Columbia Masterworks Records

These first eight sets included five symphonic recordings—Beethoven's Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, Dvorak's "From the New World", Mozart's E-Flat Major (No.

[3]: 349  Sales were such that Columbia engaged Welles and the Mercury Theatre to produce four Shakespeare plays (Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar and Macbeth) for the phonograph in 1939 and 1940.

The album would lead to three sequels, the Hear It Now program on the CBS Radio Network in 1950 and the CBS-TV successor, See It Now, in 1951.

Columbia Masterworks was also the first recording company to release an album of a nearly complete stage production—the record-breaking 1943 Broadway revival of Shakespeare's Othello, starring Paul Robeson, José Ferrer and Uta Hagen.

Many years later, in 1962, Columbia Masterworks would release a four-LP album of the complete Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring its original Broadway cast: Uta Hagen, Arthur Hill, George Grizzard and Melinda Dillon.

Columbia Masterworks' most successful Broadway album was the original cast recording of My Fair Lady (OL-5090, 1956), starring Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Stanley Holloway and Robert Coote.

This first album was issued only in mono, but the first stereo recording of My Fair Lady—featuring the same four stars, this time with the London cast—followed in 1959.

And in 1964, Columbia Masterworks issued the film soundtrack album of the show, starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn's "singing voice", Marni Nixon.