Enrico Caruso

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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.)^[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 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 financial profits generated by Caruso's initial recordings.^[4]

Caruso made more than 260 extant recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company (later RCA Victor) over an 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.^[5] 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."^[6]

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.^[7] 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.)

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 embarked on his final series of performances at La Scala in March 1902 (creating the tenor lead 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 following 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 Metropolitan Opera 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 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.

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^{[citation needed]}.

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.^[8][9]

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.^[10] 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^{[citation needed]}.

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.^[11][12]

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 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.^[13][14]

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.^[15])

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.^[16] 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.^[17][18] 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.^[19][20] 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.^[21] 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.^[22]

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.

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.^[23] 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

Caruso with phonograph

Caruso 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.^[24] (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

Caruso at his piano

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^[25] che portò Caruso^[26] negli USA^[27], sezione B - supplemento illustrato della domenica, New York, 27 luglio 1986.

See also

• Enrico Caruso discography (CD)
• Caruso Sauce

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Enrico Caruso

• Enrico Caruso at the Internet Movie Database
• Pierre V.R. Key: Enrico Caruso; a biography (1922)
• Dorothy Caruso: Enrico Caruso His Life And Death (1945)
• International Jose Guillermo Carrillo Foundation
• Historical Tenors: Caruso
• The Enrico Caruso Page
• Grandi-Tenori: Caruso
• Recordings of Caruso Part 1 (Internet Archive)
• Recordings of Caruso Part 2 (Internet Archive)
• Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing, 1909, by Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini, from Project Gutenberg
• History of the Tenor - Sound Clips and Narration
• Caruso in the San Francisco earthquake San Francisco Museum
• Discography of Enrico Caruso on Victor Records from the Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings (EDVR)