Helen Porter Mitchell adopted the professional name Melba to acknowledge her birthplace, Melbourne. She began to study singing seriously in 1882 and made her operatic début in Brussels in 1887. Melba won acclaim at Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera and subsequently in most of the leading opera houses of the world, becoming the epitome of glamour and fame. Melba’s voice was remarkable for its even quality over a range of nearly three octaves, and for its pure silvery timbre. Her first published recordings were made in 1904 for The Gramophone and Typewriter Company, the precursor of HMV. The wide-ranging repertoire on this disc features Melba’s famed operatic rôles in La Bohème and Faust, others with which she is less associated, such as Lohengrin and Tosca as well as coloratura classics including Sevillana and Ophelia’s Mad Scene.