Caruso Tidbits

For no good reason that I can think of, I decided to dig around in some old newspapers, magazines, and books for a few items about tenor Enrico Caruso, Naples' "favorite son."  This is in addition to the items already in these pages here and here.

On the occasion of the marriage of Caruso's daughter, Gloria, a 1943 copy of Time magazine recounts a bit of the singer's life decades earlier, saying that "… his Metropolitan debut in 1903 was no smash. Critics found his acting inferior and his vocal style coarser than that of his great, aristocratic predecessor, Jean de Reszke..."

That is a distortion. On November 24, 1903, Caruso's debut received an excellent review in the New York Times (NYT). The paper said of his singing in Rigoletto that " …[Caruso]… made a highly favorable impression, and he went far to substantiate the reputation that had preceded him to this country…His voice is purely a tenor in its quality, of high range, and of large power…Mr. Caruso appeared last evening capable of intelligence and of passion in both his singing and his acting, and gave reason to believe in his value as an acquisition to the company." That's not too shabby.

Two months later, on January 31, 1904, a NYT review says that Caruso's voice is an "unceasing delight in its smoothness , purity and translucent clearness and warmth." True, the reviewer has to namedrop for comparison (because that's what critics do). This one compares Caruso favorably to two other Italian tenors of the preceding decades known to New Yorkers: Francesco Tamagno [the most famous tenor of the pre-Caruso era and the creator of the lead role in Verdi's Otello in 1887] and Italo Campanini. The review does fault Caruso for overacting, and, indeed, does compare Caruso to Polish tenor, Jean de Reszke; however, far from finding Caruso's vocal style "coarser" than that of de Reszke, the reviewer speaks of the "greater beauty and purity" of Caruso's voice. He finishes by saying that the "New York public will no doubt rejoice at hearing a real Italian tenor again of the finest kind and to know that such have not vanished from the face of the earth."

On the non-singing front, you can follow Caruso through six weeks of low soap-opera in the pages of NYT as he gets arrested in Central Park on Nov. 17, 1906, for allegedly annoying a woman who stood near him in the monkey house.  He got thrown in the pokey for a few hours, finally being bailed out for 500 dollars by the head of the Met. He wound up being fined 10 dollars for misdemeanor disorderly conduct. He professed his innocence and appealed. (He lost the appeal.) Passion mounted in the Nov. 29 edition when "Italians of St. Louis, rich and poor, formally voted their sympathy for Enrico Caruso this afternoon, and declared that the tenor is being persecuted and maliciously handled by New Yorkers. The resolutions condemn the Judge who tried him and fined him, and declared the trial a travesty on justice and an insult to a man of noble principles." Actually, the case is a bit weird since the woman who accused him gave a false name and address to the cop who took the initial complaint and then failed to show up in court to press her case. The judge fined Caruso on the say-so of the cop and a witness. (Hmmmm. A few problems there, Mr. Judge: in most democracies, the accused have the right to confront their accusers.) The case left the city fathers and mothers puzzling over whether or not they should close the monkey house permanently. (They didn't.)

There is a charming article in the June 12, 1912 edition of the NYT in which Caruso tells of his beginnings as a singer in Naples and the help he got from a local priest and even, when he did his military service, from a captain in the artillery. The captain heard Caruso singing aloud on duty and called him in for a modest chewing out. Later, the captain took Caruso to a café, had him sing for the people, then told him to "Be off and study your music…and do not let me see you at the barracks any more than is necessary."

There are many, many other items about the great singer. There is one about how distraught he was in 1911 at the death of one his closest friends, Edoardo Missiano, the person who had "discovered" him in Naples and got him his first singing coach. Also, an item about how he once sang a bass aria in La Boheme because the bass who was supposed to sing it lost his voice. (Caruso was present in the scene, anyway; he just turned his back so the public couldn't see his mouth move and Mr. Laryngitis lip-synched it.) And everyone's favorite—how he could really hold a grudge and be generous at the same time. He appeared in Naples during WWI for personal reasons, but refused to sing. (Years earlier, he had been slighted in his home town and had promised never to sing there again.) But it's for charity! The Red Cross! Caruso wrote them a check for 50,000 dollars.

“He had one old friend to whom he was devoted and whom he worshipped from afar with a pathetic sort of adoration. This was Marie Sophia of Bourbon, the former queen of Naples. She had been his benefactress in the early days of his career. Even though her reign was over and she lived in exile in France, she was still his queen, the sovereign of his native city. He never failed to visit her when he went abroad, and on his last visit she presented him with a scarf pin, a medal carved with the head of a Madonna encircled with rubies. Through her secretary, Signor Barcelona, Caruso received regular reports of her, and each month he wrote his queen a regular and ceremonious letter, addressing her with all the formality due her former rank, to which she clung pathetically even in her old age. The exile of this venerable queen was one of the things he would brood over with tears in his eyes, but he would never discuss her with anyone. To him she was the sacred emblem of royalty.”

This is not only strange, but even incredible. The “venerable queen” in question is Maria Sophia of Bourbon, the last queen of the Kingdom of Naples before it was absorbed into greater Italy, an event that transpired in 1861, twelve years before Caruso was born. After the fall of Naples, she went into exile in the Vatican States and then France, dying in 1925 (see link, above, for her complete story).

      Caruso's tomb in Naples

Though there were certainly nostalgic Bourbon hold-outs in the last few decades of the nineteenth century who yearned for the “good old days” of a sovereign kingdom of Naples, it is fair to say that by the 1890s, most Italians in the south had accepted their new status and transferred their loyalties to Queen Margherita of Savoy, consort of King Umberto I. She was the first queen of united Italy, was wildly popular, and, indeed, filled the national need for a benevolent “mother” of the new nation. It is hard to see how Caruso would have attached his affection to a person, very popular in her own time, but someone only his parents had known. She had never really been “his queen.”