liner-notes. The original Larrikin Voice of Australia logo now a plain, single word, Larrikin. New information on the inlay card states that this is ‘A Peter Burgis Kingfisher Production’. Important as Peter had been to establishment of the national collection, he was not the producer of this disc. It is not clear where the new title Hello Covent Garden came from.
‘Comin’ through the rye’ is (obviously) available on both CDs.
Melba recorded several popular Scots songs, this one in 1904. This NFSA recording was the first CD to bring together twenty-one of Melba’s most popular arias and songs and was produced by the Archive in 1988.
On 27 September 1902 for her second encore at a Melbourne Town Hall concert, touchingly, Melba sang directly to her father - David Mitchell, a Scots emigrant to Australia - who was seated in the balcony. Mitchell had had a stroke at the railway station in Albury a week or two before, while waiting to greet his daughter to arrive there. (It was necessary to change trains in Albury.) A Victorian gauge train could carry a passenger from Melbourne to the Murray, where it was necessary to transfer to trains with the different NSW rail- gauge. Melba’s suggested that this was a sample of a ’song my father taught me’ for a giddy Melbourne press after the event.
DISC THREE (2001)
AUDIO 4: ScreenSound (2 CD Set Mi chiamano Mimi – complete): , Track 2
The second NFSA CD was released in 2002, when the Archive briefly carried a new name ScreenSound Australia. (It is included here out of chronological sequence in order to follow the Archive’s first Melba release.) For the second Melba CDs – there was a set of two CDs - original recordings were played in the Senate Chamber of Old Parliament House, Canberra on an HMV Re-entrant 202, a top-end domestic shellac disc machine. The sound issuing from the 1929 record player was then digitally recorded. The careful selection of items to record was dictated, to some degree, by the availability from the Archive’s collection, of discs that were not too worn. Those who engineered the transfers noted a considerable improvement in the spaciousness of the sound, especially in Melba’s low register.
The NFSA, then, took the opportunity to digitally record an His Master’s Voice (HMV) record player, playing the early discs, capturing to some degree what might have been heard in parlours where the piano had once been regnant. (Computer asks me if this should be ‘the piano once was pregnant’. So much for new technologies and artificial intelligence.)
The imaginative decision to re-record Melba from discs being played on an historical record player in an equally historical venue was a piece of archiving brilliance. The player was taken to the Senate Chamber in Old Parliament House (OPH), Canberra. Melba had sung the first verse of the national anthem from the front steps at the official opening of the building and the first Canberra sitting of Federal Parliament, in 1927. That was just a couple of years before the HMV machine used to record the ‘live’ playing was made.
His Master’s Voice (HMV) 2022 from an auction catalogue.
Melba studied La Bohéme and other operas by Puccini, with the composer. This version, then, is an acoustic recording, made in the USA in 1910. This performance, digitally recorded from that HMV record player, playing acoustically in the Senate Chamber of Australia’s Old Parliament House. The record player is an early recording on a state-of-the-art domestic gramophone. Excellent, comprehensive liner notes, both technical and historical, are provided with the CD.
The NFSA’s talented curatorial staff, added their combined considerable ability to that of the audio-technical staff (including Wanda Lazar, once again) and those responsible for publications. Bruce Skilton’s knowledgeable selection of material and his excellent notes add to the usefulness and enjoyment of these CDs. Only one example from the transfers have been included here. It is a little more from Melba’s La Bohéme. (Bruce’s has suggested that ‘Magdalene at Michael’s Gate’ [CD 2, Track 15 of the set.] is a Melba recording of exceptional quality and worth a listen.)
There had been precedents for re-recording from ‘old’ record players that were contemporary with the material being played. From the 1980s, for example, some of the output of historic and occasionally complete recorded repertoire of particular ‘vintage’ singers, such as Francesco Tamagno, was recorded from (as I recall) an EMG machine with a giant papier maché horn, by the Pearl and Opal companies. (For much of the 1980s and 1990s presentations at the Archive included a pre-microphone, acoustic disc played from an EMG record player. It was usually an Australian performance, the couple of metres of playback horn, impressing adults and children alike.
