Fonotipia - Biography

Biography - Fonotipia

Italy

As both Mike Thomas and Norman Field indicate on their websites, Fonotipia records were prestige products for classical recordings. The discs were imported into the UK by agents from about 1905.

The discs themselves were produced by "The International Talking Machine Co.", which also produced records under the Jumbo and Odeon labels. This company was started in Berlin by Frederick Prescott in 1903 after his Zonophone company in Germany had been taken over by "The Gramophone and Typewriter Company" (later HMV). Further details of the Fontipia company are very complicated, so please refer to the Frank Andrews articles below.

The first records were 10¾ inch in a 39000 catalogue number series which reached its end by 1907. This was followed by a 62000 series of the same size. Both series have piano accompaniment. At the end of 1907 a 92000 series started with orchestral accompaniment.

A 13¾" 69000 series started in 1905, but seems to have been quickly abandoned.

A 12" 74000 series possibly started around 1906, but the number of recordings/re-recordings make a start date very difficult to estimate.

Other series are known to exist and, again, Frank Andrews' articles should be consulted.

With the start of the First World War, Fonotipia became unavailable in the UK, and much of their post-war production was also unavailable. They were absorbed into Odeon.

The only way to date Fonotipia recordings approximately is by their matrix numbers.These are prefixed XPh for 10¾", XXPh for 12", XXXPh for 13¾" and XPo for 10". Bennett gives a guide to recording dates in his 1958 supplement which can be summarised for pre-1914 recordings as follows:
1904: 1-129
1905: 130-499
1904: 500-523 (French)
1905: 524-758 (French)
1905/6: 1000-1019 (German)
1905: 1125-1540
1906: 1541-2281
1907: 2282-2841
1908: 2844-3369
1908/9: 3370-3401
1909: 3403-3840
1909/10: 3842-3890
1910: 3891-4204
1910 to 1914:4228-5058

Further Information
John R Bennett published a list of discs in 1953 in Dischi Fonotipia (download from archive.org), which was later republished with a supplement as Volume 3 of the "Voices Of The Past Series" of discographies in 1958, and with a further supplement in 1964.

The company history is complicated, and has been extensively documented by Frank Andrews in a series of articles in "The Talking Machine Review" starting in June 1976 (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5) all at archive.org.

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