
Enrico Caruso
Enrico Caruso (Naples, February 25, 1873 – Naples,
August 2, 1921) was an
Italian tenor who sang to great acclaim at the major
opera houses of Europe and North and South
America.
Historical and musical significance
Such was Enrico Caruso's influence on singing style that virtually
all subsequent tenors in the Italian repertoire have been his heirs
to a greater or lesser extent. His operatic career spanned the
years 1895 to 1920 but was cut short by a serious illness which
eventually killed him at the age of 48. He remains famous, while
few other early 20th-century singing idols are still remembered by
the general public. In the 21st century, many people might think of
this as a remarkable achievement in itself because unlike
modern-day singers, he did not have access to a sophisticated
marketing and communications industry with the capacity to
publicise his attainments instantly and globally via the media. (He
did, however, become a client of
Edward
Bernays, the father of public relations, during the latter's
tenure as a press agent in the United States.)
Biographers generally attribute Caruso's global success (in
addition to the unique quality of his voice) to his sharp business
sense, and to his enthusiastic use of cutting-edge technology for
its time—commercial
sound recording.
Many opera singers of an older generation than Caruso's had
rejected the
phonograph (or
gramophone) due to various factors such as the
low fidelity of early discs, and their voices have been lost to us
as a result. Other veteran opera singers of the first magnitude,
such as
Adelina Patti,
Francesco Tamagno and
Nellie Melba, accepted the new technology after
witnessing the swift profits generated by Caruso's initial
recordings.
Caruso made more than 260 extant recordings for the
Victor Talking Machine
Company (later
RCA Victor) over a
16-year period and earned millions of dollars from the sale of the
resulting
78-rpm discs. These
American-produced discs, recorded from 1904 to 1920, chart the
development of Caruso's voice from that of a lyric tenor, to that
of a
spinto tenor, to that of a
fully-fledged dramatic tenor with a potent, almost baritonal
timbre. (Previously, in 1902, he had cut two series of records in
Italy for the British
Gramophone & Typewriter
Company, the forerunner of
HMV/
EMI.)
There is a visual record of Caruso, too. He appeared in a number of
newsreels, a short experimental film made
by
Thomas Edison, and two commercial
motion pictures. For Edison in 1911, he portrayed the role of
Edgardo in a filmed scene from
Donizetti's
opera
Lucia di
Lammermoor. In 1919, he acted in a dual role in the
American
silent movie My [Italian]
Cousin for
Paramount
Pictures. This movie included a sequence showing him on stage
singing the aria "
Vesti la giubba"
from
Leoncavallo's opera
Pagliacci. The following year
Caruso appeared as a character called Cosimo in another movie,
The Splendid Romance. Producer
Jesse Lasky paid Caruso $100,000 to appear in
these two romantic comedies but they both flopped at the box
office.
While
Caruso sang at most of the world's foremost opera theatres,
including La
Scala
in Milan
, the
Royal Opera
House
, Covent
Garden
, in London
and the
Teatro
Colón
in Buenos
Aires
, he is best known for being the leading tenor of
the Metropolitan Opera in
New York
City
for 18 consecutive seasons. His total Met
appearances exceeded 800.
Caruso's voice extended up to the
high C in
its prime. Both his virile vocal technique and unaffected style of
singing were without precedent. They combined the best aspects of
the old 19th-century tradition of elegant
bel
canto vocalism with the ardent delivery, naturalistic phrasing
and big, exciting tenor sound demanded by such 20th century
composers of
verismo opera as
Puccini, Leoncavallo,
Mascagni and
Giordano. Fellow singers found him to be an
attentive colleague, and he was able to invest his operatic
interpretations with an exceptional degree of emotional force
without becoming lachrymose or 'hammy'. Judging by contemporary
reviews of his Met performances he was a keen and sincere actor,
too, if not always a subtle one.
Life and career

Enrico Caruso in the role of Dick
Johnson, 1910/1911
Enrico Caruso came from a poor but not destitute background.
