1 9 4 Y R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W K E N N E T H B L E E T H A little dog revolving round a spindle Gives rise to harmonies beyond belief, A cast of stars . . . – James Merrill, ‘‘The Victor Dog’’ Near the conclusion of her 1933 memoir Ma vie et mon art, the soprano Félia Litvinne casts a nostalgic glance backward: ‘‘My voice – so beautiful and warm – is almost gone. I made some beautiful recordings. Whenever I touch the gramophone, I say: ‘Here lies Félia Litvinne.’ ’’ In composing her own epitaph, Litvinne imagines her now silenced voice laid to rest in the ‘‘beaux disques’’ that are her monument. But if the gramophone is a kind of tomb, it also contains the promise of resurrection. When the stylus touches the groove, the singer is raised from the cold shellac, reaching generations of listeners who never heard her in the flesh. The illusion of presence, in which the artist and the recorded simulacrum become indistinguishable, was a selling point for recordings almost from the beginning. A 1915 Victor Talking Ma- 1 9 5 R chine advertisement for Geraldine Farrar’s Carmen juxtaposes an image of a 12-inch disc with one of the diva herself, announcing that ‘‘both are Farrar.’’ Around the same time, a publicity photograph shows Frieda Hempel, an Edison recording artist, standing next to a large gramophone with a group of blindfolded Edison employees, who are attempting to guess whether Hempel is singing or the phonograph is playing alone. In a popular television commercial filmed some sixty years later for a new brand of recording tape, Ella Fitzgerald sings the tape’s praises, a high note breaks a glass, and a narrator intones: ‘‘Is it live or is it Memorex?’’ The claim for these products is that they o√er the listener not simply realistic reproduction of singing but what the late John Steane in his indispensable The Grand Tradition: Seventy Years of Singing on Record, 1900–1970 calls a ‘‘voice-face’’ – an instantly recognizable self that we feel we know intimately. Our response to a singer is shaped partly by memories of other singers in the same repertory. So it’s no accident that those critics who describe individual voices with the greatest sympathy and precision (Steane, Will Crutchfield, André Tubeuf, and the late John Ardoin, among others) display not only what seems like total recall of the artists they’ve heard in the opera house or in the concert hall but also an encyclopedic knowledge of the performances preserved in recordings made during the first half of the twentieth century. Some of this material has been continuously available. When 78-rpm discs began to be replaced by vinyl long-playing records in the late 1940s, RCA Victor, Columbia, and EMI dipped into their vaults, issuing selections from the work of a single artist or producing ‘‘highlights’’ albums by performers who may or may not have sung together (A Golden Age ‘‘Il Trovatore’’). But the recorded legacies of singers active in the early part of the century became systematically available only with the advent of the compact disc, on labels like Nimbus, Pearl, Preiser, and, more recently, Marston, Naxos Historical, and Romophone. None of these releases has rung up massive sales; for most producers of historical vocal recordings (some of whom are also indefatigable collectors), the work of recovering and disseminating the memorable voices of the past is a labor of love. For an example of what this devotion can achieve, let’s return to Litvinne. Marston’s Complete Félia Litvinne (Marston 52049-2) 1 9 6 B L E E T H Y includes the thirty-five recordings by this artist known to exist – twenty-seven operatic items and eight songs, committed to disc from 1902 to 1911 for three companies. The accompanying booklet lists titles, matrix numbers, and playing times, and reproduces sixteen photographs, including one of the statuesque soprano in a full-length lace-trimmed dress, elaborate jewelry, and an impressive hat confronting the recording horn in a Paris studio. Two essays by Geo...