Reader's Digest Treasury of Great Operettas, Nine-LP Box Set with Program Book, Starring Anna Moffo, Conducted by Lehman Engel, RCA Custom RD-40 M, 1960

The Piece

A nine-record box set in a cream textured slipcase, and the cover alone is worth the shelf space.

The front carries a full-colour painted scene of a theatre at curtain-down: a hussar in a scarlet dress tunic with gold frogging turned toward a young woman in a lilac ball gown and long white gloves, a saddled horse behind them, a hansom cab drawing up, and behind that a crowd in top hats, plumes and evening colour spilling out under gaslight. It is painted loose and bright, all vermilion and rose and orange, in the confident commercial illustration style of its moment.

Across the top, Treasury of Great in white script, and then Operettas in a fat gold slab serif with an ornamented initial O.

In the lower corner sits the yellow imprint panel: Reader's Digest · New Cyclophonic Miracle Sound Recording · RCA Custom, with the line beneath confirming it was recorded and manufactured especially for Reader's Digest by the Radio Corporation of America, and the catalogue number RD–40 M.

The box opens like a book. The left inner face is a printed essay page with a red ornamental border and two theatre masks at its head, carrying The Gay, Wonderful World of Operetta by George Marek and Operetta and Musical Comedy by Lehman Engel. The right inner face is the credits panel, printed in brown on cream, and running down its edge is the best piece of design on the set — a colour-blocked index in nine numbered bands, each a different pastel, listing what is on side one and side two of every record.

Standing in the box is the program book, and it is the part most copies have lost.

Its cover is a grey theatre-poster frame set against a pink brick wall, lettered The Reader's Digest — The Golden Age of Operetta, with the full cast beneath. Inside, every one of the eighteen sides gets its own page: composer, lyricist, a numbered running order with the title of each individual number, and the complete cast with the role each singer takes.

History & Provenance

This is the 1960 Reader's Digest Treasury of Great Operettas, catalogue RD–40 M, nine LPs, produced under the RCA Custom imprint. The M in the catalogue number is the mono issue; a twelve-record stereo version followed in 1962.

Reader's Digest sold records the way it sold everything else — by mail, in sets, to households that were not going to a specialist shop. What made those sets far better than they had any right to be is that the magazine hired RCA to make them, and RCA put real people on them.

The soprano is Anna Moffo, and the timing is the thing. Moffo (1932–2006) made her Metropolitan Opera debut on 14 November 1959 as Violetta in La traviata — the role that became her signature — and this set was made immediately after. She went on to sing seventeen seasons at the Met, and in Italy became famous well beyond opera: La Bellissima, host of her own television series, voted among the ten most beautiful women in the country. This is a lyric-coloratura at the very front of a major career, singing light repertoire for a mail-order audience, which is a combination that stopped being possible not long afterwards.

She is joined by Rosalind Elias, Jeanette Scovotti, Mary Ellen Pracht, Sara Endich, William Lewis, Peter Palmer, Richard Fredricks and Valentine Pringle. The program book adds several more who are not named on the box at all — Robert Nagy, Lee Cass, William Chapman, Arthur Rubin and Kenneth Smith — which is one of the reasons the book matters.

It also settles the casting, and the casting is not what a buyer would assume. In Die Fledermaus Moffo sings Adele, the maid, rather than Rosalinda — Jeanette Scovotti takes Rosalinda and Rosalind Elias sings Orlofsky. In The Merry Widow Moffo is Sonia, opposite William Lewis as Danilo.

One fact worth knowing before buying: everything here is sung in English. Die Fledermaus, The Merry Widow, A Waltz Dream, A Night in Venice — all of it is performed in English-language adaptations, not in the original German. The Fledermaus lyrics are credited to Mel Mandel and Norman Sachs. That was the standard approach for an American mail-order audience in 1960, and it is either exactly what somebody wants or exactly what they do not; it is stated here so nobody finds out on the turntable.