Born in
Naples
in the Via San Giovanello agli Ottocalli 7 on
February 25, 1873, he was baptised the next day in the adjacent
Roman Catholic Church of San Giovanni
e Paolo. Called Errico in accordance with the Neapolitan
dialect, Caruso was nicknamed "Erri" by his family and close
friends; but he would later adopt the formal Italian version of his
given name, Enrico, because it sounded more cultured. This name
change was at the suggestion of a singing teacher, Guglielmo
Vergine, with whom he began lessons at the age of 16.
Caruso was the third of seven children born to the same parents,
and one of only three to survive infancy. There is an often
repeated story of Caruso having had 17 or 18 siblings who died in
infancy. Two of his biographers, Francis Robinson and Pierre Key,
mentioned the tale in their books but genealogical research
conducted by Caruso family friend Guido D'Onofrio has suggested it
is false. According to Caruso's son Enrico, Jr., Caruso himself and
his brother Giovanni may have been the source of the exaggerated
number. Caruso's widow Dorothy also included the story in a memoir
that she wrote about her late husband. She quotes the tenor as
follows in relation to his mother, Anna Caruso (nee Baldini): "She
had twenty-one children. Twenty boys and one girl -- too many. I am
number nineteen boy."
Caruso's father, Marcellino, was a mechanic with a steady job.
Initially, Marcellino thought that his son should adopt the same
trade and at the age of 11, the boy was apprenticed to a mechanical
engineer named Palmieri who constructed public water fountains.
(Whenever visiting Naples in future years, Caruso liked to point
out a fountain that he had helped to install.) Caruso later worked
alongside his father at the Meuricoffre factory in Naples. At his
mother's insistence, he also attended school for a time, receiving
a basic education under the tutelage of a local priest. He learned
to write in a handsome script and studied technical draftsmanship.
During this period he sang in his church choir and contemplated a
full-time adult career in music, an ambition which his mother, who
died in 1888, encouraged. In order to raise much needed cash, he
performed as a street singer in Naples and at cafes and soirees.
Aged 18, he used the fees that he had earned by singing at an
Italian resort to buy his first pair of non-secondhand shoes. His
progress as a paid entertainer was interrupted, however, by 45 days
of compulsory military service. He completed this in 1894, resuming
his lessons with Vergine upon discharge from the army.
Caruso made his professional stage debut in serious music at the
age of 22.
On March 15, 1895; the venue was the Teatro
Nuovo in Naples
; and the
work in which he appeared was a now-forgotten opera, L'Amico
Francesco, by the amateur composer Domenico Morelli. A
string of further engagements in provincial opera houses ensued,
and he received instruction from the conductor and singing teacher
Vincenzo Lombardi that improved technical aspects of his vocalism.
Two other prominent Neapolitan singers taught by Lombardi were the
baritone Pasquale
Amato, who would go on to partner Caruso often at the Met, and
the tenor
Fernando De Lucia, who
would also appear at the Met and later sing at Caruso's
funeral.
Money continued to be in short supply for Caruso. One of his first
publicity photographs, taken on a visit to Sicily in 1896, depicts
him wearing a bedspread draped like a toga since his sole dress
shirt was away being laundered. At a notorious early performance in
Naples, he was booed by the audience because he failed to pay a
claque to cheer for him. This incident hurt
Caruso's pride. He never appeared again on stage in his native
city, stating later that he would return "only to eat
spaghetti".
During the final years of the 19th century, Caruso performed at a
succession of theatres throughout Italy until, in 1900, he was
rewarded with a contract to sing at La Scala, the country's number
one opera house. His La Scala debut occurred on December 26 of that
year, in the part of Rodolfo in Puccini's
La Boheme, with
Arturo Toscanini conducting. Foreign
audiences in Monte Carlo, Warsaw and Buenos Aires also heard Caruso
sing during this pivotal phase of his career and, in 1899-1900, he
appeared before the Russian aristocracy at the
Mariinsky theatre in Saint Petersburg and the
Bolshoi theatre in Moscow as part of a
visiting troupe of top-class Italian singers.
