“Music, when soft voices die,/Vibrates in the memory,” Shelley wrote. But memory is fallible, lodging in a mortal brain. The shorthand of music abides in the score, but it is always performance that we hark back to. We can shake our greying locks and recall the time, decades ago, when Rudolf Serkin made a shimmering ball of the Appassionata and tossed itatusin New York’s Town Hall. Or when in some Jacobean dump Billie Holiday reached out for the good and the true and grabbed it. But much eludes us. We may think we remember a particular Isaac Stern passage, but can we compare him to, say, Paganini when we were not there to hear him? We can read about Frescobaldi’s jam sessions at St. Peter’s, but had we been present would we have been as impressed as his contemporaries?
The inventiveness of man has conspired to give focus to our nostalgia. With the advent of the phonograph, the voices could vibrate again, though in its early stages imperfectly. Today, light-beam reproduction can reach into the old shellacs or the Edison cylinders and extract from them what was lost by the crank-up Victrola. But even this magic will not let us hear Titta Ruffo in duet with Caruso as their voices catapulted to the rafters of the old Met. And even when this scientific magic can do the unbuttoning, how much of what they sang still exists in the grooves of the old recordings?
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