'Uncle Josh and the Insurance Company' Cal Stewart
1904
2:24
America started off with barnyard humor, ‘cause that’s about
all there was at the beginning – both as subject and stage. Americans were
farmers principally for generations, and the minute port towns began to grow
into cities, the classic division and mutual suspicion between country and city
folk, long documented in human history, spring up here as well.
“Rubes” were figures of fun, and often were possessed in
their native habitat with what used to be termed “foxiness” – the capability of
outwitting the city slicker. Here lie the reputations of the “sharp” Yankee
peddler and his battles of wit with his peasant customers, and the archetypal
“Brother Jonathan” of New England.
An epitome of this tradition is Cal Stewart (1856-1919), who
worked a prolific and widely loved hybrid of standup comic and village sage,
Uncle Josh Weathersby, an inhabitant of the imaginary Punkin Center, a hamlet
located somewhere in the then-wilds of New England. In countless stage
performances and more than 100 recordings, the latter on cylinder and disc
between 1897 and 1919, Stewart honed his jovial, skeptic, gentle, wisecracking
persona.
He stole it from someone else. Denman Thompson wrote a
sketch for vaudeville in the character of Joshua Whitcomb, a “hayseed” who goes
to the big city. He first performed it in Pittsburg in 1875, and later
developed it into a popular four-act play, “The Old Homestead.” Read RandyMcNutt’s marvelous essay, which accompanies the NRR listing, right here for complete details. Stewart evidently lifted the concept and adapted it to his
own purposes, creating a whittling, tobacco-chewing, cracker-barrel wit that made him a major draw for
decades.
It was a style most humorists of the time were using.
Whether termed rural humor or dialect humor or ethnic humor, people such as
Washington Irving, Mark Twain, “Artemus Ward” (Charles Farrar Browne);
“Petroleum V. Naseby” (David Ross Locke), and Bret Harte all practiced in this
vein. Most of it, Twain aside, is not that funny now, but this was the
gut-bustin’, knee-slappin’ kind of stuff that made Lincoln delay Cabinet
meetings.
Stewart’s Uncle Josh represents common values – he is an
advocate of plain horse sense, an enemy of pretension, and a scoffer at
anything new-fangled. He functions in the Bergsonian sense of humor as a social
corrective. His humor reinforces the status quo, and articulates what the
attitude of the “normal” person inside it should be. And in truth, at the time
who could make a living creating transgressive comedy, something no family
would buy and play in their home?
Stewart has many descendants. Will Rogers, Charley Weaver,
Lum and Abner, Minnie Pearl, Judy Canova, Parker Fennelly’s “Titus Moody” radio
character, the “Ma and Pa Kettle” movie series, Jerry Clower, the antics of
CBS’s 1960’s-era rural comedy shows, TV’s syndicated “Hee Haw,” Jeff Foxworthy,
Garrison Keillor, and many more take up the Western/Southern/”hillbilly”/Far
North axis of American rural comedy history.
Here Stewart recycles the old “barrel of bricks” routine,
which has been traced by Snopes back to at least 1895. In it, a man hoisting
bricks in a barrel gets hurt about five different ways. Here’s the routine:
In keeping with his persona, Uncle Josh frames it with
another joke about the expense, impractability, and unreliability of an
insurance company. He’s a master storyteller, and he stands equidistantly
between Twain and Keillor as a brilliant practitioner of extemporaneous comedy,
something developed roughly and varied in each telling. Uncle Josh’s
soliloquies rises above mere satire by poking as much fun at himself as at
anyone else.
Whether or not you find his signature chuckle ingratiating
or not, listeners will find its homey gags and platitudes a familiar template.
The
National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all
the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up
next: Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise Speech.
In 1903, a cultural arms race was on. The Victor and
Columbia recording companies were battling it out for a dominant share of the “high-end”
record market. At the height of the enthronement of Western culture as a beaux
ideal, opera was considered the most prestigious of the arts. Its combination
of music and drama was seen as the ultimate synthesis of forms, and opera
singers were globally-known celebrities in a manner not seen again until the
days of Pavarotti.