The first major operatic role that Caruso was given the
responsibility of creating was Loris in
Umberto Giordano's
Fedora, at the Teatro Lirico, Milan, on
November 17, 1898. At that same theater, on November 6, 1902, he
would create the role of Maurizio in
Francesco Cilea's
Adriana Lecouvreur. (He had hoped to
create the part of Cavaradossi in Puccini's
Tosca at the
Rome Opera
at the start of 1900 but the composer, after deliberating hard,
chose an older and more established tenor instead.)
Image:carusoO.jpg|The medal
that Enrico Caruso gave to
Pasquale
Simonelli, his New York City impresario
Obverse: Caruso facing left.
Lower right: Salanto, medal maker’s signature.
Image:carusoR.jpg|
Reverse: Muse of music with lyre
over PER RICORDO (memento). Around the rim:
TIFFANY & Co.
24 CARAT GOLD Y
(27 mm).
Caruso embarked on his last series of performances at La Scala in
March 1902, creating the principal tenor part in
Germania
by
Alberto Franchetti. The
following month, he was engaged by the Gramophone & Typewriter
Company to make his first batch of recordings, in a Milan hotel
room, for a fee of 100 pounds sterling. These discs became
best-sellers. Among other things, they helped to spread 29-year-old
Caruso's fame in the English-speaking world. The management of
London's Royal Opera House duly signed him for a season of
appearances in eight different operas ranging from
Aida by
Verdi to
Don Giovanni by
Mozart. His successful debut at Covent Garden
occurred on May 14, 1902, as the Duke of Mantua in Verdi's
Rigoletto.
The next year, he travelled to New York City to take up a contract
with the Metropolitan Opera. (The gap between his London and New
York engagements was filled by a sequence of operatic performances
in Italy, Portugal and South America.) Caruso's Met contract had
been negotiated by his agent, the banker/impresario
Pasquale Simonelli. Caruso debuted at the
Met in a new production of
Rigoletto on November 23, 1903.
A few months later, he began a lifelong association with the
Victor Talking-Machine
Company. He made his first American discs on February 1, 1904,
having signed a lucrative financial deal with Victor. Thenceforth,
his stellar recording career would run in tandem with his equally
stellar Met career, the one bolstering the other, until death
intervened in 1921.
Caruso
purchased the Villa Bellosguardo, a palatial country house near
Florence
, in 1904. The villa became his retreat away
from the pressures of the operatic stage and the grind of travel.
Caruso's
preferred address in New York City was a suite at Manhattan
's Knickerbocker
Hotel. (The Knickerbocker was erected in 1906 on the
corner of Broadway
and 42nd Street.) New York came to mean so much to
Caruso, he at one stage commissioned the city's best jewellers,
Tiffany & Co., to strike a
commemorative medal made out of 24-carat gold. He presented
the medal, which was adorned with the tenor's profile, to Simonelli
as a souvenir of his many performances at the Met.
Caruso's post-1903 career was not confined to New York. He gave
recitals and operatic performances in a large number of cities
across America and continued to sing widely in Europe, appearing
again at Covent Garden in 1904-07 and 1913-14 and also in France,
Belgium, Monaco, Austria, Hungary and Germany prior to the outbreak
of
World War One. At one stage, Melba
asked him to join her on a tour of Australia but he declined
because of the amount of time-consuming travel such a trip would
entail. He did tour Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil in 1917, however,
and two years later he performed in Mexico City. In 1920, he was
paid 10,000 dollars a night to sing in Havana, Cuba, according to
his biographer Michael Scott .
Fourteen years earlier, Caruso and other prominent Met artists had
gone to San Francisco to participate in a series of performances at
the Tivoli Opera House. Following his appearance as Don Jose in
Carmen, he was awakened at 5:13 a.m. on April 18, 1906, in
his
Palace
Hotel suite by a strong jolt. San Francisco had been hit by a
major earthquake,
which led to a series of fires that destroyed most of the city. The
Met lost all of the sets and costumes that it had brought on tour.
