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By Matthew Westphal
18 Dec 2007

The Opéra national de Paris and the Bibliothèque nationale de France have exhumed a musical time capsule: recordings of some of the greatest singers of the early 20th century, made in 1907 and sealed for opening 100 years later.

The two urns containing the old discs go on display today at the national library in the French capital, Agence France-Presse reports.

Nellie Melba (top) and Enrico Caruso

Each vessel contains 12 discs recorded and donated by the French subsidiary of The Gramophone Company (ancestor of today's EMI). The firm's chief at the time, Alfred Clark, directed that the urns — which were interred in the basement of the Opéra's home, the Palais Garnier, in a ceremony on Christmas Eve 1907 — should be opened after 100 years "in order to show men of that era the [current] state of 'talking machines' and the voices of the principal singers of our time."

In 1989 the containers were transferred from the Opéra to the Bibliothèque nationale for safekeeping.

The recordings feature such singers as Nellie Melba, Adelina Patti, Emma Calvé and Enrico Caruso in such French and Italian repertoire of the time as Bizet, Gounod, Donizetti, Rossini and Verdi. (No complete list of the contents has appeared on the websites of the Bibliothèque or the Opéra.)

While the urns are now on view, the recordings are still inside: they were sealed within asbestos and will be removed in a special hazardous-materials facility next year. Once the discs are available, EMI will examine the contents and compile a CD for commercial release.

In addition, according to a statement from the Bibliothèque, a similar ceremony will be organized "to preserve representative recordings of contemporary music" for the next 100 years.

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