This recording was part of a set of releases by seven
Metropolitan Opera stars – Suzanne Adams, Antonio Scotti, Giuseppe Campanari,
Charles Gilbert, Marcella Sembrich, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, and Edouard de
Reszke. The Victor company had sent its representative to Europe to obtain
recordings by continental opera stars. Columbia beat them to the punch by
commissioning recordings in New York. The singers were well paid, and the discs
were correspondingly more expensive. Avid listeners shelled out $2 a disc,
twice what the going rate was for a record in 1903, and the equivalent of more
than $50 today.
De Reszke was a bass from Warsaw; his strong singing and acting
skills propelled him through an illustrious three-decade career (he often sang
with his brother, the equally talented and noted tenor Jean). He sings this
aria from Act III of the once-popular romantic/comic opera “Martha” by
Friedrich von Flotow, which premiered in 1844. The bass plays the hero’s best
friend, and gets to implement a little comic relief here and there. It’s a
drinking song, rendered here in Italian, as many German and French operas of
the 19th century found themselves translated into Italian for the convenience
of the predominantly Italian-trained singers.
Though Columbia won the battle, Victor won the war. Under
its Red Seal label, most of the first half of the century’s great artists would
choose to record for them – starting with its superstar, Enrico Caruso. Caruso
would make “Martha” a huge hit for the Met in 1906, and very familiar Flotow
melodies such as “Ach, so fromm” and “the Last Rose of Summer” would become
familiar cultural staples of the period.
As an aesthetic record, it’s lacking. The same year de
Reszke recorded his three sides, of which “Canzone” is his best effort, he
retired from singing. His breath support is wobbly, his tone is flat. Only his
phrasing and trills remain to remind us of what he must have sound like at the
peak of his career.
The
National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all
the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up
next: ‘Uncle Josh and the Insurance Agent.'
The Funai Electric Company of Japan makes its last Video
Cassette Recorder, and the last one for the foreseeable future, in August. It’s
over.
The first videocassette recording of a film was released in
1967. Starting in 1977, the Video Home System consumer-level analog recording
tape was the film-industry standard. In 1997, the DVD began encroaching on the
VHS tape’s territory. The last major-market film (and future trivia answer), “Eragon,”
was released on VHS in 2007, and a year later, tape manufacture ceased
entirely.
Now whatever is left out there on magnetic video tape that
is playable will be stuck in a world that’s rejected its playback technology.
Like the V-disc, the 8-track tape, the player piano roll, the filmstrip, and
the LaserDisc, it has dead-ended, become a sport in the genetic sense of the
word. It’s a now-pointless mutation.
VHS tapes were essential to a very particular kind of
understanding of film. Not since the advent of art houses and repertory cinemas
on the American coasts in the late 1950s had such a stretch on unseen films
been found, easily accessible in the open market.
We viewers were previously subject to the imperatives of the
market. In childhood, there were a few enthusiasts who wrangled 16-millimeter
films, but these were few and far between, and well-off. We could find some of
the output of the famous Blackhawk Films on 8-millimeter and Super 8 (Super 8!)
at the local libraries, and we owned an old 8-millimeter job that played our
family home movies, and Blackhawks of Chaplin, Abbott and Costello, and Tarzan.
Otherwise, first-run films came and went, and if they were
good but not popular, you might never see them again. Broadcast television, the
first great secondary market, was a yawning abyss of hours to be filled, and
old movies filled them. “The Wizard of Oz” played every Easter, Christmas
movies at Christmas, etc. We used to go through the pre-cable TV guides every
Sunday and underline and/or circle (no highlighters yet) upcoming obscure gems,
making late-night appointments to stare bloody-eyed at the boob tube, getting
through a rare Douglas Sirk or Roy William Neill film, or “Alligator People,”
or even some freakish stretches of quality such as Bondarchuk’s “War andPeace,” through the incessant
interruptions of commercial blocks.