Clutching an autographed photo of President
Theodore Roosevelt as a talisman, Caruso
made an effort to flee the city, first by boat and then by train.
He vowed never to return to San Francisco; he kept his word.
Caruso
became embroiled in a scandal in November 1906, when he was charged
with an indecent act committed in the monkey house of New York's
Central Park
Zoo
. Police accused him of pinching the bottom
of a woman. Caruso claimed that a monkey did the bottom-pinching.
He was found guilty as charged, however, and fined 10 dollars
although suspicions linger that he may have been entrapped by the
alleged victim and the arresting officer. The leaders of New York's
opera-going high society were outraged initially by the incident,
but they soon forgave Caruso and continued to patronise his Met
performances. Caruso's fan base at the Met was not restricted,
however, to America's wealthiest stratum of citizens. Members of
the country's middle classes also flocked to hear him sing in
person or buy copies of his recordings, while he enjoyed a
passionate following among New York's 500,000 Italian
immigrants.
On December 10, 1910, Caruso starred at the Met as Dick Johnson in
the world premiere of Puccini's
La fanciulla del West. The
composer had written the music for the tenor lead's role with
Caruso's voice specifically in mind. He appeared opposite two of
the Met's other elite singers during
Fanciulla's first run
of performances, namely, Pasquale Amato and the Czech
soprano Emmy Destinn.
Arturo Toscanini, now the Met's principal conductor, controlled
proceedings from the orchestra pit.
In 1917, Caruso was elected an honorary member of
Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, the national
fraternity for men involved in music, by the fraternity's Alpha
chapter at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. That
same year, America entered World War One. Caruso did useful charity
work during the conflict, raising money for war-related patriotic
causes by giving concerts and participating enthusiastically in
Liberty Bond drives. The tenor had
proved to be a shrewd businessman since arriving in America. He
ploughed a sizeable proportion of his earnings from record
royalties and singing fees into a range of remunerative
investments. Biographer Michael Scott says that by the end of World
War One, Caruso's annual income tax bill amounted to 154,000
American dollars .
Caruso wed on August 20, 1918. His 25-year-old bride, Dorothy Park
Benjamin, was the product of a respected New York family. They had
one daughter, Gloria Caruso (born in 1919). Dorothy published two
books about her husband, whom she called "Rico". One of these books
was published in 1928, the other in 1945. They included many of his
touching letters to her. Prior to his marriage, Caruso had been
romantically tied to an Italian soprano, Ada Giachetti, who was a
few years older than he. Though already married, Giachetti bore
Caruso four sons during their liaison, which lasted from 1897 to
1908. Two survived infancy: Rodolfo Caruso (born 1898) and
singer/actor Enrico Caruso, Jr. (1904). Ada had left her husband
and an existing son to cohabit with the tenor. Giachetti's
relationship with Caruso broke down after 11 years and her
subsequent attempts to sue him for damages were dismissed by the
courts.
A fastidious dresser, Caruso took two baths a day and liked good
food and convivial company. He sketched for relaxation and the
quality of his numerous surviving caricatures suggest that he could
have made an alternative living as a professional cartoonist.
Dorothy Caruso said that by the time she knew him, her husband's
favorite hobby was compiling scrapbooks. He also amassed a valuable
collection of rare postage stamps, coins, antiques and small art
objects. Caruso was a heavy smoker of strong Egyptian cigarettes.
This deleterious habit, combined with a lack of healthy exercise
and the punishing schedule of performances that Caruso willingly
undertook season after season at the Met, may have contributed to
the bad health which afflicted the last 12 months of his
life.
Illness and death
On September 16, 1920, Caruso attended Victor's prime recording
venue, Trinity Church at Camden, New Jersey, for the final time. He
recorded several discs that day, including two items of religious
music by
Rossini. These discs were
to be his last. Dorothy Caruso noted that her husband's state of
health began a distinct downward spiral in late 1920 while they
were on a lengthy North American tour. He displayed the symptoms of
what appeared to be a heavy dose of
bronchitis but his condition worsened just before
Christmas, and he began experiencing persistent pain in his left
side. Caruso's doctor, Philip Horowitz, who usually treated him for
migraine headaches using a kind of
primitive
TENS unit, diagnosed
"intercostal neuralgia" and pronounced him fit to appear on stage,
although the pain continued to impede his singing.
