Enrico Caruso

Enrico Caruso: The Voice That Sold the Phonograph

On 11 April 1902, in a Milan hotel room, a twenty-nine-year-old tenor sang into a horn for the British Gramophone Company and collected £100. The records that came out of that afternoon did two things at once: they made a novelty machine into a household appliance, and they made Enrico Caruso the first international recording star. By the end, he had earned more from discs than from opera houses.

Naples

He was born on 25 February 1873 at Via Santi Giovanni e Paolo 7 in Naples, the third of seven children, of whom only three survived infancy. His father Marcellino was a mechanic and foundry worker; the family came from Piedimonte d'Alife in Campania. A durable legend has it that he was one of twenty-one children, eighteen of whom died; genealogical research has demolished this, and Caruso himself may have started it. It was the kind of story he liked.

His schooling came from a local priest, his music from the parish choir he joined around the age of nine. His mother Anna encouraged him and died in 1888, before any of it paid. Formal training came late — Britannica dates his first lessons, with Guglielmo Vergine, to the age of eighteen; he later worked with the conductor Vincenzo Lombardi. His professional debut was at Naples's Teatro Nuovo in *L'Amico Francesco*, dated 15 March 1895 by some sources and 1894 by others.

The Climb

The ascent took five years and ran through the composers who were then still alive. He created Federico in Cilea's *L'arlesiana* in 1897, then Loris in Giordano's *Fedora* in Milan in 1898 — the performance that made him a sensation and brought engagements in Moscow, St Petersburg and Buenos Aires. Maurizio in Cilea's *Adriana Lecouvreur* followed in 1902.

He debuted at La Scala on 26 December 1900 as Rodolfo in *La bohème*, under Toscanini. After a cold reception in Naples for *L'elisir d'amore* in 1901 he swore never to sing in his native city again, and did not. Covent Garden came on 14 May 1902, as the Duke of Mantua in *Rigoletto*, opposite Nellie Melba. Within a year he was the most sought-after tenor alive.

The Met

His American debut was the Metropolitan Opera's opening night, 23 November 1903, again in *Rigoletto*. He then opened the Met's season for the next seventeen years and held the position of leading tenor for eighteen consecutive seasons — a run without parallel before or since. Britannica counts thirty-six roles and 607 appearances in the house; counting tours, the total reaches 863. In the early seasons he sometimes sang seven times a week.

The repertoire was almost entirely Italian and French. He sang exactly two German operas, Wagner's *Lohengrin* and Goldmark's *Die Königin von Saba*, and both in Italian. In 1910 Puccini wrote the part of Dick Johnson in *La fanciulla del West* with Caruso's voice specifically in mind; he sang the premiere on 10 December.

The Machine

The Milan sessions of April 1902 were made against the wishes of the Gramophone Company's London office, which thought £100 too much for ten sides. It became one of the more profitable errors in corporate history. In February 1904 Caruso signed with the Victor Talking Machine Company and began recording in Room 826 at Carnegie Hall. The early discs used piano accompaniment; orchestras became standard from February 1906.

He made roughly 250 commercially released recordings between 1902 and 1920, from a recorded repertoire exceeding 500 songs — arias, Neapolitan songs, sacred music, popular numbers. Between 1902 and 1921 his record royalties passed two million dollars. By 1918 his income tax bill alone reached $154,000. The last session was on 16 September 1920, at Victor's converted Trinity Church studio in Camden, New Jersey, including selections from Rossini's *Petite messe solennelle*.

The commercial logic ran both ways. The phonograph needed a voice worth buying a machine for, and Caruso's timbre happened to survive the acoustic recording process better than almost any other — a technological accident that shaped a century of listening.

Earthquakes and Monkey Houses

He was in San Francisco with the Met when the earthquake struck at 5:13 on the morning of 18 April 1906. He grabbed an autographed photograph of Theodore Roosevelt, used it as identification, and left by boat and then train, vowing never to return.

That November he was arrested in the monkey house at the Central Park Zoo, accused of pinching a woman. The case had the marks of a frame-up: the complainant gave a false address, never appeared in court, and turned out to be acquainted with the arresting officer. He was convicted anyway and fined ten dollars. His box office did not move. Around 1910 Black Hand extortionists demanded first $2,000 and then $15,000 from him; the detective Joseph Petrosino impersonated Caruso at the handover and arrested the two men.

His private life was less orderly than his public one. He lived with the soprano Ada Giachetti from 1897 to 1908 and had two sons by her, Rodolfo and Enrico Jr. In 1918 he married Dorothy Park Benjamin over her father's objections. He bought the Villa Bellosguardo near Florence in 1904 and kept a suite at the Knickerbocker in Manhattan, bathed twice a day, collected coins, stamps and snuffboxes, drew accomplished caricatures, and smoked strong Egyptian cigarettes without pause.

Why Enrico Is Called a Genius

The claim here rests on a physical instrument and the craft built around it, and it is more honest to say so than to reach for intellect. Caruso's voice reached a high D-flat in its prime and darkened steadily with age; contemporaries described it as manly and powerful yet sweet and lyrical, sensuous in line and vigorous in dramatic outbursts. That combination — the weight of a dramatic tenor with the flexibility of a lyric one — let him hold lyric, spinto and dramatic roles simultaneously in a way that usually requires three different singers, across thirty-six roles at the Met alone.

The craft is where the argument gets stronger. He was not a natural with an easy gift: he came to training late, worked through Vergine and Lombardi, and rebuilt the technique through his twenties. Puccini writing a role to his specific voice is the kind of endorsement that cannot be manufactured. And he understood the recording horn as a new instrument rather than a nuisance, which most of his rivals did not, and adapted his singing to it.

The counter-case is straightforward. Genius in music is usually reserved for people who make new things, and Caruso composed nothing and directed nothing; he interpreted a repertoire other men wrote. Some of his fame is an accident of timing — he was the right voice in the right decade for a machine that could not yet capture sopranos or orchestras well. What is not accidental is that a century of playback technology has never made his records sound like a period curiosity.

Legacy

In December 1920 a piece of scenery struck him over the left kidney during *Samson and Delilah*. He haemorrhaged from the throat during *L'elisir d'amore* on 11 December and sang his last performance, *La Juive*, on Christmas Eve in acute pain; Toscanini told the Met's Gatti-Casazza that the man must be sick. Pleurisy and pneumonia were diagnosed on Christmas Day. Seven operations followed to drain fluid, including the removal of a rib in February. He recuperated in Italy from late May, overexerted himself on excursions to Capri and Pompeii in July, and died at the Hotel Vesuvio in Naples shortly after nine on the morning of 2 August 1921, aged forty-eight, of peritonitis from a burst abscess.

King Victor Emmanuel III opened the Royal Basilica of San Francesco di Paola for the funeral. Honours accumulated late and posthumously: the Royal Victorian Order from Edward VII in 1907, a Hollywood star in 1960, a US postage stamp and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987, the Gramophone Hall of Fame in 2012. The honorary captaincy of the New York Police Force, awarded in 1918, is the one he is said to have prized most.

Achievements

• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award — 1987
• Instruments: voice
• Genres: opera