The bulky boxes of tapespool littered our weekend floors for
decades, as we chucked them into the maw of the machine, which ground and
gnawed at the boxes, straining to turn its gears and play that precious tape.
(We had, and still have, a TOP-LOADER! Good times!) The revolution was us.
The VCR released us from time and space, and gave us
ownership. We eagerly caught up with films we WANTED to see, WHEN we wanted to
see them. We could now set timers and tape TV shows too, free our viewing
schedule from the intentions and ends of the programmers. The power of the
movie theaters faced its second serious challenge at this time, after the
introduction of broadcast television and anti-monopoly action brought down the
big studios after World War II.
All the films we’d read about that we’d never seen rained
into our lives. It was now possible for the average person to self-educate
about the length and breadth of cinema.
The primary downsides of the VCR were the laughably
difficult programming problems the recording system always seemed to have, the
clanky, cranky laboring of the devices, and the grainy, stretched, and
stuttering quality of the image itself. (Anyone on the production side from the
period will tell you about the hellish nightmare that was editing videotape.)
As a legacy medium, the VHS tape still has cachet. Yale
picked up 2,700 of them last year, mostly horror films. Stephanie Rogers’ story
for the Yale News points out that the VHS and VCR spurred the rise of
low-budget cinema, particularly in the cost-effective horror genre, and
direct-to-rental market helps to undermine cinema-going. (Pornography was, as
always, on the cutting edge of whatever technological development came along,
and thrived as well.)
The DVD murdered the VHS tape. Its infinitely better image,
searchability, and capacity made it the winner over the tape. DVDs gave every
film freak far more than even they could digest in one sitting. The advent of
multiple data channels on each disc gave birth to the commentary track, scads
of now-expected “extras,” alternative edits, contextualizing content, gag and
blooper reels, and films within films. (The damn things do scratch easily.)
Now what’s next? A few years ago, Oliver Stone held up a DVD
and said, “You may be the last generation to own a movie.” The video (now DVD)
rental stores are almost extinct themselves. Even the Redbox movie-dispensing
kiosk service, which killed the Blockbuster video-rental chain, finds itself
becoming a less profitable anachronism. Its DVD rentals were down a whopping 17
percent in the fourth quarter of 2015.
Now that we are streaming film, we are purchasing temporary
access to a product that’s not material. Pay for play. Downloads are possible,
but we’ve come to find that digital files are just as prone to disruption,
damage, overwriting, and loss as all those playlists you made on GrooveShark.
And that’s disturbing. I have about 2,000 films on DVD, very
consciously chosen to provide me with an index of great films (OK, and “The
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” and “Pootie Tang”) for reference and repeated
viewings. I am hoping the kids get into them and are accidentally infected with
the rewards of quality viewing. How long until I have to jury-rig some kind of
playback system for this collection I have no desire to rebuild again, from
scratch? We all seem to end up living primarily in the last medium we are
comfortable with, the one we commit to financially and emotionally.
That being said, I am still hoarding the following, as hope
springs eternal – 78 rpm records, 45s, and standard vinyl; first-generation
audiotape, cassettes, V-discs, CDs, DVDs, and . . . somewhere on this dusty
shelf I’m probing . . . my last VHS tapes.
There are 15 tapes here I deemed indispensable a decade ago.
I wonder what’s on them? Can I see the content on them some other way?
Here’s a head cleaner. “A Rugrats Chanukah,” “A Rugrats
Passover,” both available via Hulu. My friends Kathy and Robin Beck’s hilarious
documentary, “Grandpa’s Still in the TUFF Shed.” Keeper. Three vintage Daffy
Duck cartoon compilations, one of Bugs Bunny, one merely labeled “classic.”
(You can see where my priorities lie.) Keep.
Of course, I have to hang on to the Mary Martin “Peter Pan”
TV production. Priceless!
