Helen Porter Mitchell adopted the professional name, Melba, to acknowledge her Australian birthplace, Melbourne. In 1887 she made her operatic début in Brussels as Gilda, eventually winning acclaim at Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera and most of the leading opera houses of the world. This volume is the first of a series of three Naxos discs containing all the known recordings Melba made for the Victor Talking Machine in Camden, New Jersey, and New York. The 1907 recordings document some of Melba’s greatest hits with audiences of the period. Although the voice is recorded somewhat distantly, there is a naturalness of sound which allows Melba’s clean attacks, steadiness of tone and the bloom in her voice as it rises in a climactic phrase, to be heard without the edgy, strident quality that characterises some of the more powerful and brilliant recordings made after 1909.