The first recording, which was distorted, was of a child’s voice. The child was speaking to whoever was listening and wished them a Merry Christmas. The second recording, though still noisy, captured the end of the second act of “Aida,” sung by German singer Johanna Gadski at the Metropolitan Opera House in the spring of 1903.
The third recording was the clearest yet. It was the waltz from “Romeo and Juliet” from the Met, sung by Australian soprano Nellie Melba.
The recordings were found at the New York Public Library in a conference room. They were dug up from a much older source: wax cylinders. These recordings were made in the late 1800s and were made by Lionel Mapleson, a librarian at the Metropolitan Opera. He recorded both opera performances he saw as part of his job and the everyday life of his family.
The library is preserving audio recordings on wax cylinders. Some of these recordings have been around for a long time, and some are new recordings. The library is going to digitize these recordings so that they can be accessed and used by people in the future.
The machine will allow the library to play a few broken Mapleson cylinders. Nobody alive has ever heard them, so this might be a chance to hear something new from the earliest moments in recording history.
The Mapleson cylinders were originally in the library’s collection, but a new batch was recently donated by Alfred Mapleson, the Met librarian’s great-grandson. This donation was accompanied by a collection of diaries, written by Lionel Mapleson, that chronicled both his daily life and the Metropolitan Opera’s calendar. The diaries provide extra context to both Mapleson’s audio recordings and the broader world of New York opera. For example, one entry from New Year’s Day in 1908 noted the “tremendous reception” for a performance by Gustav Mahler. Another described the time that Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, “in rage,” dismissed his orchestra because of noise on the roof.
The diary is very important because it gives us a detailed look at Bob Kosovsky’s life in both New York and England, since he went back to visit his family every summer.
The library got a machine from its creator, Nicholas Bergh, last spring. This machine is from the 1800s and it was used to record Western music. Nicholas Bergh says that this machine is very special because it was used to document what was happening in theaters in the 1800s.
Alfred Mapleson contacted the library about the diaries and cylinders from his great-grandfather, which had been stored away for years in his mother’s basement. They were transported to the library in a truck that was kept cool, and they are now stored in acid-free cardboard boxes to protect them from damage.
The cylinders that were once available to the library were transferred to magnetic tape in the 1980s and released as part of a six-volume LP set. After that, the cylinders were returned to the Mapleson family, while the library’s larger collection stayed with them. However, Wood said that people all over the world still believe that a new transfer of the cylinders would reveal more audio details than the previous ones.
The phonograph was a device that records sound onto wax cylinders. The Endpoint machine uses a laser to create a detailed imprint of the music onto the wax, without damaging the physical structure of the cylinders. This allows the machine to play recordings that are missing pieces or have broken shards, which would not be possible with a traditional phonograph.
The library is working to digitize both the cylinders and the diaries. It wants to make them available to the public, but it’s not sure when it will be able to do that. The non-Mapleson cylinders in the library’s collection are also eligible to be digitized, but that process will be decided based on requests from certain people. The library’s engineers are shared across departments, and there is a backlog of thousands of requests.
The library has a lot of different ways of storing information, including wax cylinders, magnetic tape, and vinyl records. Recently, the library was able to get a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help digitize its magnetic tape archives. And the library is in talks with Bergh about a new machine that can play back wire recordings, which are a type of audio recording from the 1950s. The library estimates that there are about 32,000 lacquer discs that are at “very high risk of deterioration” and that need to be digitized.
Libraries are interested in books, newspapers, and other paper items, but they also want to preserve sound recordings. This is allowing them to invest in digitizing these items.
Alfred Mapleson said that he was happy to use his family’s inheritance to do good things. The cylinders were previously part of the Mapleson Music Library, a family-owned business that rented sheet music, among other things, to performers. But the business liquidated in the mid-1990s, and the cylinders sat untouched in his mother’s basement.
The museum cares about its collections and wants to make sure that they stay safe and accessible to the public. They don’t want to let the collections go to a private collector, where they might be lost or damaged.
His great-grandfather’s archives had given him a lot to think about. His wife had gone through the diaries and pointed out the similarities between living family members and their ancestors. He noted, with some awe, how his grandfather’s voice – the one wishing a Merry Christmas – resembled his own children’s voices. But it was time to pass everything on, and he said he had no interest in taking back the materials once the library had completed digitizing everything.
“It’s in better hands at the New York Public Library,” he said. The recordings had originated at the Metropolitan Opera; now, they would reside nearby forever. “Let’s keep it in New York, because this is where it all happened. I like that idea.”