Cover story: Enrico Caruso
George Hall charts the incredible life of the legendary Italian tenor, whose voice sold a million records and made him music’s first modern superstar
Enrico Caruso set the standard against which all great tenors have since been measured.
George Hall celebrates a legend whose voice changed opera houses and recording studios forever
Nearly 100 years ago, the legendary tenor Enrico Caruso died in Naples. Unquestionably the star tenor of his age, he rose from humble beginnings through provincial theatres and on to the world’s leading opera houses – La Scala, Covent Garden and the Met – becoming an irreplaceable fixture at the latter for nearly two decades. ‘He was a unique artist, with whom none other compared,’ said the
Met’s manager, Giulio Gatti-casazza, on his passing. ‘I do not see how we can ever have such another.’ But unlike his great predecessors, Caruso became a much wider phenomenon – an artist known by name and reputation to the general public at large who never entered an opera house. Few singers were ever so loved, and even fewer can be said to have retained their reputations for a century. What is it about Caruso that has made his name so durable in the popular imagination?
He died in Naples, and that is where he was born, on 25 February 1873; his background was poor, and he himself had a very limited education. Stories of his family consisting of 21 children, however, are untrue: Enrico was the third in a sequence of seven – though only he and two others survived infancy. He was initially trained to sing in a church choir, and it was presumably the need for money, as much as aptitude, that led him as a youngster to sing in the streets. More serious vocal studies would inspire him to try a stage career. At 22 he made his debut in a secondary Neapolitan theatre – the Teatro Nuovo – on 15 March 1895, in a now forgotten work (L’amico Francesco) by a forgotten composer (Mario Morelli); but this beginning must have been sufficiently auspicious to encourage him to continue.
Over the next couple of years, local dates, others elsewhere in the mainland of southern Italy and Sicily, plus an open-air season in Cairo, together trace an upwards trajectory that eventually saw him debut in Milan, at the Teatro Lirico, where his participation in 1897 in two further world premieres (Giordano’s Il voto – a revision of his earlier, scandalous Mala vita, and Cilea’s L’arlesiana) marked him out as a rising star on the Italian operatic scene.
The first performance of Giordano’s highly successful Fedora at the same theatre the following year consolidated his position; subsequent seasons in St Petersburg, Moscow and Buenos
Aires (1899-1900), meanwhile, saw him appearing with top-ranking colleagues on the international circuit.
Crucial was his debut in Puccini’s
La bohème at La Scala on December 26 1900 – a production followed by three more starring roles at Italy’s leading opera house during the same season, all of them conducted by Arturo Toscanini; yet arguably even more significant in career terms was the tenor’s first recording session in the aftermath of the successful premiere of Franchetti’s Germania, which opened at La Scala on 11 March 1902.
Attending one of the performances during its initial run was an individual we would now refer to as a record producer. The American-born Fred Gaisberg was the peripatetic, buccaneering A&R man of the London-based Gramophone & Typewriter Co., formed just four years before and part of an emerging industry not yet taken seriously by the musical profession.
As Gaisberg wrote 41 years later in his autobiography, Music on Record, of the experience of hearing Caruso in the stirring aria ‘Studenti! Udite!’ at La Scala, ‘I cannot describe my transports, or the wild enthusiasm of the audience’.
He turned to his companion, the company’s Italian agent Alfred Michaelis, and asked him to find out what fee Caruso would accept for ten songs. It turned out that he would accept £100: roughly £8,000 in today’s money.
Gaisberg wired London for approval, only to receive the reply, ‘FEE EXORBITANT, FORBID YOU TO RECORD’. Ignoring this crystal-clear instruction, Gaisberg went ahead anyway – and the rest, as they say, is history: Caruso would go on to make more than 250 recordings, the bulk of them for the Victor Record Company (Gramophone & Typewriter’s American affiliate), the last on 16 September 1920, less than a year before his untimely death at the age of 48.
It has been said many times, and with some truth, that Caruso made the gramophone, and the gramophone made him: certainly it is undeniable that as one of the first major opera singers to record substantially, and what is more in his prime, his achievement as a recording artist – not only financially, but also in terms of reputation and (one imagines) a sense of legacy – encouraged other important artists to follow his lead.
