A Bit Of Fun

This is fun.  It's, I believe, a French film of what I have to believe are actual singers miming the famous - some would say infamous - Sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor by Gaetano Donizetti,  a piece which has suffered at the hands of some pretty stupid use. 

The singers are from the 1908 recording with Enrico Caruso, Marcella Sembrich Francesco Daddi, Gina Severina,  Marcel Journet, and Antonio Scotti. 

The notes on the video say the movie was made by a Georges Mendel, also in 1908, though I've never heard of him before.  I have to assume that the actors who mimed the singing of the recording had to have been trained singers because it matches too well for that not to have been the case. 

The recording, itself, made by the acoustic recording method is spectacular for the period.   And it's only the starting point for producing what we hear, now.  The art of replaying and transferring those old recordings to get the most out of them has reached levels that I never would have believed possible fifty years ago.  I'd love to know who it was who produced the transfer in the video but it doesn't say.