The conductor is Lehman Engel (1910–1982), and he is the reason the Broadway material sounds like Broadway rather than like an opera house doing Broadway. Engel was nominated five times and won twice for the Tony Award for Best Conductor and Musical Director — a category that no longer exists. He conducted Li'l Abner, Shangri-La and Take Me Along on Broadway and made studio recordings of Oklahoma!, Carousel and Show Boat. He founded the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop in New York, whose alumni include Alan Menken and Stephen Flaherty. He wrote one of the two essays printed inside this box and then conducted the records it introduces.

The producer is Charles Gerhardt (1927–1999), and this set sits at the start of the run that made his name. From 1960 Gerhardt worked with the engineer Kenneth Wilkinson on recordings for RCA and Reader's Digest across more than four thousand sessions. He is best remembered today for the Classic Film Scores series of 1972–78 with the National Philharmonic — the Korngold, Steiner and Rózsa records still treated as the reference for that repertoire. The arrangements here are by Henri René and the recording engineer was Bernard Keville.

The eighteen sides run from Viennese operetta through American operetta into Broadway, which is exactly the argument Engel's essay makes about how one became the other: Die Fledermaus, Mlle. Modiste, The Merry Widow, A Waltz Dream, A Night in Venice, Babes in Toyland, The Desert Song, Naughty Marietta, Rose-Marie, Blossom Time, The Student Prince, The Red Mill, Show Boat, The New Moon, Porgy and Bess, The Vagabond King, Roberta and Song of Norway.

One thing stated plainly, before anyone buys it as an investment. This set is not rare. Reader's Digest sold these by the hundreds of thousands through the mail, and copies come up regularly in the low tens of dollars. What is uncommon is a copy that still has its program book, since a loose booklet is the first thing to go. What is on offer is not scarcity — it is eighteen sides of well-produced music by named artists, complete with the book that documents them, in a handsome 1960 package, at a price that reflects what it actually is.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Three reasons, and they do not all point at a turntable.

The music is genuinely good and there is a great deal of it. Eighteen sides covering the whole arc from Viennese operetta to Broadway, sung by a Metropolitan Opera soprano in her first year at the house and conducted by a two-time Tony winner who spent his life in the pit. Mail-order packaging has caused people to underestimate these records for sixty years; the credits are the argument against that.

The program book turns it from a record set into a reference. Eighteen pages of composer, lyricist, running order and cast means you can follow every side, know who is singing which role, and read the plot logic of an operetta you have never seen. Most surviving copies of this set have lost it, which is exactly why it is worth having.

And the box is a piece of graphic design. That painted cover is a small master class in 1960 commercial illustration, and the nine-band colour spine is the kind of thing that gets framed on its own. It stands on a shelf, leans on a mantel, or hangs flat on a wall in a music room, a bar or a study — twelve inches square, for very little money.

It also makes an easy, specific gift: for anyone raised on Show Boat and The Student Prince, anyone in community theatre, a singing teacher, a new turntable owner who needs something to play, or a collector of mid-century record design.

A note on care, in two parts, because the records and the paper need opposite things.

Store the box upright, on its edge, like a book — never flat with weight on top. Stacked records take the pressure of everything above them and warp, and the box itself will bow. Keep it out of direct sunlight, which fades printed board faster than almost anything else, and away from damp, radiators and exterior walls; board and paper both take up moisture and the box will swell and separate at the hinge. Keep the program book inside the box rather than shelved separately, and handle the torn edge of the spine index gently rather than trying to tape it — adhesive tape yellows, hardens and stains paper permanently, and a small clean tear is always preferable to a taped one.

Handle the records by the edge and the label only. Skin oils on a groove attract and hold dust, and dust in a groove is what does the permanent damage. Slide each record out and back with the sleeve opening upward so nothing escapes, and use a carbon-fibre brush before each play rather than wiping with a cloth, which drags grit across the surface. If a record needs a real clean, use a proper record-cleaning solution rather than household detergent or alcohol, and never let liquid reach the paper label.

These are mono pressings. They play perfectly well on a standard stereo cartridge; a mono cartridge or a mono switch will simply sound quieter and better centred if the equipment has one.