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Enrico Caruso In Song Volume 3Note by Nigel Douglas |
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When Caruso died his obituary in The Times included the sentence "It is quite safe to say that no tenor voice equal to his, in its combination of power and extreme beauty of quality, has been heard in this generation." Most of us who are familiar with his recordings would, I believe, add the words "Nor has there been since" - I am certainly not aware that any of Caruso’s successors has ever claimed to be his equal. The selection contained on these two CDs, ranging as it does from the lightest-hearted of Tchaikovsky songs via sundry numbers of a religious nature to Neapolitan songs and Edwardian drawingroom ballads, may perhaps be regarded as less artistically ‘important’ than the operatic recordings, but Caruso was not a singer who lowered his standards when singing ‘light’ music. There is hardly a single track amongst the forty-four in this selection which does not make the listener think at one moment or another "Only Caruso could have done that!"
The first song on Disc 1 reveals immediately that one is in the presence of a singer and communicator of extraordinary stature. Caruso sings Barthélemy’s Triste ritorno with an ease of emission which one would normally associate with a light lyric tenor, and yet the vocal quality possesses a richness which many a baritone would envy. The song opens in the lower part of the voice, but, as the vocal line rises through the middle register and the so-called passaggio to an effortless high A, that sumptuous baritonal timbre remains intact, simply receiving the addition of more and more tenorial brilliance as it ascends. The emphasis is never on the display of power for power’s sake, though we feel that there is a mass of it in reserve should it be needed; instead the key lies in the singer’s seamless legato and formidable breath control, allied to an instinctive choice of vocal colour to match the words that he is singing. Even in a little song like this Caruso reminds me of something which the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin once said of him. Asked if Caruso was any good as an actor Chaliapin replied "Caruso has a thousand voices, and each voice has such an abundance of shades and colours! He uses them like a painter. He who can sing like Caruso can act like Salvini" - a reference to the great Italian tragic actor of the time. It is, I believe, this response to the words he is singing which enables Caruso to emerge as such a vital personality, even from the earliest of his recordings. (In one of these, incidentally, the 1902 Luna fedel, Caruso comes in too early, stops and then comes in correctly; it is an amusing thought that in those pioneering days this was not considered an adequate reason to settle for a second "take"). Some singers, when heard on disc, impress us with the beauty of their voices or the musicality of their interpretations without necessarily making us wonder about them as human beings. Caruso, on the other hand, put so much of himself into his singing that his famously extrovert personality still leaps from almost every recording he made. There is an irresistible generosity about his performances, something which clearly bowled over the writer Thomas Burke, who heard Caruso in La bohème at Covent Garden two years before the recording of Triste ritorno was made. "As the opera proceeds", he wrote, "so does the marvel grow. You think that he can have nothing more to give you than he has just given; the next moment he deceives you...There never was such warmth and profusion and display. Not only is it a voice of incomparable magnificence; it has that intangible quality that smites you with its own mood ..." I often find that it is precisely at the lighter end of the repertoire that one comes closest to the artist as a human being, when the genius of a Mozart, a Wagner or a Verdi is not occupying the foreground of the listener’s appreciation - as the German tenor Fritz Wunderlich once said about the joys of singing operetta "You needn’t concentrate on trying to be clever ... you can just let go with the voice." One song in which we certainly come very close to Caruso the man is his own composition, Dreams of Long Ago. In the case of Adorables torments the creative honours are shared with Maestro Barthélemy, but Dreams of Long Ago appears to have been all Caruso’s own work. The melody is a run-of-the-mill slow waltz, no better and no worse than dozens of others which are to be encountered amongst the genre of Victorian sentimental ballads. Caruso, however, lavishes upon it a performance packed with paternal pride, and it provides a perfect example of one of those "only Caruso" moments. At the end of the first eight bars the vocal line rises by one tone, from a C sharp to a D sharp. When this opening tune is repeated, though, after the first twenty-four bars, the rise is from the C sharp straight up to a high A, on the words "two lips I adore"; and this is the kind of effect which I cannot imagine any other singer bringing off quite as Caruso does. The first time you hear the song the extended interval comes as a surprise; it scarcely seems possible that what would normally be a climactic note could be so effortlessly inserted into the vocal line. One is left with the feeling that Caruso simply opened his mouth a little wider than before and a tone of ineffable beauty was sitting there, waiting to be released. As an added bonus there is also something wonderfully endearing about Caruso’s pronounciation of the English text, with the word "recollections" perhaps taking the prize. It serves as a reminder of those touching letters which he used to write in the last years of his life to his American wife, containing such gems as the hope that their daughter would take after her mother, not her father, because "I am offly ogly." Strangely enough I have never found any reference to Caruso having sung one of his own compositions in public - perhaps he may have slipped them in from time to time as encores. Several of the other songs included in the current selection featured amongst his concert favourites, notably those composed by