ABSTRACT
Paris, Christmas Eve, 1907: while most Parisians spent the afternoon making last-minute preparations for the following day, dignitaries from the Opéra, the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the government, and the French Gramophone Company assembled for a curious ceremony in the bowels of the Palais Garnier. Two large metal “urns,” each containing a dozen gramophone discs, were sealed and placed in specially constructed walls, with instructions from the undersecretary of state for the Beaux-Arts that they should not be opened for one hundred years. For this project Alfred Clark, president of the French Gramophone Company, had donated recordings of those deemed to be the principal singers of the age in some of the most celebrated lyric and dramatic numbers then in the repertoire. Four and a half years later, on June 13, 1912, a further set of his discs was entombed. Needless to say, all of them betray a distinctly French bias, in terms of voices and repertoire. They include only a small sampling of purely instrumental music: Raoul Pugno playing his own Sérénade à la lune in 1907, Paderewski performing Chopin in 1912, a violin and piano work or two on each occasion, and an extract from Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony from the band of the Garde Républicaine in 1912. 2
