Enrico Caruso

Enrico Caruso was born on February 24, 1873, in Naples, then part of the Kingdom of Italy, into a poor family in the crowded district of San Giovanniello agli Ottocalli ^[1]. His father, Marcello Caruso, worked as a mechanic and foundry worker, and his mother, Anna Baldini, encouraged the boy's obvious musical gifts even as the household struggled. Enrico was one of several children, and stories of the family's hardship followed him throughout his life, sometimes exaggerated in press accounts that claimed he was one of eighteen or twenty siblings ^[2].

As a boy Caruso sang in local church choirs, where his clear voice attracted notice. He received little formal schooling and was apprenticed to a mechanical trade in his early teens, following his father's path. Music kept pulling him away from the workshop. He earned small sums singing at cafés, private parties, and resort towns around the Bay of Naples, and by his late teens he had decided to attempt a professional career ^[1].

His first serious vocal training came from Guglielmo Vergine, a Naples teacher who took him on around 1891 under a contract that entitled the teacher to a share of future earnings. The arrangement later caused a legal dispute, but the lessons gave Caruso a technical foundation. After a brief period of compulsory military service, which was cut short so he could pursue singing, he prepared for the stage in earnest ^[2].

Caruso made his operatic debut in Naples in March 1895 at the Teatro Nuovo in Domenico Morelli's little-remembered opera L'Amico Francesco ^[1]. The early years were unglamorous: provincial Italian houses, modest fees, and a voice that critics found promising but uneven, especially at the top of the range. He worked steadily through the repertory in Caserta, Salerno, and other southern cities, gradually strengthening his upper register with the conductor and coach Vincenzo Lombardi ^[2].

A turning point came in 1897 and 1898, when engagements in Palermo, Livorno, and Milan brought him to wider attention. In November 1898 he created the role of Loris in the world premiere of Umberto Giordano's Fedora at the Teatro Lirico in Milan, a success that led to contracts in St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, and Monte Carlo ^[3]. In 1900 he reached La Scala, singing under Arturo Toscanini, and in 1902 he made his Covent Garden debut in London as the Duke in Rigoletto ^[1].

That same year Caruso made a decision that changed both his career and the music industry. In April 1902, in a Milan hotel room, he recorded ten arias for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company for a flat fee. The discs sold remarkably well and demonstrated that a great voice could survive the primitive recording horn ^[4]. For anyone asking who was Enrico Caruso at the start of the new century, the answer was suddenly available on a spinning shellac disc in homes across Europe and America.

Caruso's American career began on November 23, 1903, when he made his Metropolitan Opera debut in New York as the Duke in Rigoletto ^[1]. The house became his artistic home for the rest of his life. Over eighteen seasons he appeared there more than 600 times in roughly 37 roles, opening the season on many occasions and drawing capacity audiences whenever his name appeared on the bill ^[5]. His core repertory ran from lyric parts such as Nemorino in L'Elisir d'Amore to heavier dramatic roles like Canio in Pagliacci, Radamès in Aida, and Eléazar in La Juive, the last of which he took on near the end of his career ^[3].

Among the most cited Enrico Caruso achievements is his role in legitimizing recorded sound. He signed with the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1904 and remained its most valuable artist, eventually setting down about 250 commercially released recordings ^[4]. His 1907 disc of "Vesti la giubba" from Pagliacci became one of the best-selling records of the acoustic era, and his royalties made him one of the highest-paid performers in the world. The partnership benefited both sides: Victor sold phonographs on the strength of his name, and the records carried his voice to listeners who would never enter an opera house ^[5].

He also participated in notable premieres. Caruso created the role of Dick Johnson in the world premiere of Puccini's La Fanciulla del West at the Metropolitan Opera on December 10, 1910, with Toscanini conducting, one of the most publicized operatic events of its time ^[3]. He was on stage at San Francisco's Grand Opera House singing in Carmen on April 17, 1906, hours before the great earthquake struck the city; he escaped unharmed but vowed never to return to San Francisco, and he kept that vow ^[2].