Homemade mixes: here’s a John Ford triple feature, “The Lost
Patrol,” “The Informer,” and “Wagon Master.” All easily found via streaming.
Here are two I can’t find anywhere else: Jack Gold’s
brilliant and underrated retelling of “Robin Crusoe,” 1975’s “Man Friday,” with
Peter O’Toole and Richard Roundtree. And the PBS mini-series version of Joseph
Conrad’s “Nostromo” from 1996. “Nostromo” was the last, great, unrealized
project of David Lean’s, and this production lacks something vital but points
the way toward a truly definitive adaptation of the novel.
The first and last “Star Trek: The Next Generation”
episodes. Of course. Keep.
Another compilation: the documentary on Russell Scott,
Denver’s TV clown Blinky (can stream it); “The Adventures of Robin Hood”
(likewise) and “The Maltese Falcon” (I have the DVD). Goodbye!
A documentary on my hero, Steinbeck; a miscellany of Laurel
and Hardy shorts, some vintage Dana Gould (a criminally under-regarded standup
comedian and writer), and some of those delectable vintage Fleischer Brothers
Superman cartoons. Keeper.
And the family home videos. Our father’s side of the family
was ravenously to new technology, and the earliest home-movie footage we have
dates back to the mid-1930s. Our dauntless cousin Elaine picked up dozens of
these Super 8 and 8mm home-movie shorts and had them transferred to videotape.
(A dissection of moving family images from before my father’s birth to my
youngest sister’s babyhood deserves another essay, and some therapy.) There are
hours there to be pored over by curious descendants, discussed, laughed at, explained,
and used as a springboard of associations. “That’s Aunt Emma,” I say, and her
clean, damp, kitchen-y smell, her scrollwork piano, a laundry chute, the cuckoo
clock, the steeply raked back yard, all manifest themselves, instantly.
The VHS tape in this last case will serve as a link to a new
technology, duped to DVD and then undoubtedly to whatever new forms of
recording and transmission evolve. But it’s a fact of physics that there is
loss of signal, a weakening of the resolution of the image, each time a
duplication to another medium is made. Will these irreplaceable ghosts of me,
my parents, grandparents, sisters, cousins, and friends fade away down the
years like pen strokes on a palimpsest, until finally forgotten and lost? When a
medium dies, that erosion, that slippage occurs, and I worry.
The cakewalk was discussed by me previously here; and in thisentry from my National Film Project, I recently touched on the contributions
Williams made. The important thing to remember is that these were the first
African-American superstars. Their 1903 musical comedy “In Dahomey” was a hit,
running for two years, and the first written and performed by African-Americans
on Broadway.
Walker and Williams’ relations with the culture are complicated.
On one hand, one of their gigs starting off was playing African villagers in
animal skins; they were routinely rousted, robbed, and abused by white gangs as
they traveled in vaudeville. Williams wore blackface, and both men housed their
onstage personas in the racist stereotypes of the day – Williams as Jim Crow,
the simpleton/stooge, and Wheeler as Zip Coon, the straight/con man who takes
advantage of him.
Williams (left) and Wheeler in character, "In Dahomey."
Their immense popularity eventually gave them the power to
move the needle a little bit. They had income and leverage, and they tried
different media platforms. Ten of the 11 recordings they made were set down in
1901; four of them are from their hit Broadway show “Sons of Ham” the previous
year. (“Pretty Desdamone” was a one-off in April of 1906; Walker didn’t like
how his voice recorded and refused to do more.)
Some of the surviving selections are the typical ethnic “coon”
or “darkie” songs of the day, sentimental tripe that paints the average
African-American as a shambling comic figure. However, little gems such as the
comic “(When It’s) All Going Out and Nothing Coming In” and the fanciful “In My
Castle on the Nile” are charming and catchy. Despite Walker’s trepidations, his
voice comes through cleanly n these recordings. However, Williams has an edge
on him; he is much better able to project his persona and attitude through the
medium. No wonder Walker took a pass. You can feel the energy and interplay on
these discs, and get a sense of how appealing these two performers were.
