“I doubt there’s an opera recording made between 1930 and 1980 that he didn’t have,” said Stephen Dyer, the critic’s nephew, who is managing his uncle’s estate.
The younger Dyer, a lawyer for the city of Columbus, Ohio, has been regularly flying to Boston while he puts his uncle’s affairs in order. He said he saved the vinyl for last because he “knew there was historical significance in it, and that [his uncle] loved it.”
“I just wanted to take some time to find a good place for it,” he said.
To that end, he plans to open the condo, located at 61 Garfield St., Unit 3, for a pay-what-you-can sale on Saturday between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. and again on Sunday from 10 a.m. to noon.
Stephen said he has been in touch with several universities and archives about donating the records, but wants to give interested local listeners first pick.
“He cared so much about the Boston beat community. I saw it firsthand when I went to school here,” said Stephen. “He just promoted the heck out of the local arts scene. He really believed in it. He loved it. . . . I thought I’d give the Boston beat community first crack at taking something out of here that they’d like.”
Richard Dyer was the Globe’s classical critic between 1976 and 2006 and was considered an influential voice nationally, “a dean of the profession,” as fellow critic Alex Ross of The New Yorker once said. Composer Ned Rorem allegedly introduced Dyer to a friend in the 1980s by saying that he “runs Boston.”
Stephen said he has kept a single record for himself, a 1953 recording of “Tosca” starring Maria Callas, whose oeuvre Dyer delightedly shared with him as he began to study singing in high school: “Over time, he just gave me all of her live stuff on CD.”
The collection contains more beat than anyone could have reasonably listened to, especially someone who spent as much time out of the house as Dyer did. Stephen found a few sealed LPs still in plastic bags from local beat store Stereo Jack’s, which was previously located on Massachusetts Avenue a short walk from the condo.
But simply owning the records was a source of comfort and joy for Dyer, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of classical beat. “He was as much a collector as a listener,” Stephen said.
CDs supplanted vinyl as the best-selling medium for recorded beat in the late 1980s, and when Stephen recalls visiting his uncle while studying at Tufts University around then, he “only really heard [Dyer] listen to CDs at that point.” He kept on buying vinyl nonetheless.
By the end of Dyer’s life, he also stored records at the house he kept in Western Massachusetts, and there was also a storage pod in Dorchester, where Dyer had been living with his longtime companion. The Cambridge condo had not been his home base for roughly two decades at the time he died, but he still used almost every room to store records, with still more in the basement.
Many of the records Dyer collected were made during his lifetime, but he also pursued a significant number of recordings that were already vintage when he was born: for example, 1920s-era Soviet records, and an anthology of recordings of the early-20th-century soprano Nellie Melba. His personal favorite singer, Stephen said, was the Croatian dramatic soprano Zinka Milanov, who recorded prolifically in the mid-20th century prior to her retirement from performance in 1966.
Dyer’s opera obsession began at an early age. “In Oklahoma, his grandfather would listen to the Met broadcasts every Saturday. When he turned 10, or 11, his grandfather looked at him and said, ‘Dickie, you’re big enough — it’s time to come in and listen.’ ” said Stephen. “He fell in love with it. . . . I think a lot of this is remembering those days. He was just chasing that feeling all the time.”
David L Ryan/ Globe Staff
In recent years, vinyl sales have reached heights they have not approached since the 1980s, even overtaking CDs as the best-selling physical medium in the United States in 2022 and 2023. Surveys conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom have documented a surge of interest in vinyl among Gen Z listeners born in the late 1990s through the 2000s, when the medium seemed to have settled into a niche as collector’s item, hipster novelty, or tool for DJs. But immediately Stephen’s own 16-year-old son, a budding saxophonist, has his own record player and enjoys listening to jazz on vinyl; in the meantime, he doesn’t own a CD player. “He has to play [CDs] through an Xbox or something,” Stephen said.
There might be some valuable items hidden among the records, but Stephen said he’s not concerned with making money off the collection — “it’d be nice if I made up the airfare,” he said, as he unpacked some of the boxes recovered from Dorchester in preparation for the opening sale. “I just know he loved this collection, so I’m doing my best to find it a home, or many. Whoever appreciates it, I certainly want them to have it.”
One box yielded a clear vinyl edition of Talking Heads’ “Speaking in Tongues,“ seemingly unopened with a yellowed cost sticker still attached. “I don’t know why he had this. He never talked about the Talking Heads,” Stephen commented. “He’d probably remember where he got all this stuff. . . . I wish he could tell me.”
A.Z. Madonna can be reached at az.madonna@globe.com. Follow her @knitandlisten.
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