Away from the stage Caruso was gregarious, generous, and famously fond of Neapolitan food, strong cigarettes, and practical jokes. He was also a skilled caricaturist whose sketches of colleagues, conductors, and himself appeared regularly in the Italian-language New York newspaper La Follia di New York, and collections of his drawings were later published in book form ^[2].

His longest romantic relationship was with the Italian soprano Ada Giachetti, with whom he lived from 1897 until 1908. The couple never married, since Giachetti already had a husband, but they had two sons who survived infancy, Rodolfo and Enrico Jr. The relationship ended bitterly when Giachetti left him, and the aftermath included lawsuits and public scandal in Italy ^[6]. In 1918 Caruso surprised the opera world by marrying Dorothy Park Benjamin, the daughter of a wealthy New York attorney. Their daughter, Gloria, was born in December 1919, and Dorothy later wrote two affectionate memoirs of her husband ^[6].

Caruso's celebrity occasionally turned against him. In 1906 he was arrested in the monkey house of the Central Park Zoo, accused of pinching a woman, an episode the press called the "Monkey House case." He was convicted and fined, always maintained his innocence, and feared the incident would end his American career; his audiences, in the event, stood by him ^[2]. In 1910 he was the target of an extortion attempt by the Black Hand, a criminal network preying on Italian immigrants, which he reported to the police ^[5].

The final phase of Caruso's career coincided with the First World War. He gave generously to war charities, sang at benefit concerts, and recorded the popular song "Over There" in 1918 in support of American troops ^[5]. His voice had darkened with age into an almost baritonal richness, and he took on heavier roles, capping his career with Eléazar in Halévy's La Juive at the Metropolitan in 1919 and 1920 ^[3].

His health collapsed in late 1920. During a performance of L'Elisir d'Amore at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on December 11, 1920, he suffered a throat hemorrhage and had to stop mid-performance ^[1]. Doctors diagnosed pleurisy that developed into empyema, an infection of the lining of the lungs, and he endured a series of painful operations through the winter. His last opera performance was La Juive at the Metropolitan on December 24, 1920 ^[5].

In May 1921 Caruso sailed home to Italy hoping to recover in the Naples climate. After a brief period of improvement in Sorrento, his condition worsened suddenly, and he died in Naples on August 2, 1921, at the age of 48 ^[1]. Italy treated his death as a national loss. The King of Italy opened the Royal Basilica of San Francesco di Paola for the funeral, an honor normally reserved for royalty, and enormous crowds followed the procession through the city ^[6].

Caruso occupies a singular place in the history of singing because he was the first great artist whose prime was captured, however imperfectly, on record. Later tenors from Beniamino Gigli to Luciano Pavarotti were measured against him, and Pavarotti in particular spoke openly of Caruso as the standard ^[4]. His recordings have never left the catalog: they were reissued on 78s, LPs, and CDs, and in the 1970s RCA even used early computer processing to strip away the original accompaniments and add modern orchestras, an experiment that showed how durable the voice remained ^[4].

His story has been retold repeatedly. Hollywood produced the film The Great Caruso in 1951 with Mario Lanza in the title role, a heavily fictionalized account that nonetheless introduced his name to a new generation ^[2]. In Naples, the Palazzo Reale has hosted a museum dedicated to him, and his tomb in the Del Pianto cemetery remains a site of pilgrimage for opera lovers. Scholarly biographies, including the detailed study written by his son Enrico Caruso Jr. with Andrew Farkas, have separated documented Enrico Caruso facts from decades of legend ^[6].

Beyond opera, Caruso helped invent modern musical celebrity. He understood publicity, endorsed products, appeared in early films, and treated the recording studio as seriously as the stage. The idea that a singer's fame could rest on records as much as on live performance begins, more than with anyone else, with the tenor from Naples ^[5].