| Hear The Master sing: "Songs My
Mother Taught Me" , Op.55, no.4, recorded in 1916 |
Caruso was of a poor family and was the
18th of 20 children. Although he was a musical child who sang
Neapolitan folk songs everywhere and joined his parish choir at the
age of nine, he received no formal music training until his study
with Guglielmo Vergine at age 18. Within three years, in 1894, he
made his operatic debut, in Mario Morelli's L'Amico Francesco in
Naples at the Teatro Nuovo. Four years later, after adding a number
of impressive roles to his repertoire, he was asked to create the
role of Loris in the premiere of Umberto Giordano's Fedora in Milan.
He was a sensation and soon had engagements in Moscow, St.
Petersburg (Russia), and Buenos Aires. He made his La Scala debut
with La Bohème (1900). In 1901, after being unfavourably received in
his performance in L'elisir d'amore in Naples, he vowed never again
to sing in Naples, and he kept his word.
Caruso then created the chief tenor parts in Adriana Lecouvreur,
Germania, and La fanciulla del West, and for the La Scala company
the tenor roles in Le Maschere and L'elisir d'amore. World
recognition came in the spring of 1902 after he sang in La Bohème at
Monte Carlo and in Rigoletto at London's Covent Garden. He made his
American debut in Rigoletto at the opening night of the Metropolitan
Opera in New York City on Nov. 23, 1903, and continued to open each
season there for the next 17 years, presenting 36 roles in all. |
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His last public appearance--his 607th performance with
the Metropolitan--was as Eléazar in La Juive (Dec. 24, 1920). Caruso
became the most celebrated and highest paid of his contemporaries
worldwide. He made recordings of about 200 operatic excerpts and
songs; many of them are still being published. His voice was sensuous,
lyrical, and vigorous in dramatic outbursts and became progressively
darker in timbre in his later years. Its appealing tenor qualities
were unusually rich in lower registers and abounded in warmth,
vitality, and smoothness.
Courtesy of Britanica
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| Enrico Caruso and the 1906 Earthquake
Enrico Caruso (1873 - 1921) is considered by many music lovers to be
the greatest operatic tenor of all time. He was on tour in San Francisco
during the Great Earthquake, and appeared in Carmen at the Mission Opera
House a few hours before the disaster.
Arnold Genthe, the famed photographer, saw Caruso after the world-famous
tenor had left the Palace Hotel and walked to the St. Francis Hotel at
Union Square.
This somewhat disjointed narrative of Caruso’s experiences in San
Francisco appeared in The Sketch, published in London, with drawings by
Caruso to illustrate his experiences. The article was reprinted in the
July 1906 edition of The Theatre magazine.
Courtesy of Museum of the City of
San Francisco
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Artwork courtesy of