Enrico Caruso (born Naples, February 25, 1873 – died Naples, August 2, 1921) was an Italian opera tenor of tremendous international renown and a key pioneer in the field of recorded music.
Caruso's enormous record sales and extraordinary voice, celebrated for its beauty, power and unequalled richness of tone, made him the number-one male operatic star of his era. Such was his influence on singing style, virtually all subsequent Italian and Spanish tenors (and most non-Mediterranean tenors, too) have been his heirs to a greater or lesser extent.
His musical 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 opera performers 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.)[1]
Biographers [2][3] generally attribute Caruso's global success (in addition to the unique quality of his voice) to his sharp business sense, and to his enthusastic 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 seeing the swift financial profits generated by Caruso's first recordings.[4]
Caruso made more than 260 extant recordings for RCA Victor over an 18-year period and earned millions of dollars from the sale of the resulting 78-rpm discs. These discs, recorded from 1902 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.
There is a visual record of Caruso, too. He appears in various news reels and, in 1919, he acted in a commercial silent film, My [Italian] Cousin, for Paramount Pictures.
While Caruso sang at most of the world's foremost opera houses, 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 17 consecutive years. His total Met appearances exceeded 800. The difficult-to-please Arturo Toscanini, who conducted Caruso often, regarded him as being one of the finest artists with whom he ever worked and Caruso remains, in the opinion of most experts, the greatest all-round tenor exponent of Italian opera on disc.
Both Caruso's vocal technique and his virile style of singing were without precedent. They combined like no other the best aspects of the 19th-century tradition of elegant bel canto vocalism with the ardent delivery and big, exciting tenor sound demanded by 20th century composers of verismo opera such as Puccini, Leoncavallo, Mascagni and Giordano. Considered a good musician by his colleagues, he was able to invest his interpretations with an exceptional degree of emotional force. Judging by contemporary reviews of his Met performances he was an enthusiastic and sincere actor, too, if not always a terribly subtle one.Contents [hide] 1 Life and career 2 Premature death 3 Honours 4 Repertoire 5 Recordings 6 Media 7 Bibliography 8 References 9 See also 10 External links
[edit] Life and career
Enrico Caruso came from a poor background (his father was a mechanic at a Naples factory). He was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church of San Giovanni e Paolo on February 26, 1873, having been born in his mother and father's adjoining flat one day earlier. He was called "Errico" in accordance with the Neapolitan dialect and was known affectionately as "Erri" by his family and friends; but he would adopt the more formal Italian version of his given name, "Enrico", for theatrical purposes.
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. The biographers Francis Robinson and Pierre Key both included the story but genealogical research conducted by 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.[5] Caruso's widow Dorothy also included the story in her book about her late husband. She quotes the tenor as follows about his mother: "She had twenty-one children. Twenty boys and one girl -- too many. I am number nineteen boy." [6])
He sang in church choirs as a child, took singing lessons with Guglielmo Vergine and Vincenzo Lombardi, and performed in cafes and as a street singer to earn much-needed cash. (When he was 18, Caruso used the fees he earned by singing at an Italian resort to buy his first pair of non-secondhand shoes, while his first publicity photograph, taken during this period, depicts him wearing a bedsheet draped like a toga, because his only dress shirt was in the laundry.)
Caruso made his professional debut in serious music on March 15, 1895, at the Teatro Nuovo, Naples, in a now forgotten opera by Domenico Morelli. At an early performance in Naples he was booed by the audience because he ignored the custom of hiring 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".
The young tenor worked assiduously to improve his voice production, eliminating a tendency to crack on high notes. He proceeded to perform in a succession of provincial venues during the second half of the 1890s before graduating to La Scala in December 1900. Audiences in Monte Carlo, Warsaw and Buenos Aires also had an opportunity to hear him sing during this youthful phase of his career and, in 1899-1900, he performed in Russia at the Mariinsky theatre in Saint Petersburg and the Bolshoi theatre in Moscow with a visiting troupe of top-class Italian singers.
The first major role that Caruso created was Loris in Giordano's Fedora, at the Teatro Lirico in Milan, on November 17, 1898. At that same theater, on November 6, 1902, he created the role of Maurizio in Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur. (He had also hoped to create the part of Cavaradossi in Puccini's Tosca at the Rome Opera in 1900 but the composer, after deliberating hard, chose an older and more experienced tenor instead.)
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.
Reverse: Muse of music with lyre over PER RICORDO (memento). Around the rim: TIFFANY & Co. 24 CARAT GOLD Y (27 mm).