In 1909, Walker began to suffer from the symptoms of
syphilis. Two years later, he was dead, at the age of 38 or 39. Williams went
on to even greater fame as a solo act, with song hits such as “Nobody” and “When
the Moon Shines on the Moonshine.” He died young himself, at 47, in 1922.
The achievements of Walker and Williams are impressive. Practically
forgotten today, they were the first African-American superstars.
The
National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all
the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up
next: ‘Canzone del Porter.'
WALKER/WHEELER RECORDINGS
1.(When
It’s) All Going Out and Nothing Coming In
2.The
Phrenologist Coon (From “Sons of Ham”)
3.She’s
Getting More Like the White Folks Every Day (From “Sons of Ham”)
4.Good
Afternoon, Mr. Jenkins (From “Sons of Ham”)
It wasn’t on purpose. We did not intend to blow her up. We
loved Grandma, even though she wasn’t Nice Grandma. (Nice Grandma gave us candy
and ice cream and Mountain Dew, the last of which she didn’t know was
chock-full of caffeine. She couldn’t understand what was getting us ‘all
whipped up.’)
Mean Grandma chain-smoked Pall Malls and pulled recalcitrant
snakes that she found in her flower gardens in half with her bare hands. My sister woke up late one morning, and Mean
Grandma made her eat pork chops for breakfast, a trauma that took her years from
which to recover. Nobody messed with Mean Grandma.
We bloodthirsty devil-children loved fireworks. As soon as
the seasonal entertainment-munitions tents were pitched by the roadside, we
begged to be hauled to them. There our parents would fume as we ran crazily
around the enclosure, evaluating the various Zebras, Black Cats, sparklers,
snakes, smoke bombs, ground spinners, and Strobing Comet Candles, both on a
per-piece basis and as weighed against the huge combo packages we could go in
on together and divvy up later.
The hierarchy of fireworks was proportional to the danger
they posed. Sparklers, snakes, and smoke bombs were for babies. Fountains and
spinners were more our speed. We longed to dash back and forth from the middle
of the street in front of our ranch house, wielding a smoldering punk just like
the dads wielded their glowing cigarette butts in the night, lighting fuses and
backpedaling, over and over again. Zippers were the best; they lit, spun, and
then leaped into the air, increasing the odds of becoming lodged into our
foreheads, and consequently more beloved.
The arsenal of choice consisted of masses of crisp, crackly
packagings of pop-bottle rockets, so-called as they were cylinders of gunpowder stuck to long, thin sticks that were placed in soda-pop bottles and ignited. These could be launched for weeks before and
after July 4; they were used for cross-yard wars, or shot at innocent younger
siblings and other helpless animals.
We yearned to be driven north from Denver to nearby Wyoming,
where explosives laws were lax and the “good stuff” could be gotten, beckoning just beyond that arbitrary,
windswept border. There were the fabled M-80s. When we could get these
high-powered explosives, we would use them to shoot coffee and pop cans into
the sky, out in the fields and fields of unfinished suburban developments that
surrounded us. We muttered darkly of one day blowing the lock on the local A
& W and guzzling all the root beer we could.
The ultimate goal was, of course, to get the biggest, most beautiful,
longest-lived fountain. We worked out way up to a grand finale, then hiked over
the hill to see the city shoot off the big show. The year this happened, I believe
I finally had a driver’s license, and had been saving my money from working at
Taco Time. One afternoon, we ran up to wicked Cheyenne.
Now, I don’t remember seeing the words “mortar,” “aerial
shell,” or “artillery” on the suspiciously large piece de resistance we
splurged on. We set it out in line with the other pyrotechnical treats, all
curated and choreographed to a nonce.
Grandma was none too sprightly by then. She was going on 80,
and her reptile-dismembering day were behind her. Still, we exercised a respect
tinged with fear. She insisted on being seating in a lawn chair at the end of
the driveway, nearest the street, to not miss a second of the festivities.
