The Paris Opera and National Library are to display two sealed urns containing recordings by opera greats of the early 1900s such as Nellie Melba and Enrico Caruso.

The recordings were buried on Dec. 24, 1907, in an effort to preserve the leading voices of the era.

There are 12 discs in each urn with interpretations of French and Italian opera donated by the Gramophone Company in France.

They were buried in the basement of the Palais Garnier opera house in Paris with the stipulation that they not be opened for 100 years "so men of that epoch can hear what the leading voices of our time sounded like," Alfred Clark, head of Gramophone Co., said at the time.

The urns were exhumed in 1989 and have been in safekeeping in the Paris National Library.

On Wednesday, the library will begin displaying the urns, but the recordings won't be extracted until some time in 2008, as they are sealed in asbestos and must be removed under special conditions.

In 1907, asbestos was considered a way of protecting the records from deterioration, but now is known to be a carcinogen.

EMI, heir to the Gramophone Company, plans to create a recording of the works from the urns, including music by Bizet, Gounod, Donizetti, Rossini and Verdi.

EMI also plans to create a new time capsule of great music to be preserved for another 100 years.

With files from the Australian Broadcasting Corp.