On
December 11, 1920, during a performance of L'elisir d'amore by Donizetti at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music
, he suffered a throat haemorrhage and the audience
was dismissed at the end of Act 1. Following this incident,
a clearly unwell Caruso gave only three more performances at the
Met, the final one being in the role of Eléazar in
Halévy's La
Juive, on
Christmas Eve 1920.
(Appearing in the cast that night was the Australian
coloratura,
Evelyn
Scotney, who had sung with Caruso a number of times.)
Caruso's health deteriorated further during the new year due to
what was now diagnosed as purulent
pleurisy
and
empyema. He experienced episodes of
intense pain because of the infection and he underwent seven
surgical procedures to drain fluid from his chest and lungs. He
returned to Naples to recuperate from the most serious of his
operations, during which part of a rib had been removed. According
to Dorothy Caruso, he seemed to be recovering, but allowed himself
to be examined by an unhygienic local doctor and his condition
worsened dramatically after that. The Bastianelli brothers, eminent
doctors with a clinic in Rome, recommended that his left kidney be
removed. He was on his way to Rome to see them but, while staying
overnight in the Vesuvio Hotel in Naples, his precarious condition
took an alarming turn for the worse and he was given
morphine to help him sleep.
Caruso died at the hotel a few minutes after 9:00 a.m. local time,
on August 2, 1921. He was aged 48. The Bastianellis attributed the
likely cause of death to
peritonitis
arising from a burst subrenal
abscess. The
King of Italy,
Victor Emmanuel III, opened the
Royal Basilica of the Church of San Francisco di Paola for Caruso's
funeral, which was attended by thousands of people. His embalmed
body was preserved in a glass
sarcophagus at Del Pianto Cemetery in Naples for
mourners to view. In 1929, Dorothy Caruso had his remains sealed
permanently in an ornate stone tomb.
Honours
During his lifetime, Caruso received many orders, decorations,
testimonials and other kinds of honors from the monarchs,
governments and other bodies of the various nations in which he
sang. One notable decoration was the 'Honorary Captain of the New
York Police Force'. In 1987, Caruso was posthumously awarded the
Grammy Lifetime
Achievement Award. On February 27 of that same year, the
United States Postal
Service issued a 22-cent
postage
stamp in his honor.
Repertoire
Caruso's operatic repertoire consisted mainly of Italian and French
works. He performed only one opera by
Richard Wagner, namely
Lohengrin, and that was early in his career.
Listed below in chronological order are the first known
performances by Caruso of each of the different operas that he
undertook on stage.

- L'Amico Francesco (Morelli) - Teatro Nuovo, Napoli, 15
March 1895 (Creation)
- Faust - Caserta, 28 March
1895
- Cavalleria
rusticana - Caserta, April 1895
- Camoens (Musoni) - Caserta, May 1895
- Rigoletto - Napoli, 21 July
1895
- La traviata - Napoli, 25
August 1895
- Lucia di Lammermoor
- Cairo, 30 October 1895
- La Gioconda -
Cairo, 9 November 1895
- Manon Lescaut -
Cairo, 15 November 1895
- I Capuleti e i
Montecchi - Napoli, 7 December 1895
- Malia - Trapani, 21 March 1896
- La sonnambula - Trapani,
24 March 1896
- Marriedda - Napoli, 23 June 1896
- I puritani - Salerno, 10
September 1896
- La Favorita - Salerno, 22
November 1896
- A San Francisco - Salerno, 23 November 1896
- Carmen - Salerno, 6 December
1896
- Un Dramma in vendemmia - Napoli, 1 February 1897
- Celeste - Napoli, 6 March 1897 (Creation)
- Il Profeta Velato - Salerno, 8 April 1897
- La bohème - Livorno, 14
August 1897
- La Navarrese - Milano, 3
November 1897
- Il Voto - Milano, 10 November 1897 (Creation)
- L'Arlesiana - Milano, 27
November 1897 (Creation)
- Pagliacci - Milano, 31
December 1897
- La bohème
(Leoncavallo) - Genova, 20 January 1898
- The Pearl
Fishers - Genova, 3 February 1898
- Hedda - Milano, 2 April 1898 (Creation)
- Mefistofele - Fiume, 4
March 1898
- Sapho - Trento, 3? June 1898
- Fedora - Milano, 17
November 1898 (Creation)
- Iris - Buenos Aires, 22
June 1899
- La regina di
Saba (Goldmark) - Buenos Aires, 4 July 1899
- Yupanki - Buenos Aires, 25 July 1899
- Aida - St. Petersburg, 3 January
1900
- Un ballo in
maschera - St. Petersburg, 11 January 1900
- Maria di Rohan - St.
