Tito Schipa’s first discs were cut for the Gramophone Company, Milan, in the fall of 1913. Of the thirteen published sides, only eight were issued on the prestigious premium priced red-label series. These discs have always been readily available to collectors, and mint copies were easily obtainable for this project. The five titles from La Traviata, Tosca, and La Gioconda were issued in Italy on the lower priced green-label series, and are exceedingly scarce. Finding perfect originals of these discs has been impossible. With the help of collectors and digital technology, however, most of the distortion caused by wear on the original discs has been eliminated without compromising the youthful charm of Schipa’s voice.

The remaining Schipa recordings presented here are his thirty-four sides recorded for the Pathé Company between 1916 and 1921. It is well known that Pathé discs are perhaps the most difficult recordings to reproduce, due to the primitive recording method, and the resultant sub-standard sonic quality. Unlike any other major record company, Pathé’s master recordings were all recorded on large wax cylinders, and then acoustically re-recorded to disc. Therefore, all Pathé recordings are one generation removed from the original master. Because of this convoluted method, the sound of Pathé discs can range from quite good to embarrassingly poor, depending on how well the master cylinder was transferred to the disc format. The Pathé recordings of Tito Schipa are no exception. However, in preparing this album, excellent copies were used, and extreme care was taken to extract as much music as possible from these primitive grooves.