The show progressed to the Big Finish. We set the monster
out on the asphalt, and I lit the fuse. We stepped back briskly and lightly.
Then the most amazing bass CHUFF came out of the device,
like it had just shat out a locomotive at top speed; like it was the Kaiser’s
Paris Gun, flinging a quarter-ton into the air.
“RUN!” I yelled, and we turned as one, bolting up the
driveway. Halfway to the front door, a deafening explosion rattled the area, a
fantastic electric-blue burst that froze everything forever for that one
second, us, the trees, the cars, our shadows that burst into life in front of
us. Haloed in cobalt.
Only 50 feet above, like an enormous azure time-lapse
dandelion, the obviously commercial-grade pineapple bloomed. The sparks lashed
down at the surrounding roofs and ricocheted back into the sky.
The neighborhood was very quiet, save for the hysterical
dogs. We peered nervously through the front door’s tiny diamond-shaped window. Then
--
“Where’s Grandma?”
It would be great to pretend that she was sitting there, face
comically smudged and smoke ascending from her hair. No. She was still sitting
precisely as as she when we had abandoned her.She was just pissed.
She didn’t go with us to see the big fireworks display that
year, either. She said she was tired.
One of the most cumbersome, expensive, and unique playback
systems invented was the player piano. The idea of a full-sized instrument that
could reproduce the playing of a human was in the air for decades, but remained
unperfected until 1895. After that, it became enormously popular for a time,
creating an industry that would last until the advent of electrical audio
recordings in the mid-1920s improved sound playback on disc enormously, at a
far more cost-effective rate.
The player piano works pneumatically; that is, through
compressed air. Holes poked in a roll of paper correspond to notes played on
the piano. When a hole is “read” by the mechanism, it shoots a burst of
compressed air at the lever action that forces the proper key to be struck.
Sounds complicated? It only took about 20 years to iron out the problems
inherent in the technology.
A typical piano roll.
Once the technical aspects were figured out, the player
piano became a familiar part of the culture of the period. Whether buying new
rolls for the home machine, or plunking nickels into machines set up in bars
and restaurants, customers spent freely on the device. Commercial customers
found that, after the initial capital outlay for the machine, the cost of
buying new rolls and maintaining the player were cheaper than hiring live
performers – no doubt causing a wave of technology-related unemployment.
The novelty of the player piano, with its magically moving
keys pressed as though by invisible fingers, was a draw, as was its
consistency. (Some prominent players who grew during this 30-year span,
1895-1925, describe learning how to play by slowing down the mechanism’s action
and aping the keystrokes, just as English blues players of the 1960s learned by
slowing down American records and working out the chord changes.)
A short list of noted performers who “cut” piano-transcriptions
includes Rachmaninoff, Gershwin, Percy Granger, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton,
and James P. Johnson. These invaluable records teach us much about the players’
techniques. One of the most prominent names to record piano rolls was, of
course, the greatest ragtime music composer, Scott Joplin.
Joplin was an African-American Texan, born in the wake of
the Civil War. He quickly mastered the parameters of the ragtime song (see my earlier entry on ragtime here), and by 1899 had his first hit, the familiar “Maple
Leaf Rag.” Joplin gave the wild, upbeat, syncopated genre dignity by introducing
complex chording and the symmetries of classical compositions. Joplin was not
shooting sorely for popularity; he was a serious composer who produced more
lyrical pieces such as the sublime “Solitude” and the opera Treemonisha, which went unproduced until
1975.
Joplin’s day in the sun was short-lived. He faced the
typical bias against African-Americans at the time; it was fine for them to
serve as entertainers and figures of fun, but white society did not accept their
expressions of higher aspirations. Joplin was famous, but solely because of his
rags. Joplin probably consented to record these seven rolls he did in 1916 just
to make some quick cash.
Joplin’s name on these rolls was a draw for the public.
