Biografías
Enrico Caruso

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En una carta a su amigo Bruno Zirato fechada en East Hampton, Long Island, el 3 de agosto de 1920, escribe que "sufría terribles dolores en general". Esto ocurría poco después de cuatro semanas de presentaciones en La Habana, que seguirían con una serie de conciertos en once ciudades en el Canadá y en los Estados Unidos. Su carácter se había hecho irritable por la tos, las cefaleas y el insomnio que lo aquejaban últimamente. Se preparaba para la apertura de la temporada del Metropolitan con La Juive, la cual tuvo lugar el 15 de noviembre. Por esa época el tenor Beniamino Gigli, de 33 años, debutaba en Nueva York con Mefistofele. Caruso le hizo llegar una cordial nota de congratulación. También La Juive se presentó en Filadelfia el 30 de noviembre. El 3 de diciembre de 1920 cantó en Nueva York Sansón con enorme éxito, a pesar de un cidente sucedido cuando una parte del templo cayó sobre él, en la escena de la destrucción, golpeándole en el tórax.

(Caruso en I Pagliacci, a la derecha)

El día siguiente "cogió un resfrío" en el Central Park, y su tos se agravó; pero su médico dictaminó que se encontraba bien para cantar Plagiacci el 8 de diciembre. Fumó un cigarrillo inmediatamente antes de subir a escena, pero su voz se quebró en "Vesti la Giubba", y tambaleante y como ciego, salió del escenario para caer desfallecido en brazos de Zirato. En su camerino, semi-inconsciente, se quejaba de fuerte dolor en el costado. Su médico, el doctor Horwitz, por quien la esposa Dorothy manifestaba desconfianza, diagnosticó una "neuralgia intercostal", le vendó el hemitórax izquierdo y le permitió continuar con el acto segundo. Al caer la cortina la audiencia le prodigó un aplauso comprensivo. 

En la noche del 11 de diciembre se presentó en la Academia de Música de Brooklyn con L’Elisir. A las 7:45, ya vestido como Nemorino, experimentó un fuerte acceso de tos y observó, con gran preocupación, que manchaba con sangre el lavamanos. Este fue, aparentemente, su primer episodio de hemoptisis. A pesar de los ruegos de su esposa, insistió en subir al escenario. Tuvo tos en el primer acto, y la audiencia se horrorizó al ver sangre en la vestimenta de Nemorino. Continuó cantando, pero su boca se llenaba de sangre. En los intervalos se secaba con toallas que quedaban ensangrentadas. Fue examinado por el doctor Horwitz en el camerino, quien opinó que la sangre provenía de una pequeña vena rota en la base de la lengua. Una vez que la hemorragia cedió, se levantó y declaró que continuaría con el acto segundo. 

Pero la audiencia, ante el anuncio del director de que Caruso cantaría si así lo querían, se pronunció en contra, con muchas  personas llorando. Caruso y Dorothy habían adoptado el Hotel Vanderbilt como su hogar en la ciudad. De regreso a la suite la ciudad. De regreso a la suite en el último piso, y después de una visita a su pequeña hija Gloria en la guardería, pidió a Gatti-Casazza y a Zirato que se quedaran a cenar. El doctor Horwitz informó a Gatti que el asunto no era serio y que de ninguna manera podía interferir con la carrera del tenor. Según Jackson, Caruso "trato de hacer algunos chistes, pero por primera vez en su vida no encendió un cigarrillo."

Al día siguiente, domingo, descansó y en la noche del lunes 13 de diciembre, de nuevo contra el querer de su esposa, cantó La Forza del Destino en el Metropolitan. Recibió una prolongada ovación con la delirante audiencia de pie, antes y después de su interpretación. Su médico insistió, aparentemente ante el robusto estado físico del tenor, en el diagnóstico de "neuralgia intercostal", y procedió a colocarle un corsé, con el cual cantó un perfecto Sansón el 6 de diciembre. Pero cinco días más tarde, acosado por severo dolor en su costado, tuvo que cancelar un L’Elisir, se informó que el artista sufría un ataque de lumbago. 

