Handel festival: “Israel In Egypt” – Excerpt (1888)
On June 29, 1888, an excerpt from Georg Friedrich Händel's oratorio "Israel In Egypt" was performed at the Handel festival held at the Crystal Palace in London. This performance is known as a notable event in the history of music recording.
On this day, a choir of about 4,000 people performed "Moses and the Children of Israel" under the direction of conductor August Manns. This epic chorus was recorded on an Edison phonograph by George Gouraud, Thomas Edison's foreign sales agent. The recording was made onto yellow paraffin cylinders, and the recording device was placed about 100 yards (about 91 meters) away from the choir.
Due to the limitations of recording technology at the time, the large number of choir members, the distance between the recording equipment and the choir, and the acoustic characteristics of Crystal Palace, the recordings were faint from the start. Furthermore, the sound quality has deteriorated over the years, and today the recordings are only faintly audible. However, they still provide a valuable resource for learning about the performance practices and scale of choirs at the time.
This recording was long considered the oldest surviving music recording, but in 2009"Au Clair De La Lune" (Light of the Moon), 1860Its status changed with the discovery of the 1888 recording, but the 1888 recording still holds an important place in music history as one of the earliest recorded large-scale choral performances of classical music.
Handel's "Israel in Egypt" is an oratorio based on the Bible that premiered in 1739, and is composed of excerpts from the Old Testament's "Exodus" and "Psalms." It is known as a work that is particularly known for its many choral parts, and is characterized by its dramatic development of the story and musical expression.
The Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace was first held in 1857 and, due to its success, was organised every three years, of which the 1888 Festival was one example, showing the thriving musical culture of the time.
This 1888 recording continues to attract the interest of many researchers and music lovers today, both as an attempt to capture music beyond the technical limitations of the time and as a historical record of a large-scale choral performance.