Caruso remained at La Scala until 1902. He had yet to turn 30 and his voice was still maturing when, in April of that year, he was engaged by the Gramophone & Typewriter Company to make his first recordings (in a Milan hotel room) for a fee of 100 pounds sterling. These discs helped to spread his fame, and he was able to make a highly successful London debut at Covent Garden's Royal Opera House on May 14 that same year. Then, with the help of his agent, the banker/impresario Pasquale Simonelli, he travelled to New York City at the conclusion of the London season, which had been followed by a sequence of engagements in Italy, Portugal and South America. On November 23, 1903, he debuted at the Metropolitan Opera as the Duke of Mantua in a new production of Verdi's Rigoletto.
The next year, Caruso began a lifelong association with the Victor Talking-Machine Company. He made his first American discs on February 1, 1904, having signed a lucrative contract 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.
In 1904, Caruso purchased a palatial Italian residence, the Villa Bellosguardo, near Florence. 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 Manhatten'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 acclaimed performances at the Met.
By no means, however, was Caruso's post-1903 career confined exclusively to New York. He performed often in other American cities and continued to sing widely in Europe, appearing again at Covent Garden in 1904-07 and 1913-14 and also thrilling audiences in France, Belgium, Monaco, Austria and Germany prior to the outbreak of World War One. In 1917 he toured South America and, two years later, gave performances in Mexico City.
In April 1906, Caruso and leading members of the Metropolitan Opera company came to San Francisco to give a series of performances at the Tivoli Opera House. The night after Caruso's appearance as Don Jose in Carmen, he was awakened in the early morning 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.[7][8]
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 described by press reporters as being "pretty and plump". 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. Members of New York's opera-going high society were outraged initially by the incident, but they soon forgave Caruso. [9]
On December 10, 1910, Caruso starred at the Met as Dick Johnson in the world premiere of Puccini's La fanciulla del West. Puccini had written the music for the principal tenor's role in the opera with Caruso's voice specifically in mind. 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 applied himself to raising large sums of money for charities and patriotic causes for the duration of the conflict by giving concerts and making personal appearances.
Caruso wed in 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 1919). Dorothy published two books about Caruso, one in 1928, the other in 1945, which include many of his touching letters to her. Prior to his marriage to Dorothy Benjamin, Caruso had been romantically tied to an Italian soprano, Ada Giachetti, a few years older than he. Though already married, Giachetti bore Caruso four sons during their liaison, which lasted from 1897 to 1908. Two of these offspring survived infancy: Rodolfo Caruso (born 1898) and singer/actor Enrico Caruso, Jr. (1904). Ada 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. [10][11]
Privately, Caruso was a jovial if somewhat sensitive person who put a lot of hard work into perfecting his art and mastering new roles. He dressed fastidiously, 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 collected postage stamps, coins, antiques and small art objects, taking pleasure in their beauty. Caruso was a heavy smoker of strong Egyptian cigarettes. This deleterious habit, along with a lack of healthy exercise and the punishing schedule of performances that Caruso willingly undertook each season at the Met, may have contributed to his fatal final illness.
[edit] Premature death
During September 1920, Caruso recorded several discs for Victor at Camden's Trinity Church, including sacred music by Rossini; these recordings were to be his last. According to Caruso's wife Dorothy, his state of health began a distinct downward spiral in late 1920 while on a lengthy North American tour. He manifested 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.[12]
On December 11, 1920, during a performance of L'elisir d'amore by Donizetti at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, he had 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.
Caruso's state of health deteriorated further during the new year due to what was now diagnosed as purulent pleurisy. He experienced episodes of intense pain and underwent surgical procedures to drain fluid from his lungs.[13]
He returned to Naples to recuperate from the second of his chest operations, during which part of a rib had been removed. According to Mrs Caruso, he seemed to be recovering, but he allowed himself to be examined by an unhygenic local doctor and his condition worsened dramatically after that. [14][15] He died in the Vesuvio Hotel in Naples, a few minutes after 9 a.m. local time, on August 2, 1921. [16] Doctors in Rome, consulted by Mrs. Caruso just before her husband's death, put down the cause of death as most likely peritonitis arising from a burst abscess. [17]
The King of Italy opened the Royal Basilica of the Church of San Francisco di Paola for the funeral, which was attended by thousands of people. His embalmed body was preserved in a glass sarcophagus at Del Pianto Cemetery in Naples for his fans to view. [18] A few years later, however, Mrs. Caruso had his remains sealed permanently in an ornate stone tomb.