Petersburg, 2 March 1900
- Manon - Buenos Aires, 28 July
1900
- Tosca - Treviso, 23 October
1900
- Le Maschere - Milano, 17 January 1901 (Creation)
- L'elisir d'amore -
Milano, 17 February 1901

- Lohengrin - Buenos
Aires, 7 July 1901
- Germania - Milano, 11 March 1902 (Creation)
- Don Giovanni - London, 19
July 1902
- Adriana Lecouvreur -
Milano, 6 November 1902 (Creation)
- Lucrezia Borgia
- Lisboa, 10 March 1903
- Les Huguenots - New York,
3 February 1905
- Martha - New York, 9
February 1906
- Carmen - San Francisco, 17 April
1906 (the night before the great earthquake)
- Madama Butterfly -
London, 26 May 1906
- L'Africana - New York, 11
January 1907
- Andrea Chénier -
London, 20 July 1907
- Il trovatore - New York,
26 February 1908
- Armide - New York, 14
November 1910
- La fanciulla del
West - New York, 10 December 1910 (Creation)
- Julien - New York, 26 December 1914
- Samson et
Dalila - New York, 24 November 1916
- Lodoletta - Buenos Aires, 29
July 1917
- Le Prophète - New
York, 7 February 1918
- L'amore dei tre re -
New York, 14 March 1918
- La forza del
destino - New York, 15 November 1918
- La Juive - New York, 22
November 1919.
Note: At the time of his death, Caruso was
preparing to perform the title role in
Verdi's Otello
in a planned Met production. Though he never had an opportunity to
undertake the part of Otello on stage, he recorded two extracts
from the opera in 1910 and 1914: Otello's aria "Ora e per sempre
addio" and the Oath Duet, "Si, pel ciel marmoreo giuro" (with the
celebrated
baritone Titta Ruffo singing Iago's music).
Caruso also had a repertory of more than 520 songs. They ranged
from classical compositions to traditional Italian melodies and
popular tunes of the day, including a few English-language titles
such as
George M. Cohan's "
Over
There" and
Henry Geehl's "For You
Alone".
Recordings
possessed a "
phonogenic" voice and he
became one of the first major classical vocalists to make numerous
recordings. He and the disc
phonograph
(also known as the
gramophone) did
much to promote each other in the first two decades of the 20th
century. His 1907 acoustic recording of "Vesti la giubba" from
Leoncavallo's opera
Pagliacci was
the first gramophone record to sell a million copies. (Caruso's
searing rendition of the aria would inspire popular singer
Freddie Mercury to quote its melody in the
first section of
Queen's hit "It's a
Hard Life".) Some of Caruso's recordings have remained continuously
available since their original issue around a century ago, and
every one of his surviving discs (including the unissued takes) has
been re-engineered and re-released on CD in recent years.
Regrettably, for legal reasons arising from a clash of contracts,
he never recorded any of the music written for the character of
Dick Johnson in Puccini's
La fanciulla del West, which he
created in 1910.
