Information about Enrico Caruso

Enrico Caruso (born Errico Caruso February 25 1873, Naples – August 2 1921, Naples) was an Italian opera singer and one of the most famous tenors in history. Caruso was also the most popular singer in any genre in the first twenty years of the twentieth century and one of the pioneers of recorded music. Caruso's popular recordings and his extraordinary voice, known for its range, power, and beauty, made him one of the best-known stars of his time.

About Caruso

During his career, Enrico Caruso made over 260 recordings and made millions of dollars from the sale of his 78 rpm records. While Caruso sang at many of the world's great opera houses including La Scala in Milan and Covent Garden in London, he is best known as the leading tenor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City for 17 years. Conductor Arturo Toscanini, who conducted some of the operas that Caruso sang in at the Met, considered him one of the greatest artists he had ever worked with.

Caruso was baptized in the Church of San Giovanni e Paolo on February 26, 1873, having been born in Naples, Italy, one day earlier. He began his career in Naples in 1894. The first major role that he 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.

In 1903, with the help of his agent, the banker Pasquale Simonelli, he went to New York City, and, on November 23 of that year, he made his debut with the Metropolitan Opera as the Duke of Mantua in a new production of Verdi's Rigoletto. The following year Caruso began his lifelong association with the Victor Talking-Machine Company; his star relationships with both the Metropolitan and Victor would last until 1920. Caruso himself commissioned Tiffany & Co. to produce a 24 kt. gold medal with his profile, as a memento (PER RICORDO) for his friends of his Metropolitan performances.

In April 1906, Caruso and 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 performance in Carmen, the tenor 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 eventually destroyed most of the city. The Metropolitan lost all of the sets and costumes it had brought. Clutching an autographed photo of President Theodore Roosevelt, Caruso made an effort to get out of the city, first by boat and then by train, and vowed never to return to San Francisco; he kept his word.^[1]

On December 10, 1910, he starred at the Met as Dick Johnson in the world premiere of Puccini's La Fanciulla del West. On December 11, 1920, during the performance of L'Elisir d'Amore by Donizetti he sufferred a hemorrhage and because of that, after act I of that opera, the audience was dismissed. After that incident he gave only three more performances at the Met, his last one was as Eléazar in Halévy's La Juive on December 24, 1920.

In 1918 Caruso married Dorothy Park Benjamin, who was then aged 25, the daughter of an old-established New York family. They had one daughter, Gloria. Dorothy published a book about Caruso in 1945, which includes many of his letters to her.

Caruso died in 1921 in Naples, at age 48, the cause of Enrico's death was peritonitis, due to the bursting of an abscess. He is buried in Naples.

Caruso was portrayed by Mario Lanza in a highly fictionalized Hollywood motion picture, The Great Caruso, in 1951.

In 1987, he was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Trivia

• Caruso was one of seventeen children born to the same parents and one of only three to survive infancy. When he was 18, he used fees earned by singing at an Italian resort to buy his first pair of shoes. He is pictured wearing a bedsheet, draped like a toga, in his first publicity photograph because his only shirt was in the laundry.
• Caruso's birthplace in Naples, 7 Via San Giovanella agli Ottocalli, still stands next to the church where he was baptized. His remains were interred in a mausoleum at the cemetery of Santa Maria del Pianto
• During a performance in Naples, early in his career, Caruso was booed by the audience because he ignored the custom of hiring a claque to cheer for him. Afterwards, he said he would never again go to Naples to sing, but "only to eat spaghetti."
• Caruso performed in Carmen in San Francisco in front of thousands the night before the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Caruso was staying at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco when the earthquake struck. His eyewitness account can be seen here.
• Since his death, numerous compilation albums of his work have been created. Certain recordings of his were predominantly used in Woody Allen's Match Point. His recording of O Paradiso is a key part of the play "Awake and Sing" by Clifford Odets.
• At a performance of Puccini's La Boheme, the basso onstage lost his voice and Caruso reputedly began to sing his aria "Vecchia zimarra" while the basso mouthed the song. His performance was so appreciated he even went to record it but later asked for it to be destroyed. This recording was recovered and has had several incarnations on LP, including a recital disc published by Club 99 in the 1970s (CL99-60).
• Caruso must have had problems with very high notes. In his recordings of the tenor's aria in Act I of La Boheme, the high C is replaced by high B, while in Faust he sings the high C in falsetto style, in contrast to Jussi Bjorling and others.

Repertoire

• L'Amico Francesco (Morelli) - 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 after which Caruso vowed never to return to San Francisco)
• 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.

At the time of his death, the tenor was preparing the title role in Verdi's Otello.^[2] Though he never performed the role, he recorded two selections from the opera: Otello's aria, "Ora e per sempre addio," and his duet with Iago, "Sì, pel ciel marmoreo, giuro".

Caruso also had a repertoire of some 521 songs, ranging from classical to traditional Italian folk songs and popular songs of the day. The most often purchased song by Caruso at itunes is the Neapolitan sailor's song Santa Lucia and the universally famous song 'O Sole Mio.

Recordings

Caruso was one of the first star vocalists to make numerous recordings. He and the disc phonograph did much to promote each other in the first two decades of the 20th century. His 1907 recording of Vesti la giubba from Leoncavallo's Pagliacci was the world's first gramophone record to sell a million copies. Many of Caruso's recordings have remained in print since their original issue a century ago.

His first recordings, made in 1902, were for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company. He began recording exclusively for the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1904. While most of his early recordings were made in typically cramped studios in New York and Camden, New Jersey, Victor began to occasionally record Caruso in the old Trinity Church in Camden, which could accommodate a larger orchestra. His final recordings were made in September 1920 and the last two selections were excerpts from the Rossini Petite Messe Solennelle. Caruso's conductors in his recordings included Walter B. Rogers and Joseph Pasternack.

RCA, which purchased the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1929, later took some of the old discs and over-dubbed them with a modern orchestra. Several previously unreleased Caruso discs continued to appear as late as 1973. In 1950, RCA reissued some of the fuller-sounding recordings on vinyl 78-rpm discs. Then, as LPs became popular, many of the recordings were electronically enhanced for release on LP. Researchers at the University of Utah utilized the first digital reprocessing techniques to reissue most of Caruso's Victor recordings, beginning in 1976. Complete sets of all of Caruso's recordings have been issued on CD by RCA, Pearl and Naxos, each using different mastering techniques.

For more information about Caruso's recordings, see Enrico Caruso recordings.

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 Enrico Caruso My father and my family, w. Discography by William Moran and Chronology by Tom Kaufman (Amadeus, 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, S. Caruso, First edition, (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 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 http://bluehawk.monmouth.edu/~psimonel/nonno.html che portò Caruso http://bluehawk.monmouth.edu/~psimonel/nonno3.jpgnegli USA http://bluehawk.monmouth.edu/~psimonel/nonno4jpg.jpg, sezione B - supplemento illustrato della domenica, New York, 27 luglio 1986.

Media

Over There A recording of the popular American World War I song.

References

See also

• Enrico Caruso recordings
• Caruso Sauce

External links

• Historical Tenors: Caruso
• The Enrico Caruso Page
• Grandi-Tenori: Caruso
• Enrico Caruso at the Internet Movie Database
• Collected Works of Caruso Part 1 (Internet Archive)
• Collected Works of Caruso Part 2 (Internet Archive)
• MetOpera database
• Discography at SonyBMG Masterworks
• Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing, 1909, by Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini, from Project Gutenberg
• Further informations about Caurso, Enrico and his music
• "Tenor of Love"