[edit] Honours
During his lifetime, Caruso received many orders, decorations, testimonials and other kinds of honors from the monarchs, governments and cultural organizations of the various nations in which he sang. 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.[19]
[edit] Repertoire
Caruso's operatic repertoire consisted overwhemingly 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.
Caruso signing his autograph 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;
Caruso's sketch of himself as Don José in Carmen, 1904 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.[20] Though he never had an opportunity to perform the part, he made two records of extracts from the opera: Otello's aria, "Ora e per sempre addio"; and the duet with Iago, "Sì, pel ciel marmoreo, giuro".
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.
[edit] Recordings
Caruso with phonograph
Caruso possessed a "phonogenic" [1] voice and he became one of the first star 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 Pagliacci was the first gramophone record to sell a million copies.[21] (Caruso's searing rendition of the aria would inspire 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 unissued takes) has been re-engineered and re-released on CD in recent years.
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. 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.)
His final recording session took place in New Jersey in September 1920. The last items that the doomed tenor recorded consisted, fittingly enough, of two pieces of religious music from Rossini's Petite Messe Solennelle.
Caruso's earliest American records of operatic arias and songs, like their Italian-made predecessors, were accompanied by piano. From February 1906, however, '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 in 1927, were considered unsatisfactory. In 1950, RCA re-published a number of the fuller-sounding Caruso recordings on vinyl 78-rpm discs. Then, as LPs became popular, many of the recordings were electronically enhanced for release on this format. Some of these recordings, remastered by RCA Victor on the 45-rpm format, were re-released in the early 1950s as companions to the same selections performed by Mario Lanza in the "Red Seal" series. Most of these 45 rpm records were pressed on translucent red vinyl. Thomas G. Stockham of the University of Utah utilized 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 noted 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 popular 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 discs were made by the more primitive acoustic process, which required the recording artist to sing into a metal horn or funnel rather than 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.
[edit] Media
Caruso at his piano "Sì, pel ciel marmoreo giuro!"
The 1914 recording by Titta Ruffo and Enrico Caruso of Giuseppe Verdi's Otello "Ombra mai fù"
"Ombra mai fù" (and the introductory recitative) from George Frideric Handel's Serse, recorded in 1920. "Recondita armonia"
A 1907 performance of "Recondita armonia" from Giacomo Puccini's Tosca O Mimì, tu più non torni
A 1907 recording with Enrico Caruso as Rodolfo and Antonio Scotti as Marcello of "O Mimì, tu più non torni" from Act IV of Giacomo Puccini's La bohème. "Una furtiva lagrima"
"Una furtiva lagrima" from Gaetano Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore Sung in 1911 for the Victor Talking Machine Company. O soave fanciulla
"O soave fanciulla" from Giacomo Puccini's La bohème, sung by Enrico Caruso and Nellie Melba in 1906. La donna è mobile
Caruso sings La donna è mobile from Verdi's Rigoletto, circa 1908 Ave Maria
Caruso sings Ave Maria by Percival Benedict Kahn, Mischa Elman on violin (1913) Vesti La Giubba
March 17, 1907 recording of 'Vesti La Giubba' from Pagliacci No Pagliaccio non son
Recording of 'No Pagliaccio non son' from Pagliacci La Partida
Manon! avez-vous peur...On l'appelle Manon
1912 recording of Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar performing a scene from Act II of Jules Massenet's Manon. O souverain, O juge, O père!
1916 recording of Rodrigue's Act III aria in Jules Massenet's Le Cid (1885). Faust: "O merveille! ... A moi les plaisirs"
The Act I finale of Charles Gounod's Faust (1859), sung by Enrico Caruso and Marcel Journet in 1910. "È scherzo od è follia" File:Caruso et al. - È scherzo od è follia.ogg Enrico Caruso, Frieda Hempel, Maria Duchêne, Andrés de Segurola and Léon Rothier performing "È scherzo od è Follia" from Giuseppe Verdi's Un ballo in maschera in 1914
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Over There A recording of the popular American World War I song.
[edit] Bibliography Caruso, Dorothy, Enrico Caruso - His Life and Death with discography by Jack Caidin (Simon and Schuster, New York 1945). Caruso, Enrico Jr., and Farkas, Andrew, Enrico Caruso, My Father and My Family, with discography by William Moran and chronology by Tom Kaufman (Amadeus, 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[22] che portò Caruso[23] negli USA[24], sezione B - supplemento illustrato della domenica, New York, 27 luglio 1986.