The NFSA undertook several experimental re-recordings from this machine in the later 1980s and 1990s. An account of some of this activity can be found in Archive sound engineer, Wanda Lazar’s essay ‘Around the Horn with Amy Castles’ in the Australasian Sound Archive journal, Number 5, April 1988.
This example of EMG record player has a smaller horn than the one held by the NFSA. With thanks to Tim Weeks (2025).
https://www.facebook.com/groups/108453762611462/posts/8805794626210622/
The following Youtube video is a useful overview of an EMG record player, playing and also a glimpse of how some listeners from the 1930s heard acoustically reproduced singing. A curspry glance at the internet offerings for EMG produced no Melba discs played on this machine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1Tl6ykXehg
DISC FOUR (Axis)
AUDIO 5: Home Sweet Home (Bishop), Axis CD, Sydney 1992 Track 23
This Axis CD appeared in 1996. It included the NFSA’s mastering of the programme drawn from the National Collection and with notes prepared for the original release in 1988.
There have been dozens of releases of common and occasionally rare Melba material. Over the years EMI produced multiple 78 shellac sets of Melba’s singing and these were followed by compilation on vinyl and then in 1992, this EMI Axis CD.
Most people who were born after WW2 might have learned to recognize Melba’s voice from their parents (and grandparents… and possibly their great-grandparents!) shellac 78s. If they were interested (captivated) they went on to buy long playing vinyl transfers. These recordings, remastered by EMI from 78 rpm shellac discs, had been issued on vinyl long playing discs earlier. The Axis CD was published in 1992. It includes 23 tracks, and positions Melba’s ‘usual’ final offering at concerts as its last item, ‘Home Sweet Home’.
DISC FIVE (Naxos)
The NAXOS company, aiming for complete edition of Melba’s known recordings released divides its transfers according to their North American or European origin. Often, she made several recordings of items that formed a substantial part of her opera and concert repertoire. These excellent audio-restorations and re-mastering are the work of Ward Marston.
NAXOS’s sound engineer, Ward Marston who is also credited as the producer of several Melba recordings, produced excellent result between 2002 and 2005.
AUDIO 6: Piangea cantando (Willow Song)Guiseppe Verdi, Otello. Complete American Recordings, Naxos, Track 3. (1910)
This aria was a part of the programme at Covent Garden on 8 June 1926. It catches something of the magical quality of Melba’s chest register and her easy access to a wide range of expertly pitched notes.
It is interesting make the comparison of this American acoustic recording from 1910 with that made with a microphone twenty-six years later at Covent Garden.
AUDIO 7: Piangea cantando (Willow Song) Covent Garden Farewell Track 1.
This (Audio 7, here) is the later recording. (1926)
The improvement in the sound quality is clear enough but something of the depth and resonance of the chest tones had diminished, perhaps. The sudden cut at the end is evidence of the pioneering ‘outside broadcasting’ developing for radio applied to documentary recording.
In 2008 a European company called Historic Masters published transfers taken from then recently discover ‘metal mothers (masters)’ of Melba’s 1904 discs and other later Melba material at EMI in Hamburg, Germany.
The disc and the accompanying notes are the work of Roger Niell, a longstanding friend of the NFSA, who has conducted research on Australian singers for scores of years.
AUDIO 8: Donde lieta usci. Once more, this is one of Mimi’s arias from La Bohéme, the Puccini opera that became standard repertoire for Melba. It is also the third of at least six performances of the aria Melba committed to cylinder or disc. At her 1926 Covent Garden Farwell Concert Melba sang Act 2 of Romeo and Juliet, Act IV of Verdi’s Otello and Act 111 and IV of the work she had made her own, La Bohéme. The recording apparatus was housed in a truck outside the Royal Opera House and had minimal contact with the activity on the Covent Garden stage. As a result, there is occasional awkwardness about the start and finish of recordings. Romeo and Juliet was not recorded as the tenor (Romeo) was contracted to another recording company at the time. Our loss! However, we are able to compare this extract with the 1910 American recordings (Audio 6, here).
