Announcing the National Jukebox, from Library of Congress

[DF55]

http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/

As Alex Ross describes it,

"The Library of Congress has unveiled an enormous online Jukebox containing more than ten thousand Victor Talking Machine recordings from the early years of the twentieth century. Well over a thousand of these are of the classical persuasion. There are the well-known classics — Caruso, Melba, Schumann-Heink, and the rest — alongside all sorts of fascinating oddities. Some of the Wagner selections are unsurprising, but I was taken aback by Sousa's rendition of the second transformation sequence in Parsifal." http://www.therestisnoise.com/2011/05/locjukebox.html (his text contains links that I've not copied here).

I can't get it to work for me at the moment, but seems worth pursuing.