Wikipedia:Featured sound candidates/O souverain

O souverain

Forgive all the Massenet - I shall be moving on to Puccini after this, but wanted to finish up a couple articles I had started improving.

That said, I believe I should justify why a lot of what is coming up of late is the same few singers. Basically, when you're looking at pre-1923 public domain sound, you're looking at the infancy of the recording industry, and a lot of frankly bizarre recordings were made as people experimented with the novel new medium. At the moment, I'm trying to fulfil some commitments I've made to WikiProject Opera, as well as helping out a few others with some other genres well-represented in that time period. This means finding high-quality recordings of certain arias and composers.

90% of what I find is utter crap. Every recording I evaluated of the Toreador song from Carmen, for instance, was simply awful. But then we have those few singers who manage top-quality performances consistently, the top few percent of the herd. If the choice is to go with Caruso, or Billy Murphy, or Ada Jones again; to choose someone who sounds terrible; or to not have any coverage at all, I think everyone will agree that choosing Caruso is a good choice.

Perhaps it's unnecessary to defend such choices, particularly as Caruso has only been featured once, but I feel better having done so.

• Nominate and support. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 13:08, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
• Support - but it should only go on the Le Cid and Enrico Caruso pages. --Kleinzach 01:10, 8 October 2008 (UTC)
  • This is a bit of an aside, but can you confirm the spelling and capitalizatiob? I've seen it done several ways, including "O souverain, ô juge, ô père!", and am not really sure which is preferred. Also, I've put it in Massenet for the moment, as the other Le Cid was there, and it's probably best to know what's there before trimming. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 02:23, 8 October 2008 (UTC)
    • Can't confirm spelling/capitalization as I don't have a source. Also there's a lot of clutter on the Massenet page. These sound files (unnecessarily IMO) take up so much white space. --Kleinzach 04:46, 10 October 2008 (UTC)
• Opinion, The wobbling sound around 27 to 29 sec could be edited?--Caspian blue (talk)
  • I'll have a search, but it can be hard to find these things, and harder to fix them. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 05:12, 10 October 2008 (UTC)
    • Oh, that. Unfortunately, no. The human voice is fiendishly complex, and some things aren't really restorable. Luckily, the flaw is pretty subtle, I think? Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 19:47, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
• Support. While I'm not much of a fan of Massenet, this is an excellent historical recording of his work that is illustrative of his style. Vassyana (talk) 16:16, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Promoted Jules Massenet, Enrico Caruso, O Souverain, O Juge, O Pere.ogg. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:16, 20 October 2008 (UTC)