They're very collectable, these Romophone complete editions. Up they go on the shelves, and you know that there is another small but quite important area in the history of singing on records properly covered, ready for reference at any time, and reference that will be a pleasure because the standard of transfer is so reliable. In this instance it is the Rethberg Brunswicks: records which in their original form were always rare over here (less so in the United States, where they were made), and which capture the voice in its lovely prime; the later years of the pre-electric era in recording and the early years of the electric.
Purely as a singer, Rethberg was surely the most gifted and accomplished lyric soprano of her age. The essential gift was a voice of exquisite quality and her upbnnging contributed to the purity of intonation and a feeling for musical style. Her production was even and fluent, on all these records there is scarcely a note or a phrase that is not delightful purely as singing. Some of the later records show it also as a voice capable of considerable expansion in volume, and we note the solos from Aida (the part for which she was best known), Lohengrin and Tannhauser. What they also tell us I believe, is that these represented the extremes of what she should have been undertaking, and that their rightful place was at the outer edge of her repertoire, not its centre.
Accordingly, Aida's ''Ritorna vincitor'' does not provide the ideal introduction to her, though having (with ''O patria mia'') the earliest matrix number in the series, it comes first in the collection. Some of it is fine, and very fine indeed, but I don't know that from it we would immediately conclude that she was by nature as well as art the supreme Aida of her time. From ''O patria mia'' we might well conclude just that, but here of course is a different aspect of what we think of, all too conveniently, as 'the Aida voice'. Rethberg is celestial in this, ample in volume sensitive in feeling phrasing beautifully, taking the C softly and in a broad single sweep. Equally lovely is her Mimi, and then in the Andrea Chenier aria there is such an unpressured beauty of utterance that it almost becomes a different composition. So the discs continue, with fine singing in opera and song including an excellent recording of the Freischutz aria which is also heard to such fine effect live from the stage of the Vienna Opera in the Vienna State Opera series, Vol. 3 (Koch Schwann, 11/94). An occasional disappointment arises, as with a too solid ''Ach, ich fuhl's'' (Die Zauberflote) and a concession to American-Italian taste in the loud top C of the later ''O patria mia''.
A previously unpublished delight is a blissful performance of Eugen Hildach's Der Spielmann and among the less familiar songs is a charmer by Carl Taubert, Es steht ein Baum in jenem Tal. As I write, a second album (of HMV and Victor recordings up to 1934) is scheduled, with the hope of it coming before the public within the centenary of Rethberg's birth.'