One possibly unexpected thing about this recording is how complete it is (it originally occupied fifty-six 78-rpm sides). It doesn’t open quite all the internal redactions of later practice, but restores some, including one of my favorite passages, the sixteen bars of the Garden Scene beginning with Faust’s “Tu veux que je te quitte” and leading into Marguerite’s startling two-octave excursion between C’s at “Cédez à ma prière.” It brings back Walpurgis, with the whole ballet sequence, and the opening tableau of Act IV. (This is Marguerite/Siébel, though in puzzling form, omitting not only Siébel’s loyal-forever song, but Marguerite’s “Il ne revient pas,” leaving us with a very brief plot-only sequence of accompanied recitative. One would suspect a derivation from the opéra-comique original with dialogue, except that even that must have included the songs.) These passages are brought back in some modern performances and recordings, too, but it is interesting to see the whole grand opera laid out for us in the days of acoustical 78s. (Don’t expect “Avant de quitter,” though. Written for Santley at the London premiere, it was never included in French performances till well after WW2, though it does appear on the 1931 Paris recording, in concession to the international market.)

Since fifty-six 78-rpm sides back then means a third CD now, Marston fills out the third one with a selection of thirteen more recordings made by Parisian singers between 1903 and 1913. Some of this material was already available on CD (most notably in Symposium’s Harold Wayne Collection series), but to have these Faust extracts gathered here as supplements to the complete recording helps us light up the picture. Faust in Paris in the immediate post-de Reszke years, as at the Metropolitan contemporaneously, was a big show, not only in length but in terms of vocal calibration (and that scoring, while at moments elegant and delicate, is essentially rich and weighty). And before one can speak sensibly of a French style, one must consider the vocal co-ordinations that enable the style. Singers cannot make effects, but only cosmetically imitate them, if their voices are not structured to receive the precisely directed energies that produce them. A few notes:

Pretty much across the board, these voices show a kind of strength essentially different from the plush, “voluminous” sort of more recent large-voiced singers. This strength is leaner and tauter, brighter in relation to the voice type, and very insistent on vowel clarity, even in the upper female range and even as heard through the frequency limitations of early recordings.

The upper voices of both sexes are intensely vibrated in a way that may not at first appeal to modern listeners, but which indicates strong laryngeal energization that certainly aided projection, and was undoubtedly less obtrusive in a live theatre acoustic. (Exception: Farrar.) Among the tenors (Vezzani, Beyle, Muratore in the Duel Trio), there is sometimes a strenuous intensification of this, verging on fibrillation, on forte high notes. Again, while not always aesthetically pleasing, it surely launched those pitches excitingly. Both Beyle and Emile Scaramberg take the C of “Salut, demeure” in falsetto, and re-arrange the text to give themselves an “i” vowel to do so. This is a sound distinctly separate from their generally muscular full-voice co-ordination, and different from the voix-mixte solutions of the most accomplished lyric tenors, like Miguel Villabella or the Crooks of 1940 (on the “a” of “présence.“) I prefer even the hectic forte of Vezzani, to say nothing of the gleaming tone of the younger Crooks or of Björling, or the celebrated diminuendo of the youthful Di Stefano.