Melba recorded performances Donde lieta usci in the following years: 1901 (USA), 1904 (UK) (twice, one unpublished), 1907 (USA) 1910 (USA), 1926 (UK). The date range of these recordings provides an excellent opportunity to listen for changes in her voice.
I have asked Roger Neill for an indulgence. The last track, recorded in London 17 December 1926, is the last recording Melba made. The popular African-American spiritual has retained its popularity since it first appeared in the 19thcentury. At 65 Melba voice is in remarkably fine fettle. It is sometimes argued that training by Mathilde Marchesi helped Melba to preserve the instrument she was gifted.
AUDIO 9: ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ with Harold Craxton on the piano, Historic Masters Track 17.
This performance is taken from a metal master discovered in Hamburg in the early 2020s. It is an exceptionally clear and clean sounding record. In a real sense, probably the best recorded Melba sounds.
Melba last commercial recording, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, then, was made in London 17 December 1926. The NFSA OWLS wish to thank Roger Neill and Historic Masters for permission to extract a track from their 2008 disc. The item can also be found on the Eklipse disc (Track 20…though the track list lists only 18 items.) Clearly the producers of the Eklipse CD, commencing with some of the earliest of Melba’s cylinder recordings, liked the symmetry of concluding with Melba’s final recording. This 2008 Historic Masters recording of Swing Low, has been made from pristine metal part used to press shellac discs (78s) discovered at EMI in Hanover quite recently. Roger Neill’s excellent booklet Melba’s First Recordings is a useful source of information regarding the making of the transfers and the original recordings.
And finally, Roger Neill also provided guidance for an important set of 4 compact discs of many of the ‘greats’ of Australian singer and, perhaps, one two of slightly lesser stature. Melba is given 3 tracks at the very beginning of the set. It is a treasure trove of Australian voices, and is still available to buy.
This boxed set in the Decca Eloquence series, a series produced by another friend of the NFSA, Cyrus Meher-Homji, was selected and assembled by Tont Locantro and Roger Neill. At the time of writing these notes it is still available in the ever-diminishing number of record shops that carry new CDs.
Select Publications
There are numerous books about Melba and the place amongst the singers of her time. These are just few of them.
Blainey, Ann, I am Melba: A biography, Black Inc, Melbourne 2008
Brownrigg, Jeff, The New Melba, Crossing Press, Sydney, 2006
Colson, Percy, Melba: an Unconventional Biography, Grayson, London 1932
Lazar, W “Around the Horn with Amy Castles’ in Australian Sound Archive, Number 5, April 1988 ISSN 0818-5646, Canberra
MacKenzie, B and F, Singers of Australia, Lansdown, Melbourne, 1967
Melba, Nellie, Melodies and Memories, Thorton Butterworth, London 1925
Moran, W, (Ed.) Nellie Melba: A Contemporary Review, Greenwood, Connecticut, 1985
Murphy, Agnes G, Melba: A Biography, Doubleday Page, New York 1909
Nichols, B, Evensong, Jonahan Cape, London 1932
Radic, Therese, Melba: the Voice of Australia, Macmillan, Melbourne 1986
Vestry, Pamela, Melba: A Family Memoir, Coldstream, Victoria 2000
Wainwright, R, Nellie: the Life and Loves of Dame Nellie Melba, Allen and Unwin, Melbourne, 2021
Wechsberg, J, Red Plush and Black Velvet, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1961
In addition, there are also thousands of articles and reviews, some of them gathered into William Moran’s book listed above. (For example, John Norton’s attack on Melba from 1902 is included there.) The National Library’s online access tool to newspapers and periodicals, Trove, is a good source of journalism in Australia.