Tosti; indeed, on at least one occasion, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on June 12th 1906, Tosti himself accompanied Caruso at the piano. The rapport which Caruso built up on these occasions between himself and his audience became legendary, and he devised all sorts of ingenious methods for bringing the applause to an end when he felt that he had done enough. After a concert in the Winter Garden, Blackpool, for instance, in 1909, he eventually reappeared wearing an overcoat (in August), carrying his hat and stick, and smoking a large cigar. It is, perhaps, worth remembering that at that time much of the music making which went on in a country like Britain took place in the home. There may not have been many tenors in Caruso’s audiences who were capable of tackling Celeste Aida or Vesti la giubba in the front parlour, but there would assuredly have been many an amateur light baritone who regularly regaled friends and family with Tosti’s Parted or O’Hara’s Your eyes have told me what I did not know ; and to hear songs of this category sung by such a giant as Caruso must have been a thrilling, if somewhat humbling, experience. If the drawing-room ballad was a genre to which Caruso had had to accustom himself, the Neapolitan song, both in musical idiom and verbal dialect, was his birthright. He had been born into deep poverty in a Naples slum - the house still stands, and is still a distinctly humble dwelling, though it bears a proud plaque - and as his parents were too poor to send him to school he was taught to read and write by his mother. At the age of ten he was earning his own living with manual work, but his exceptionally beautiful alto voice enabled him to pick up a little extra cash singing in church choirs, and after the voice broke he took to singing Neapolitan songs in street cafés. By the time he recorded, for instance, de Curtis’s Canta pe’ me he had become the most highly paid singer in the history of the Metropolitan Opera, New York, he had made his home there, and he was the most instantly recognised Italian citizen in the entire world. I do not know whether Canta pe’ me had been in his youthful repertoire, but surely this recording could only have been made by someone with Naples in the blood. Though he had moved so far from that back-street poverty and hardship the tone colour which Caruso employs as he pours out his glorious flood of sound is basically one of sadness. There is almost a sense of pleading in the majestic high G attacks on the word "canta"; perhaps it is no coincidence that so many of the finest Neapolitan songs are in minor keys. There is one other style of song on these two CDs which, for listeners who are not familiar with the story of Caruso’s life, may come as something of a surprise - namely the patriotic and military songs, which he recorded in the latter stages of the First World War. Before the war Caruso had returned to Europe every year, giving regular guest performances at Covent Garden, in Vienna and in various of the leading houses in Germany, as well as taking occasional opportunities to relax in his palatial villa near Florence. Once the war had started, however, his activities were limited to North and South America, and it was a matter of great relief to him when the United States eventually entered the fray, and on the same side as his native land. He was tireless in his appearances for wartime benefit funds, and after having recorded George M.Cohan’s patriotic roof-raiser Over there in July 1918, one verse in English and the other in French, (see Prima Voce NI 7809), I imagine that he recorded the Inno di Garibaldi a couple of months later out of a desire to beat the drum for Italy. He also sang it in a concert in New York’s Washington Square in November 1917, along with La Marseillaise and The Star Spangled Banner, and again in September 1918 in a concert in Central Park, which was reported to have attracted "the largest audience ever gathered" there. La campana di San Giusto, too, is a song of an overtly political nature, dealing as it does with the return of the city of Trieste to Italian ownership after the defeat of the Austro-Hungarians. Here Caruso puts a lovely chuckle into his voice each time he describes, with the phrase "le ragazze di Trieste", the delight of the young ladies of that city as the cathedral bell rings out and Italian soldiers are back amongst them. Quite why Caruso’s homage to the Regiment of Sambre et Meuse should have been delayed until two months after the war had ended I do not know, but there is no gainsaying the panache with which he trumpets forth his tribute to those intrepid military men. A comparison of these later recordings of Caruso’s with those made back in 1902 and 1903 makes it evident how his voice had darkened and grown more massive over the years. The advances in the recording process naturally emphasise this change, but in any case such was Caruso’s technical mastery that even when his voice was at its heaviest it never became unwieldy. His very last stage appearance was in a role which had been a favourite from his earliest days, Nemorino in L’elisir d’amore, which calls for great vocal dexterity; and anyone who doubts Caruso’s ability to sing rapid coloratura in his latter days should listen to the cadenza at the end of his recording of Mia Piccirella from the opera Salvator Rosa, made in September 1919. I would like to end these reflections, though, with a glance at one more track from the current selection. This is the duet entitled Crucifix, written by the eminent French baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, in which Caruso is partnered by Marcel Journet, one of the most celebrated basses of the day. Journet’s is the first voice that we hear, and very fine it is too; but when Caruso enters the sound is one of incomparable beauty, rich and majestic but astonishingly gentle too. The effect of this passage calls to mind the description by the tenor John McCormack of the first time he heard Caruso in the flesh, as Rodolfo in La bohème at Covent Garden. When Caruso sang his opening phrase, wrote McCormack, "my jaw dropped, as though hung on a hinge." Only Caruso could have done that. |
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