|
|
Enrico Caruso
|
     | |||
| To begin on a personal note.
Readers will recall, I daresay, the time of childhood changing into youth, when it seemed imperative to make lists.
Almost anything would do: places visited, books read, films seen.
At about the age of twelve, my list of composers, ranged in order of esteem, started dutifully enough with Bach and Beethoven and went on, more truthfully, to Puccini and Verdi.
Then, high in order of presumed merit, came names such as De Curtis, Buzzi-Peccia, De Crescenzo and Tosti.
These were the masters of the Neapolitan song, or rather what went under that description, for not all of them originated in that part of Italy.
The delectable bay, the colourful backstreets, had become for us in the sullen North the very essence of sunshine and song: the place where tenor voices of untold and untrained natural magnificence sang of love to the accompaniment of mandolines and the eternal throb of the Mediterranean.
The Naples I visited many years later was sadly different. Meanwhile, it had reigned as capital city of the heart's desire, its attractions hymned on gramophone records by almost all the great voices, particularly those of the tenors, and especially that of Enrico Caruso. In this anthology he can be heard in songs by all four maestri of the youthful lists, incomparable in the richness of his vocal resources and with a free, generous spirit to match. He was a man of great heart in whom song and emotion were inseparable. Even in the mild emotional temperature of (say) Tosti's 'A vucchella a midday heat rises and the passions intensify. In the jaunty L'addio a Napoli the heart swells with the voice, and in other, more broadly developing songs such as Musica proibita and L'alba separa, short as they are, we feel by the end that we have touched the heights and plumbed the depths as in a miniature Odyssey. Every phrase is lived to its full, each song is a separate adventure; however tawdry the lyrics, however commonplace the appearance of the music on paper, something in the quality of voice and fervour of spirit will confer distinction. Musically, the songs belong in a no-man's land, a limbo of non-recognition, somewhere between 'classical' and 'pop'. Times may have changed a little, but to the cultivated mid-century Italian they have been very largely an embarrassment, part of the music-hall Italy of comic waiters and ice-cream sellers. To the generation of young people who survived the Second World War, they were the songs of an era which (even more than most young people in most eras) they did not want to know about. With the general coarsening of the senses that accompanied the invasion of Rock, Heavy Metal and the rest of it, the passions of these songs, already too emphatic for the more refined taste, became (as I have heard young Italians say) 'not passionate enough'. With the increasing sophistication of the so-called 'classical' interest, the musical and verbal directness of these songs registered essentially as a lack of subtlety: if such things had a place in musical life at all it was beyond the fringe, an occasion for a tolerant smile once or twice a year when a faded piece of sentimentality by Tosti might be brought out at the end of a concert as a late-night encore. In a recent book called Italian Art-Song (Lakeway and White, Indiana, 1989) just one of the songs included here is admitted. "A specialised form of sentimental ballad" is the authors' phrase for the canzoni napolitane, and Buzzi-Peccia's Lolita gets in on a little more than sufferance. Of this composer's songs they write: "Usually bright and rhythmic, they border on the more popular Neapolitan song genre, but the care lavished on their construction and the variety of texts and styles the composer chose places them within the art-song category." In an interesting final sentence they add: "The song should be sung for the entertainment of the audience." Caruso certainly does that. The sweetness of his voice in the opening phrases would beguile any listener, whether it is the girl to whom they are addressed or the wider public who happens to be overhearing. The charming suggestion of a languishing heart ("che langue il cor") is conveyed with the light caress of a downward portamento, and indeed much of the expressive art lies in the right feeling for this. After the key-change comes another lovely example ("domani, come fai, Lolita?"), an affectionate bit of cajolery (it's he who is calling her, and yet, after all, what would she do without him?). There is art in the phrasing too, not always letting the words dictate but rather following the curves and caresses of the melody. The fervent 'Ah' strikes first a challenging pose, all manly pride, and then softens with its amorous echo. The climactic high note is flung out with the bravado of one who fully intends to be noticed. And no doubt "the entertainment of the audience" has been duly accomplished – but not, one might suggest, by any cheapening of the appeal, nor by necessarily holding a different, less noble end in view than has the singer of what is more widely recognised as art-song. In all of the songs that follow, Caruso exercises an art which, if not complex in the manner of a