It was difficult to determine WHICH version of "Lucia di Lammermoor" this was when I first watched it, as the date listed on YouTube is 1908....and there IS a version of the film from 1908...but it's NOT this one! Instead, this is the 1911 version and it's obviously so because the Edison film was, oddly, all sound...an amazing novelty for the time. As you might expect, the film had a synchronized disc which played the music...and lining them up exactly was sometimes a pain...something you don't need to worry about with this YouTube offering.
What makes this a particularly amazing film is that it is one of the only times you can SEE and HEAR Erico Caruso perform. While he doesn't sound nearly as good as later performers like Pavarotti, it's really because of the primitiveness of the equipment that his voice doesn't sound like the greatest of his age. Well worth seeing for opera lovers, film buffs and film historians.
What makes this a particularly amazing film is that it is one of the only times you can SEE and HEAR Erico Caruso perform. While he doesn't sound nearly as good as later performers like Pavarotti, it's really because of the primitiveness of the equipment that his voice doesn't sound like the greatest of his age. Well worth seeing for opera lovers, film buffs and film historians.
