Emma Eames - Her Voice and Recordings

Her Voice and Recordings

During her prime, Eames possessed an opulently beautiful, aristocratic and expertly trained soprano voice. It began as a purely lyric instrument but increased in size over time, enabling her to sing parts as heavy as Aida, Sieglinde, Santuzza and Tosca in large auditoriums. Music critics occasionally took her to task, however, for the coldness of her interpretations and aloof stage manner.

Eames was reportedly unhappy with the way that she sounded on the series of commercial 78-rpm recordings she made in 1905-1911 for the Victor Talking Machine Company. In 1939, however, she appeared on an American radio broadcast and selected some of her better recordings to play to listeners, speaking with little modesty about their merits. Eames' voice was also captured 'live' during an actual performance at the Met in 1903, on some primitive recordings which have become known as the Mapleson Cylinders. She sings (impressively) fragments of Tosca on these cylinders. They can be heard in the form of re-engineered digital transfers, together with all the recordings that she cut for Victor, on a Romophone CD release (catalogue number 81001-2).

In addition to Tosca and Romeo et Juliette, Eames' repertoire featured a comparatively small but stylistically diverse group of operas, ranging from works composed by Mozart, through Verdi and Wagner, to Mascagni. They included, among others, Aida, Otello, Il trovatore, Un ballo in maschera, Lohengrin, Die Meistersinger, Die Walküre, Faust, Werther, Cavalleria rusticana, The Magic Flute, Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni.