A pioneering study of sound recordings made by singers from the fin-de-siècle French operatic world-and the hidden histories of preservation that shape how these extraordinary recordings are heard today.

This pioneering study engages with nascent sound-recording technologies just entering the operatic world of fin-de-siècle France. At its heart are the stories of notable opera singers who turned to these technologies to navigate the tensions between center and periphery in their highly institutionalized milieu. Told through rich descriptions of early sound recordings and synchronized-sound films, these narratives shed new light on how and why performers and pedagogues embraced the era's emerging technologies.

The volume moves beyond these human motivations to examine the physical aspects of the technologies and the sometimes haphazard nature of their preservation. The fragile wax cylinders and shellac discs that contain these recordings have survived into the twenty-first century by circuitous means-tucked away in private and public collections, reaching us through the interventions of those who have collected and treasured them and transferred them to digital formats.

This book argues that such recordings speak differently depending on how they have been handled and by whom, from the collectors who rescued them to the sound engineers whose often undocumented choices have definitively shaped what we now hear.

Moving between the recordings themselves and first-person reckoning with them, the author makes a case for listening to early sound recordings not as transparent windows onto the past but as artifacts with long and unpredictable afterlives.