and you want to curl up with a biography of a turn-of-the-twentieth century opera star. I know you do. And one of the best is Clara Leiser’s Jean De Reszke and the Great Days of Opera.
Those sonically appalling Mapleson cyinders (recorded live at the old Met) do more justice to men’s voices than women’s, (as of course is true of the contemporary acoustic recordings) and De Reske is amazing in the fragments recorded during his final Met season in 1901.
You’ll find his L’Africaine costume (O Paradiso’s on the Maplesons) on display on the Parterre eve of the (new) Met. Gleams like it was made yesterday.
And next to De Reske’s is Olive Fremstad’s as Selika in the same opera. It’s an interesting Gilded age attempt at a specked African mud cloth effect.
Fremstad, too, is the subject of a fascinating bio: Mary Watkins Cushing’s The Rainbow Bridge.
De Reske destroyed the few test commercial recordings he made because he wasn’t satisfied with them. Fremstad left the few she made alone, although not all survive.
Both were consummate singing actors and uncompromising perfectionists.