Caruso's first recordings, cut in separate sessions in Milan in
April and November 1902, were made with piano accompaniments for
the Gramophone & Typewriter Company of England. Two years
later, he began recording exclusively for the
Victor Talking Machine
Company in the United States. While most of Caruso's American
recordings would be made in boxy studios in New York and Camden,
New Jersey, Victor also recorded him occasionally in Camden's
Trinity Church, which could accommodate a larger group of
musicians.
(Victor, however, had used Room 826 at
Carnegie
Hall
as a makeshift recording venue for its initial
batch of Caruso discs in February 1904.) As we have seen, his final
recording session took place at Camden on September 16,
1920. The last items that the doomed tenor recorded
consisted, fittingly enough, of the sacred pieces "Domine Deus" and
"Crucifixus" from Rossini's
Petite Messe Solennelle.
His earliest American records of operatic arias and songs, like
their Italian-made predecessors, were accompanied by piano. From
February 1906, however, so-called 'orchestral' accompaniments
became the norm. The regular conductors of these
instrumental-backed recording sessions were Walter B. Rogers and
Joseph Pasternack. After
RCA acquired Victor in
1929, it re-issued some of the old discs with the accompaniment
over-dubbed by a more modern sounding, electronically recorded
orchestra. Earlier experiments using this re-dubbing technique,
carried out in 1927, were considered unsatisfactory. In 1950, RCA
re-published a number of the fuller-sounding Caruso recordings on
78-rpm discs made of
vinyl instead of brittle
and gritty
shellac, which was the
traditional material used for "78s". Then, as vinyl long-playing
discs (LPs) became popular, many of his recordings were
electronically enhanced for release on the extended format. Some of
these particular recordings,
remastered by
RCA Victor on the alternative 45-rpm format, were re-released in
the early 1950s as companions to the same selections sung in the
"Red Seal" series by movie
tenor
Mario Lanza. The majority of them
were pressed on translucent red vinyl.
(Lanza starred in the
1951 Hollywood
biopic The Great
Caruso which had proved a commercial success, although it
strayed from the facts of Caruso's life.)
In the 1970s, Thomas G.
Stockham of the University
of Utah
utilised an early digital reprocessing technique
called "Soundstream" to remaster Caruso's Victor recordings for RCA
with mixed success. These early digitised versions of
Caruso's complete recordings were partly issued on LP, beginning in
1976. They were issued complete by RCA twice on
Compact Disc, in 1990 and 2004. Other complete
sets of Caruso's restored recordings have been issued on CD by the
Pearl label and, most recently, in 2004 by
Naxos. The 12-disc Naxos set was
remastered by the well known American audio-restoration engineer
Ward Marston. Pearl also released in 1993 a CD set devoted to RCA's
electrically over-dubbed versions of Caruso's original acoustic
discs. RCA/BMG (now
Sony) also has issued three
CD sets of Caruso material with modern, digitally-recorded
orchestral accompaniments added. Caruso's records are now
available, too, as digital downloads. The best-selling downloads of
Caruso at
iTunes have been the familiar
Italian songs "
Santa Lucia" and
"
O Sole Mio".
Note: Caruso died before the introduction of
higher fidelity, electrical recording technology (in 1925).
Consequently, all his 78-rpm discs were made using the more
primitive acoustic process, which required the recording artist to
sing into a metal horn or funnel rather than into a microphone.
This process was incapable of capturing the full range of overtones
and nuances present in Caruso's voice. The duration of a 12-inch,
Red Seal Caruso disc was restricted to a maximum of about 4:30
minutes. As a result, many items of vocal music recorded by Caruso
had to be trimmed or sung at a quicker-than-normal tempo. For more
information about Caruso's records, see
Enrico Caruso recordings.
Media
- : Over There
- :Caruso singing the popular World War I song by George M. Cohan.
Bibliography
- Caruso, Dorothy, Enrico Caruso - His Life and Death,
with a discography by Jack Caidin (Simon and Schuster, New York,
1945).
- Caruso, Enrico Jr., and Farkas, Andrew, Enrico Caruso, My
Father and My Family, with a discography by William Moran and
a chronology by Tom Kaufman (Amadeus Press, Portland, 1990).