Unfortunately, only one of the seven piano rolls, his second take on “Maple Leaf
Rag,” seems to reflect his genuine playing, a stuttering, uncoordinated effort
that speaks to his advanced stage of suffering from tertiary syphilis. The other
six were edited and “corrected” by the staff arranger at the recording company,
William Axtmann. Joplin would die the following year from his condition, at the
age of 49.
The Joplin revival began in 1971, when Joshua Rifkin recorded
a selection of his work, which received a Grammy nomination. Prominent musicologist
Gunther Schuller orchestrated and produced Joplin’s Red Back Book for a 12-piece ensemble in 1973, and won a Grammy
doing it. Then, of course, Marvin Hamlisch’s use of Joplin in his soundtrack for
the film The Sting the same year
opened the floodgates for Joplin’s rediscovery.
The player piano remained significant for only one other American
composer – the amazing and still under-regarded Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997).
An expatriate in Mexico due to his left-wing leanings, Nancarrow was fascinated
by the possibilities the player piano gave an ambitious composer. Eventually,
he purchased the equipment needed to make rolls himself, and did so from 1947
on.
Nancarrow cutting a roll.
Nancarrow recognized that the player piano could reproduce
compositions impossible for one or even two keyboardists to perform. He could
pile line after melodic line on top of each other, as well as multiple
independent rhythms. The results, fortunately preserved, are exciting explosions
of color, harmonics, and sound patterns.
The
National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all
the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up
next: Williams and Walker’s Victor recordings.
Lionel Mapleson and his enormous recording horn, used to record Metropolitan Opera excerpts live from the catwalks above the stage.
Cylinder recordings
of the Metropolitan Opera
Lionel Mapleson
1900-1903
135 cylinders
On March 21, 1900, Metropolitan Opera librarian Lionel
Mapleson purchased a gramophone for his personal use. Being an intelligent and
curious man, he soon started using it to record operatic performance. The
result is the first “live from the Met” recordings, long before the live Saturday
radio matinees from thence started in 1931.
Opera was seen as the most legitimate form of high culture at the time. This led to incredible snobbishness at the opera house, in contrast to the art form's former status as a populist entertainment over the course of the 19th century. The explosion of vernacular culture, and the technology to spread it, meant that the designation of value by a cultural elite was no longer needed, or heeded. Soon opera became a bugbear, something to be mocked by comedians. Opera in America wouldd not enjoy an upswing again until the 1980s.
Over three frenzied years, from 1901 through 1903, Mapleson experimented with recording techniques. Initial recordings were made from the
prompter’s box downstage center, but Mapleson soon crafted an enormous recording
horn to more efficiently gather the sound, and began recording from above, in
the theater’s fly space.
The results range from pretty fair to nearly incomprehensible,
and include performances from key opera singers such as Emma Calve, Nellie
Melba, Jean and Edouard De Reszke, Fritzi Scheff, Pol Plancon, and Ernestine
Schumann-Heink. These were names that inspired the same kind of fervent fan-worship
today’s opera greats do, and the excerpts are invaluable in terms of getting a
sense of the weight and timbre of these historic voices.
There recordings don’t shed much new light on the art form
itself – opera has maintained a consistency of approach that makes many
productions ever-current (or ever-outdated, if you prefer). But there’s
something a little livelier about these cylinders – instead of the
close-confined acoustics of the recording studio of the day, and the tinny
accompaniment of a few instruments, the listener can hear and feel the broader
resonance of the stage and the increased weight and texture of the orchestra’s
contributions.
Plus, there is something about working live that adds a
soupcon of vivacity to the enterprise. Recordings could be made over and over
again until they were “right,” but these on-the-fly snatches have much more immediacy.
These recordings can be found her and there online, and
there are some recordings which excerpt the collection. The definitive assembly
of tracks, with copious notes, can be found at the Rodgers and Hammerstein
Collection of Recorded Sound at the Lincoln Center Library – see the program notes here.
The National Recording
Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in
the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Scott
Joplin’s ragtime piano rolls.
