Machine Speak Ruggiero Leoncavallo, ‘Vesti la giubba’ (Pagliacci), I Pagliacci, Act I

A contemporary observer remarked that, though the machine was clearly at an early stage of development, it gave a fairly accurate imitation of a five-year-old child, with only one minor speech impediment: 'its voice is pleasant and sweet, only the R is pronounced gutturally and with a little rumbling' ('la voix en est agréable & douce, il n'y a que l'R qu'elle prononce en grasseyant & avec un certain ronflement').Elsewhere, the machine seems to have made the most of a limited vocabulary by making friends, declaring love and hailing rulers of empires past and present. A sound technology's first words may be made to bear weighty burdens. Yet the sequence of short entertainments that preceded the feature might well have reinforced the impression that it was the simulation of performers' bodies that the technology hoped to achieve, as live, onstage performances of the overture to Tannhäuser and Beethoven's 'Kreutzer' Sonata gave way to short films that featured musicians performing within single-shot, static frames. Enrico Caruso had made the song famous two decades earlier, in a gramophone recording that was the earliest to 'go platinum'.Yet another, more general explanation for the use of opera (which would be extensive among early Vitaphone shorts) is that the venerable artform, rendered newly audible, could serve to mystify picture-palace audiences. For cinemagoers drawn from the rapidly expanding middle class, so this argument goes, there were few expectations as to what opera should be beyond its secure signification of high art; it projected an aura of upward mobility, an aura from which the as-yet-undefined Vitaphone could borrow in order to suggest its own cultural prestige.This sociological explanation hints at an answer to the question, 'why opera?', while the technological and media-historical justifications given just now suggest reasons why 'Vesti la giubba' in particular might have been used.