- Gargano, Pietro, Una vita una leggenda (Editoriale
Giorgio Mondadori, 1997).
- Gargano, Pietro and Cesarini, Gianni, Caruso, Vita e arte
di un grande cantante (Longanesi, 1990).
- Jackson, Stanley, Caruso (Stein and Day, New York,
1972).
- Key P. V. R. and Zirato B., Enrico Caruso, a Biography
(Little, Brown and Co, Boston, 1922).
- Scott, Michael, The Great Caruso, with a chronology by
Tom Kaufman (London and New York, 1988).
- Vaccaro, Riccardo, Caruso (Edizioni Scientifiche
Italiane, 1995).
- Wagenmann J. H., Enrico Caruso und das Problem der
Stimmbildung, (Altenburg, 1911).
- Il Progresso italo americano, Il banchiere che portò Caruso
negli USA, sezione B - supplemento illustrato della domenica,
New York, 27 luglio 1986.
See also
References
- "I was able to do it with television and radio and media and
all kinds of assists. The popularity that Caruso enjoyed without
any of this technological assistance is astonishing." Beverly Sills, Enrico
Caruso: The Voice of the Century (A & E Biography,
1998).
- Pierre Key and Bruno Zirato, Enrico Caruso, a
Biography. Vienna House, 1922.
- Stanley Jackson, Caruso. Stein and Day, 1973.
- A.J. Millard, America On Record (Cambridge University
Press, 2005), pp. 59-60.
- Caruso, Enrico Jr., Enrico Caruso, My Father and My
Family. Amadeus Press, 1990.
- Dorothy Caruso, Enrico Caruso, His Life and Death, p.
257.
- Key and Zirato, p. 16.
- William Bronson, The Earth Shook, The Sky Burned
- An account of the earthquake by Caruso's lifelong friend, the
baritone Antonio Scotti, including Scotti's
observations of Caruso's behavior, is found in Pierre Key's
biography of Caruso, Enrico Caruso: A Biography free online at
Google Books, pp. 228-229.
- David Suisman, " Welcome to the Monkey House: Enrico Caruso and
the First Celebrity Trial of the Twentieth Century". In The
Believer, June 2004, webpage found 2009-05-14.
- Enrico Caruso, Jr. covers Caruso's relationship with his mother
in great detail. Jackson's 1973 biography and Scott's 1988
biography also contains extensive information.
-
http://www.musicianguide.com/biographies/1608000502/Enrico-Caruso.html
- Dorothy Caruso, p. 234-235.
- In his biography, Enrico Caruso, Jr. points to an onstage
injury suffered by Caruso as the possible trigger of his final
illness. A falling pillar had hit him on the back, over the left
kidney (and not on the chest as popularly reported). Indeed,
Caruso, Jr.'s biography devotes an entire chapter to medical
opinions concerning the tenor's ailments and cause of death.
- National Library of Australia
- Caruso described his illness and surgeries in a letter to his
brother Giovanni, reprinted in Enrico Caruso, His Life in
Pictures by Francis Robinson (Bramhall, 1977), p. 137.
- Dorothy Caruso, p. 268-270.
- Biographer Pierre Key attributed Caruso's decline to
over-exertion as he convalesced (p. 389), as did Francis Robinson
(p. 139).
- Dorothy Caruso, p. 275.
- Enrico Caruso Dies in Native Naples: Death Came
Suddenly, New York Times, August 3, 1921, webpage found
2009-05-14.
- PRINGLE, HEATHER, The Mummy Congress, London, 2002, p.294-296;
see also
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,728911,00.html
- Scott
catalog # 2250.
- Classical Net - Verdi - Famous Interpretors of
Otello
- Enrico Caruso BMG/Sony Masterworks website.
- New Page 1 at bluehawk.monmouth.edu
- http://bluehawk.monmouth.edu/~psimonel/nonno3.jpg
- http://bluehawk.monmouth.edu/~psimonel/nonno4jpg.jpg
External links