A substantial addition to the shelves, this box‑set devoted to the great tenor John McCormack comprises four CDs, a full-length DVD, and a booklet containing previously unpublished letters together with notes on the selected recordings. It was designed to commemorate the 60th anniversary of his death in 1945, and in giving it the subtitle “Icon of an Age” the leading spirits of the enterprise suggest a secondary purpose. Ages pass; icons fade. Towards the end of the DVD it is claimed “with deep sadness” that McCormack is now “almost forgotten in Ireland”. If true, that’s a terrible state of affairs, and one which this handsome offering should certainly help to put right.

Gordon Ledbetter, author of The Great Irish Tenor (Scribner: 1977), provides an authoritative, well balanced commentary for the DVD. Watching and hearing him, I was several times reminded of Desmond Shawe-Taylor, who for so many years was the best of critics on matters concerning singers of the past as of the present. He was also one of the most fastidious in taste, and McCormack was a passion with him. He was one of a select number (Ernest Newman and Walter Legge were others) who ranked McCormack among the great musicians of his time. They would point out that his recordings and even his concert programmes drew on only a small fraction of the worthwhile music in his repertoire. As for the less worthy element, as Shawe-Taylor put it, they found a distinction “evident in everything he touched, however trivial”.

The trivia (if that is indeed the word) are generously represented on the second disc. “I hear you calling me” is included in the version with accompaniment played by the composer, Charles Marshall, recorded in 1908, and again in the better-known (and surely preferable) recording of 1927. And always, however many times it is played, nobody listening breathes while McCormack sings that last phrase. “Macushla” and “The Snowy-breasted Pearl” are others where the eyes unfailingly water towards the end of the song. “Kathleen Mavourneen” (1927) is almost unbearably moving at “it may be for years and it may be for ever”; likewise “Terence’s Farewell to Kathleen” at “my blessings go with you” and “The Old House” at the valedictory “Why stand I here like a ghost and a shadow”. Incidentally, that is one of the good transfers; not all are of that quality.

On the box-cover is the promise of nine unpublished recordings, and these account for the third CD. “Unpublished” is a word particularly exciting to record collectors so it may be fair to warn them not to pitch their expectations too high. Five of the nine are of daughter Lily and son Cyril, family-album pieces all of them, and the four remaining, made in December 1930, add little to what we already have. The fourth CD, called “Golden Voices”, gives a sample (or, for Caruso, two) of the art of singers associated with McCormack and mentioned elsewhere. Welcome in itself, it is no substitute for a further disc along the lines of the first. This has eight arias, two operatic duets, and songs by Schubert, Brahms, Strauss, Rachmaninov and others. These are well chosen but the programme could easily be twice as long (no “Una furtiva lagrima” or Rigoletto Quartet, and among the Lieder no “Herr, was trägt der Boden hier”, a song which McCormack considered one of the finest in his repertoire and which he recorded most eloquently despite the aspersions sometimes cast upon his understanding of German).

The letters, printed in a separate and attractively produced booklet, were written to McCormack’s friend and colleague from the Dublin years, JC Doyle, a concert baritone whose evenly produced voice is included among the Golden ones on CD 4. The earliest, in 1905, comes from Milan (“beh blazes as they say”). The surviving correspondence peters out (“excuse hell of a haste”) in 1909. In between is some lively, informal chat with pithy comments on singers (Melba a great disappointment, admiration for Battistini and De Luca, Tetrazzini’s high E flat the most sensational note ever heard). And some of the best remarks, such as an account of the Italian debut in L’amico Fritz, are quoted in the film. This is the main course. Oddly, perhaps, we seem to come closest through places: Athlone, London and New York early in the century, Dublin in 1932, the stately residence at Moore Abbey, and the more homely one at Booterstown where he died. That embarrassing scene in the film Wings of the Morning where he sings “Believe me if all those endearing young charms” to the gentry (even here armed with the notebook he always held in his hands at concerts) is surely not the thing to start with. On the other hand, the family don’t let him down. The granddaughter, in particular, is a lovely woman: the screen lights up when she is on. It goes into full wartime blackout for my own contributions – or I wish it would. I appear in the role of the grumpy old man who complains about the rubbish. The point is more elegantly made by Dr Albert Bradshaw of Dublin Academy who in view of the dispoportionate amount of third-rate music finds the McCormack discography “sad”. Quite right. Sad. And joyful too.