The recordings are identical–why did Vyvyan Holland change his mind? It is possible that he was obliging a friend when he verified the recording of Montgomery Hyde and that he was swayed by expectation and enthusiasm, and that in the more formal situation of the BBC he was less sure of his attribution. Vyvyan Holland then declared that the recording could not be the voice of his father. Richard Bebb took it to the BBC where the then Head of Sound Archives, Timothy Eckersley, asked Vyvyan Holland to come in and listen to it. He in turn sent a copy to Richard Bebb, an authority on early speech recordings, asking him to authenticate it. Some time in the early 1960s a well-known American collector, Eddie Smith, was sent a tape of the Wilde recording. He brought back to England an acetate of his interview with the Wilde recitation tacked on the end, and this he played to Vyvyan Holland, Oscar Wilde’s son, who verified the recording as being his father’s voice. Montgomery Hyde never saw the original cylinder but only a tape of it. Fortunately, it survived along with other Edison memorabilia and to it we owe the preservation of the only recording ever made of Wilde’s voice.” The recording … was made on a wax cylinder. He responded by reciting Part VI of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which consists of the last three stanzas of the poem, and identifying it with his name at the end. One of these inventions was the “phonograph or speaking machine” and Wilde was asked to say something into the horn of the recording mechanism. Montgomery Hyde recounted the circumstances of Wilde’s visit to the Paris Exhibition in the summer of 1900 in his biography Oscar Wilde, published in 1976: “Wilde was recognised in the American pavilion, where one of the stands was devoted to the inventions of Thomas Edison. At the close of the poem the reciter gives his name in a studied, high-pitched and langourous voice: “Oscar Wilde”.Ĭaspar Citron told Montgomery Hyde that one of the radio station’s researchers had come upon the cylinder in an American archive and also gave him details of how it had come to be made. The recitation was reasonably clearly audible with only a few words masked by the swoosh and crackle which seem so characteristic of cylinder recordings. There followed an 80-second recording beginning “The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Part Six”. The interview, which lasted thirty minutes, was copied to an acetate disk, and was followed by an announcement: “What you are now going to hear is a recording of the actual voice of Oscar Wilde …” In 1963, when in America to promote his book Oscar Wilde: The Aftermath, an account of the last years of Wilde’s life, he had been interviewed for the New York radio station WORFM by a presenter named Caspar Citron. Montgomery Hyde, a collector of Wilde’s letters and memorabilia and author of three books about him. Earlier this year the National Sound Archive was delighted to receive a disc containing a recording the voice of Oscar Wilde reciting a passage from The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
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