One historian speculated that his choice may have been a topical joke.
Showing off his language skills, Bismarck also recorded snippets of poetry and
songs in English, Latin, French and German.
The Bismarck recordings were among dozens of wax cylinders stored in a wooden
box in Edison’s laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, which is now the
Thomas Edison National Historical Park.
Another cylinder includes what is thought to be the first recording of a piece
by Frederic Chopin, while other musical treasures include work by some of
the great German and Hungarian Romantic singers and pianists.
Although the box was discovered in 1957, its contents were unknown until last
year when Jerry Fabris, the curator at the museum, used a new device called
an Archeophone to convert the cylinders into audio.
Ulrich Lappenküper, director of the Otto von Bismarck Foundation in
Friedrichsruh, Germany who had been aware of the Wangemann recordings but
assumed they were lost, said: “This is sensational.”
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