Equally, the increasing success of the resulting discs, again both artistically and commercially, gave the new apparatus a status that helped turn it from a novelty into a necessity for any cultured home. Many thousands of people heard Caruso sing during his lifetime but far more heard – and indeed continue to hear – his recordings, many of which have never been out of the catalogue; in recent decades they have been repeatedly remastered and reissued in diverse complete CD editions.
During that historic but technically primitive first session on 11 April 1902, ten titles were recorded with piano in one afternoon in a room in the Grand Hotel in Milan. As well as two arias from Germania, Caruso sang extracts from other operas in his stage repertoire: Rigoletto, Manon, L’elisir d’amore, Tosca, Aida, Boito’s Mefistofele and Mascagni’s Iris.
Today, no one would even try to set down so much in one session, and there is at least one serious mishap: in Cavaradossi’s ‘E lucevan le stelle’ from Tosca, Caruso starts three bars early, on the wrong note, and then stays there. ‘After this’, write two experts on the tenor’s recordings, John Freestone and Canon HJ Drummond, in Enrico Caruso: His Recorded Legacy, ‘there is a gradual alignment of forces and some quick thinking on the part of the accompanist, and he and the singer are finally at one on the phrase “e un passo sfiorava la rena”. Henceforward the record is a good one, but one can imagine the composer’s reaction when he first heard it!’ Indeed, one can – and the tenor’s, too, in retrospect.
‘I cannot describe my transports, or the wild enthusiasm of the audience’
This, however, is a rare blemish in Caruso’s recorded output, due to the pressure of one hastily arranged session: as a performer the tenor was not only highly musical and diligent, but always determined to give of his best to any audience. He would go on to make several more recordings of this particular aria, including some with orchestra rather than piano – and no further mistakes of the sort evident in the first session can be detected.
Despite the limitations of the recording equipment that captured him – he died four years before the advent of ‘electrical recording’ (ie made using a microphone) provided a richer and more complex picture of the human voice – Caruso’s discs have stood the test of time.
Their impact, in any case, was immediate; as Gaisberg noted, they quickly made the company £15,000, and were apparently available in the shops by the time of Caruso’s London debut at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in May 1902 – a season that saw him sing in Rigoletto, La bohème, Lucia di Lammermoor, Aida, L’elisir d’amore, Cavalleria rusticana, La traviata and Don Giovanni.
Even more importantly, as Gaisberg tells us, it was one of them that persuaded Heinrich Conried, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, to hire him: hearing the disc in Paris, he took it off with him to New York, where he played it to the company’s directors; their response was to cable Caruso a contract. Though he would continue to sing elsewhere – at Covent Garden, for instance, in 1904-7 and 1913-14
– following his debut (Rigoletto again) at the Met on 23 November 1903, the New York opera house became Caruso’s artistic home for the rest of his career: in all he gave 863 performances with the company.
But one city he never again performed in was Naples: after a less than enthusiastic reception from an unsympathetic audience (or – some have suggested – an unbribed claque) at the venerable Teatro
San Carlo on 30 December 1901, Caruso vowed he would never again appear in his native city; though he did return there during his final illness.
Of his New York debut in Rigoletto on 23 November 1903, the critic of The World wrote, ‘his voice is a full, pure tenor, with delicious velvety tones, yet alive with dramatic fire in every note. Barring accidents he cannot fail to create a furore.’ On that night both ‘La donna è mobile’ and the quartet were encored. Caruso quickly became a popular fixture at the Met, singing seven further operas in his first season and steadily increasing his repertoire over the years: one highlight was his participation in the world premiere of
La fanciulla del West in 1910; sadly, unlike in the case of his creations of such works as Fedora and Adriana Lecouvreur, he set down nothing from Puccini’s opera.
