I don’t remember how or when these particular 78 rpm recordings found their way into my collection, but they are just wonderfully awful! Or maybe not. Who are we to judge another time by the standards of our own?
Balcony scene - part 1
Balcony scene - part 2
The melodramatic quivering in their voices: “Oh Ro-o-meo-o-o, Ro-o-meo-o-o, whe-e-refore art thou-u-u, Ro-o-meo-o-o”. I love it!
The pressings (Victrola, red seal 74662 and 74663) are from 1921, but they may have been recorded several years before that.
Julia Marlow and her husband, E. H. Sothern seem to have been big Shakespearians just after the turn of the 20th Century.
I live and breathe by the juxtapostion of the past with the present. It’s endlessly fascinating. These recordings seemed like magic to many people back at the turn of the 20th Century. Could they have ever imagined their voices being heard 100 years later by anybody, anywhere in the world, via this magical thing called the Internet, at the turn of the 21st Century?
no comment until now