The Record of Singing

It was issued on LP (with accompanying books) by EMI, successor to the British company His Master's Voice (better known as HMV) — perhaps the leading organization in the early history of audio recording.

The project was accompanied initially by two illustrated books, containing singers' biographies and appraisals, which were published in London, by Duckworth, in the late 1970s.

In practice, this means that there are separate Italian, German, French, Anglo-American and East European classifications.

Vocal artists of such lasting renown as Enrico Caruso, Nellie Melba, Titta Ruffo, Feodor Chaliapin, Kirsten Flagstad, Rosa Ponselle and Maria Callas are thus represented but by only a few recordings in each case.

Nonetheless, no such compilation can ever be exhaustive in scope, and the project has been criticised from time to time since its initial release for overlooking a few important singers who, while largely forgotten today, were highly talented performers who once enjoyed substantial careers and made records of enduring artistic merit.

They contained brief singers' biographies, too and featured a critical (sometimes controversial) commentary (see below) about their accomplishments, as gleaned from certain discs they had made.

The collection was published with extensive documentation, including the numbers of the original recordings and full biographies of the singers.