''Her career is a window on the meeting of musical manners between the New World and the Old.'' Dominic Fyfe, writing on Farrar, succinctly enunciates a text for profitable discussion and, between them, the two collections now under review provide much of what would be needed by way of illustration. The setting, of course, is the old Metropolitan Opera House, the ''Yellow Brick Brewery'' of John Briggs's prose Requiem (New York: 1969), from which this excellent introductory essay also quotes: the ''Faustspielhaus'', W. J. Henderson famously called it, Faust being the opera given on its opening night (and its final closing, too). It was also staple fare throughout the Golden Age of the 1890s, after which many of the house's clients must have felt that provincialism had set in, as the personable and elegant Jean de Reszke was succeeded by the Neapolitan Caruso. The arrival of Geraldine Farrar, young, beautiful and American, with the glamour of European triumphs fresh upon her, gave a new turn to Marguerite's spinning-wheel, and the jewels sparkled once again.
Farrar sang Marguerite 60 times with the company; but as Cio-Cio-San, or Madam Butterfly, she scored the magnificent total of 139 performances, and in this way too the old and the new world meet. Her Butterfly (described as ''exquisite'' by her rival Frances Alda) is beautifully heard in these excerpts, the clear voice and firm tone giving body to a characterization that is perhaps pretty and pathetic rather than tragic. Alda considered her Mimi ''too brittle'', yet the recordings show much that is lovely, and, in the scene with Marcel, unforgettable. It is difficult to imagine her as a Tosca with quite the stamina for Act 2, but the solos are apt enough. Best is the glimpse of her Susanna in Wolf-Ferrari's opera; least delightful the Mozart which, clean and substantial as singing, lacks imagination and character.
In the Faust excerpts she sings a too solid, public ''Roi de Thule'' and an accomplished if not very French Jewel song. In the duets her tone and cleanness of style are admirable—giving, in her ''O silence, o bonheur'', a lesson to Caruso who has just shamefully broken the climactic phrase of his solo with an unmannerly crescendo on the high A and a subsequent breath between ''d'un'' and ''nuage''. The final trio, incidentally, appears to have been transposed a semitone down.
Elsewhere Caruso is magnificent, as is Marcel Journet, absolutely at his best here. Understanding between all the singers seems so complete that one imagines they had been singing the music together season after season whereas, as far as I can gather, Caruso and Farrar sang in Faust together only four times in all, and never with Journet. The natural feeling that this is a ''document of an era'' has to be revised accordingly.
Even so, it's a pity the 'document' is not given complete: the Garden scene quartet and end of Act 3, the Church scene and (with Amato as Valentin) the Scene des epees might well have been added. It is worth noting that the Farrar selection includes some of the less well-known takes: the ''Vissi d'arte'' is not the one issued (and then reissued on DB246) in the UK, and the Boheme and Butterfly duets with Scotti are not the ones heard on DK111 and 118, but versions that remained uncoupled over here, and are generally superior. The Butterfly Flower duet is the lesser-known version with Josephine Jacoby rather than the better one with Louise Horner. All the original copies are excellent, and respond well to the Nimbus method of transfer.'