singer of Wolf, Duparc, Mussorgsky or Britten, has a subtlety of its own. It lies partly in such matters of style as have been mentioned; there is also a balance to be struck, determined by what, as a kind of intellectual shorthand, we call taste, between restraint and release, and passion, lyricism and dramatic emphasis. The songs themselves set the agenda. In their most characteristic form (as in Mamma mia, che vo' sapè? and Manella mia) they modulate in mid-verse from minor to major, and while the first half may be all sadness it is the second that brings emotional release. Caruso's judgment (or his taste) is characteristically unerring in those two songs. Never has a singer spun phrases with more opulent ease, perfection of legato, natural responsiveness to mood, than Caruso in the first half of the verses, nor has a voice opened out with more thrilling effect than he achieves in the second. The wonderful thing is that he also commands such dignity of utterance. Caruso is often represented as an emotionally primitive singer (perpetrator of the 'Caruso sob' and so forth), yet, listening to him in those frankly emotional songs, with all their lowly associations, one can hardly fail to be struck by the dignity, even the nobility, of his vocal manners. To some extent it is inherent in the timbre: the famous baritonal quality imparts a certain gravitas which none of his immediate successors had within their voices. A 'darkening' of the tenor tone became progressively noticeable as the years went by, and we can hear that clearly enough in this present collection. Yet in no recording is it a more apparent feature than in Tosti's Addio, recorded as early as 1910. A baritone voice of sumptuous beauty is what one seems to hear at first. The middle-upper notes have splendid freedom, but it is not until the impassioned "per sempre addio" that the tenor voice itself is unsheathed – and then with what brilliance, and what thrilling emotional impact. When the heart opens and the voice thrusts home its cry, it is the dignity and restraint of those baritonal verses that account for the effect as much as do the high notes themselves. In later years the distinct identity of voice-registers was to become more apparent. It is a notable feature of the recordings made in 1919 and 1920, when, in general, one rejoices in the richness of the middle register and slightly flinches before the onset of the climactic phrases on high. With this comes also a more emphatic style: an example is the Serenata (Bracco) where the total effect, as in Vaghissima sembianza, is that of a light-weight song matched with a heavy-weight singer. Passages of the utmost sweetness are still to be heard in these late years, but the marvellous compound of strength and suavity as found in the first of our songs (the 1908 Lolita) has begun to resolve into a number of separate elements. A little earlier, in 1917, he recorded three songs, products of a session on April 15, which also brought forth a famous version of the Romance from Martha and that most surprising of inclusions in his operatic repertoire, the aria 'Oh! lumière du jour' from Rubinstein's Nero. All are magnificent examples of his art. Perhaps he had taken a holiday (Thomas Kaufman's chronology of his appearances shows nothing between January 8 and April 23, the previous recording session having been the concerted pieces with Galli-Curci on January 25th). Whatever the cause, he was clearly on top form that day. Not even in the recordings of his youth, dating back to the early years of the century, did he sing with more lyrical sweetness than in the opening of Musica proibita; and surely no more thrilling example of his fully developed powers exists than the song of Tosti to words by D'Annunzio, L'alba separa dalla luce l'ombra. In recently published biography of Jussi Björling (Anna-Lisa Björling and Andrew Farkas: Jussi, Amadeus, 1996) there is a story of Björling, then at the height of his career, hearing this record for the first time. He played it again and again, and then sang along with it, full-voice, so that the windows rattled. He could do it! And it is what we all want to do as we listen to that record: it has within it the very essence of Caruso, and, I think, of Italian song too: broad, sweet, impassioned and like nothing else on this earth. A year later he recorded Sei morta ne la vita mia, which remained unpublished till long after his death in 1921. RCA retrieved it from the vaults (where it seems no more unpublished Caruso lies entombed) and released it as their 'Christmas gift' of 1947. It is the singing of a man of 45; one is aware of that. Yet the beauty of tone remains incomparable to this day. According to his widow, Dorothy, it was the record which captured Caruso's voice most faithfully of all. It is also the only song in this present recital to have piano accompaniment; and if among all of them there is one that brings the greatest of all tenors into the room where we sit ("after the singer is dead and the maker buried"), this may well be it. |
|
| All rights of the producer and of the owner of the recorded work reserved. Unauthorised copying, public performance and broadcasting of this recording prohibited. |