One or two incidents marred
Caruso’s career at the Met. One was a sexual misdemeanour – though many commentators believe it was all a put-up job; at any event the tenor was accused of indecently touching a woman at the monkey-house of the zoo in New York’s Central Park in November 1906. Despite being found guilty and fined 10 dollars, he survived the negative publicity which did him no long-term harm; indeed, according to The New York Herald, on the curtain going up on his next Met appearance, as Rodolfo in La bohème on 28 November, ‘one long shout of greeting rose simultaneously from every portion of the house’. (One wonders whether the same would happen today, in the #Metoo era!) A subsequent unpleasantness, in 1910, involved a blackmail plot against him, whereby he was threatened with harm if he failed to pay a substantial amount, but he had the good sense to alert the police and the extortionists were dealt with by the law.
By this time Caruso had had his own family for many years – though he wasn’t married. In 1897 he had met and sung with the soprano Ada Giachetti, who was herself already married but separated from her husband (divorce was illegal in Italy at the time). She and Caruso remained together for a decade, and produced two sons, one of whom – Enrico Caruso,
Jr – himself had a career as an actor
Ten titles were recorded with piano accompaniment in one afternoon
and singer. Theirs was, by all accounts, a tempestuous relationship, and she eventually ran off with Caruso’s chauffeur. In 1918 Caruso met and quickly married the much younger Dorothy Benjamin, despite opposition from her wealthy New York parents; their marriage, which seems to have been happy, produced a daughter. Following Caruso’s death, his widow wrote two books about her husband.
Meanwhile, the tenor’s Met-centred career continued. Over the years, his voice developed and darkened, a baritonal tinge always present within its complex mix steadily increasing (a similar quality can be heard in such modern singers as Plácido Domingo and Jonas Kaufmann). Consequently, Caruso took heavier roles that suited the increased breadth and power of his instrument: Samson in Saintsaëns’s Samson et Dalila, Jean de Leyde in Meyerbeer’s Le prophète, Alvaro in La forza del destino and – his last new assignment – Eléazar in Halévy’s La Juive.
His popularity as an artist, moreover, reached the level of celebrity accorded to few opera singers of his or indeed any other time: he even made two silent films – My Cousin in 1918 and The Splendid Romance (now lost) in 1919 – though no great artistic claims have ever been made for them.
Caruso’s recordings are a different matter. In his comprehensive survey of singing on record, The Grand Tradition, vocal expert John Steane said of them that ‘with very few exceptions [they] are marvellous and moving from the first in the series to the last […], the richest legacy we have from these early days of the gramophone’. More sadly, what some of the final recordings also indicate is the toll taken on the tenor’s lungs by long years of heavy smoking: in the final sessions his laboured breathing is all too apparent.
Caruso sang his final complete performance, La Juive, with the Met company in Philadelphia on 30 November 1920. Two weeks later, he had to abandon a performance of L’elisir d’amore in Brooklyn at the halfway point because he was haemorrhaging from his throat. Pleurisy and empyema were diagnosed, and his lungs repeatedly and painfully drained. To effect an improvement in Italian climes, he travelled with his wife to Naples, but there were further setbacks and he died in the Grand Hotel Vesuvio on 2 August 1921, widely and profoundly mourned.
If asked to name one quality that these documents of the tenor possess, I would use the word heroism – by which I don’t mean that Caruso was in any sense a Heldentenor. His only Wagner role was Lohengrin, which he sang just three times, in Italian, in Buenos Aires in 1901. Verdi’s Otello – a heroic role in the Italian tradition – he never sang, though he might well have done had he lived longer: a recording with baritone Titta Ruffo of the Otello/iago ‘Sì, pel ciel marmoreo giuro!’ duet from Act II of the opera was made in 1914, and suggests that it might have worked well for him.
What is, then, heroic about Caruso’s singing? Whatever he recorded, there is a consistent level of engagement with the material and with his imaginary audience that is rare and, as Steane suggests, genuinely moving: pouring out his tone with generosity, spontaneity and warmth, he gives of himself unstintingly. Once asked what he believed to be the requisites of a great singer, Caruso responded, ‘A big chest, a big mouth, 90 per cent memory, ten per cent intelligence, lots of hard work, and something in the heart.’ It is his recordings that have given Caruso immortality, and no one hearing them could doubt the grandeur of the emotional experience they offer.