Listen to extracts from the collection [click écouter]

Ghostly voices filled the Paris Opéra yesterday as music-lovers heard recordings entombed for a century in the vault famously haunted by the fictional Phantom.

Nellie Melba, the Australian soprano, and the tenor Enrico Caruso were among the long-dead stars who crackled from 24 pristine gramophone records that had been locked away for posterity.

The tale of the “buried voices”, as they are known, began on Christmas Eve 1907 with a strange and solemn ceremony. In the labyrinth below the Palais Garnier, as the opera house is known, Aristide Briand, a leading statesman, dedicated two leaden urns.

Times Archive, 1907: Gluck and Debussy at the Paris Opera

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“This will teach men [100 years from now] about the state of our talking machines and the voices of the principal singers of our times,” he said.

The idea of leaving voices in a time capsule came from Alfred Clark, the American head of the French branch of Gramophone, the British company that became His Master's Voice and later EMI.

According to Gaston Leroux, who wrote The Phantom of the Opera in 1909, workers unearthed the skeleton of Erik, his disfigured “angel of music”, as they were burying the records. The novel opens and closes in the sound vault.

The skeleton was invention, but the renditions of Wagner, Beethoven, Verdi and other composers were kept under seal for the prescribed century. They were transferred to the National Library and opened last Christmas along with two urns deposited in 1912, one of which had been damaged beyond repair. Technicians spent a year extracting the fragile records from the glass plates and asbestos inside which they had been packed. The 78rpm grooves were read optically and transferred to digital storage.

The collection was put on the internet yesterday as extracts were played to experts and the public in a vaulted salon while snow fell outside on the great Opéra staircase.

Most of the recordings were commercial and have survived in less fine condition elsewhere, but the collection of repertoire and performers offers a window on the sound-track of the Belle Epoque, experts said.

Some were not impressed with the old masters. François Le Roux, a Paris Opéra baritone and teacher, said that the old techniques grated on modern professional ears. Singers belted it out, indulging in showy flourishes and fast vibrato that sound odd now, he said.

“The sopranos were generally nasal. Most of them would not get past the quarter-finals in a contest nowadays,” he said.

Experts on vintage records marvelled not only at the sound, but at the colourful, perfectly preserved labels of the discs from what are known as Gramophone's “pre-dog” period. EMI is bringing out a CD from the contents of the urns next month. The Opéra also plans to bury a new time capsule with the best early 21st century music.

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