Enrico Caruso - Mamma mia, che vo' sapè? (Victor, 1909)

Описание: Dead Tenors’ Society continues its monthlong tribute to the greatest tenor in recorded history, Enrico Caruso (1873-1921). Last week’s installment focused on Caruso’s early career at the Met up to 1908. Part three covers the next decade of his life, up to 1918.

Following his break from common law wife Ada Giachetti, Caruso sank into a deep depression. He somehow managed to honor his professional commitments, including a slew of performances in Wiesbaden, Frankfurt, Bremen, Hamburg, Leipzig and Berlin in October and the opening of the Met season (in Aïda) in November. The troubled tenor seemed to throw himself into his work. During the first two weeks of the new season, Caruso sang seven times…a performance every other day. When his singing became inconsistent, some critics chalked it up to a cold. Others reported that he sang in a “strenuous and reckless” manner. He missed almost a month of performances in the spring but returned for Aïda in April. Realizing that there was something desperately wrong with his voice, the tenor asked to be relieved of future duties with the company. The Met was forced to ask rival company Hammerstein Opera for the loan of their star tenor, Giovanni Zenatello, to replace Caruso in their spring tour.

Specialists agree that extended periods of stress can lead to vocal nodes. This, as it turned out, was the cause of Caruso’s vocal issues (the stretch of every other day performances may ALSO have contributed). This was not the first time the tenor suffered from this malady…he was surgically treated for nodes, brought about by overwork, in 1906. The tenor travelled to a clinic in Milan in April of 1909 where a node was discovered and successfully removed. Following a few months of recuperation, Caruso undertook a concert tour of the UK, spent October performing in Germany, and opened the 1909/10 Met season with La Gioconda in November. Caruso was back and singing better than ever and still a bit too often (averaging two performances a week). Old habits, it seems, die hard.

One of the highlights of the 1910/11 Met season was the world premiere of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West on December 10. Sadly, copyright laws prevented anything from the opera being recorded outside of Europe, so we can only imagine how Caruso would have sounded in the work. As might be expected with such a frantic workload, the tenor suffered yet another vocal setback in the early part of 1911. More surgery was performed, and Caruso was back on his feet that fall. Although he continued to relentlessly push himself, sometimes taking on back to back performances, the tenor’s vocal cords must have become accustomed to it. The 1911 bout with nodes seems to have been his last.

Caruso continually challenged himself as an artist. He added more and more taxing roles to his repertoire including Rinaldo in Armide, Flammen in Lodoletta, Avito in L’Amore dei Tre Re, Jean in Le Prophète, Don Alvaro in La Forza del Destino and the title roles in Andrea Chénier (which he essayed in London in 1907), Samson et Dalila, and Charpentier’s Julien. When he was not singing, Caruso busied himself by illustrating the Italian language magazine, La Follia, published by his old friend Marziale Sisca. The tenor’s caricatures became so popular that even non Italian speaking New Yorkers subscribed to the magazine. Joseph Pulitzer offered Caruso an annual salary of $50,000 (an astounding sum in those days) to illustrate for his newspaper group. The tenor turned him down, citing a prior agreement with Sisca. When asked how much Sisca was paying him, Caruso replied, “Nothing…but where there is pleasure, there is no loss.”

Caruso also starred in a pair of silent films, My Cousin and A Splendid Romance, both shot for Paramount in the summer of 1918. Although today’s fans of historic opera singers may find it fascinating to see Caruso on screen, 1918 audiences didn’t appreciate the tenor without his voice. My Cousin flopped at the box office and the latter film was never released. Caruso had a few surprises up his sleeve before 1918 came to a close…but more on that in part four.

After a March 1908 recording session, Caruso did not visit the Victor studios (with the exception of a December 1908 session which yielded no satisfactory results) until November 1909. Despite this hiatus from the recording horn, Victor managed to issue an uninterrupted supply of Caruso records to satisfy a hungry public. Caruso’s first recording of a Neapolitan song didn’t take place until November 6, 1909, with Nutile’s “Mamma mia, che vo’ sapè?”. Perhaps after the year he’d just endured, the tenor felt he needed this. Regardless, Caruso’s performance of this song is one of the most honest performances on record…no flash, no excess, just sincere emotion. Plus, unlike most of the post-Lanza tenors, Caruso closes the song in a minor key…a welcome departure.