Recuperado, continuó los ensayos para interpretar Eleazar (La Juive) en la noche de navidad. Después de compras de regalos (un abrigo de chinchilla para su esposa y cajas de monedas de oro para sus compañeros de trabajo), llegó con facies descompuesta a maquillarse el 24 de diciembre, cuando haría su presentación número 67 en el Metropolitan. Florence Easton interpretó a Raquel. Su hijo, Mimmi, había venido de la Academia Militar Culver en Indiana, para oirlo. Toscanini, también en la audiencia, manifestó su preocupación por la salud de Caruso. A pesar de terribles dolores, con su tórax vendado por el doctor Horwitz (quien insistía en el diagnóstico de la neuralgia), completó la función. Pero de regreso a su hotel apareció extremadamente pálido y sólo pudo tomar algo de sopa como cena de navidad.

Al día siguiente, el 25 de diciembre, cuando él y su esposa entregarían presentes navideños, de nuevo tuvo un fuerte dolor torácico que lo doblegaba en el baño. El doctor Horwitz no pudo ser hallado, y Caruso fue examinado por un distinguido internista de Nueva York, el doctor Evan Evans, quien diagnosticó pleuresía y probablemente neumonía. Según Prichard, se cultivó un neumococo en el laboratorio de la Universidad de Columbia. Tres días después presentó disnea y cianosis, y uno de sus médicos, el doctor Antonio Stella, practicó una toracentesis. Con ello se inició una serie de operaciones para drenar colecciones pleurales purulentas, por el doctor John F. Erdman, profesor de cirugía de la Universidad de Columbia, quien el 12 de febrero lo sometió a una toracostomía, resecando cuatro pulgadas de una costilla. A mediados de febrero de 1921 entró en coma. Su estado se agravó hasta el punto que el día 15 le fue administrada la extremaunción. Durante una semana, en que cumplió los 48 años de edad, se mantuvo entre la vida y la muerte. Scott menciona cinco operaciones sobre el tórax; se le aplicaron dos transfusiones de sangre.  Las iglesias de Nueva York, y de muchos otros lugares, se llenaban de gente que oraba por su recuperación y al Hotel Vanderbilt llegaban personas y miles de mensajes expresando preocupación y solidaridad. Entre los visitantes estuvo Tita Ruffo, quien había aceptado cantar Otello con Caruso en la temporada siguiente. "Su torso magnífico es sólo un esqueleto", dijo sollozante al salir. Contra todas las predicciones, el ídolo comenzó a recuperarse: "No moriré", expresó finalmente a sus doctores. Sin embargo, al saber que Beniaminio Gigli había sido llamado como su reemplazo en Andrea Chénier en el Metropolitan, dijo con amargura: "deberían haber esperado a que yo muriera".

Jackson relata el desastre que aquejó al Metropolitan en esa temporada: Caruso al borde de la muerte, Gigli con dos episodios de gripa, Marcella Sembrich con difteria y Geraldine Farrar con influenza.


 

El tenor Errico Caruso (nombre original) nació en Nápoles (Italia) el 27 de febrero de 1873. Perteneciente a una familia pobre, ocupaba el decimoctavo lugar en una familia de veinte hermanos de los que sólo sobrevivieron tres.Debido a las penurias económicas, Enrico no puede estudiar música y se hubo de conformar con participar en el coro de la parroquia de san Juan y san Pablo de su barrio. En 1888 tras la muerte de su madre decidirá seguir los consejos paternos y abandonar la música por el taller mecánico con el fin de poder obtener dinero que aportar a la economía familiar. "...Yo me había resignado a seguir mi trabajo como el aprendiz de un mecánico. Después de su muerte,(hace referencia a la madre)  sin embargo, mi corazón estaba lleno de tristeza, encima de mi pérdida irreparable, yo no encontraba ninguna razón que justificase seguir sacrificándome por la música”. Serán palabras de Caruso años más tarde recordando estos lamentables hechos. Sin embargo, su madrastra, al igual que hiciera anteriormente su madre, le anima a continuar. Enrico sigue sus consejos y quiere volver a retomar el canto, sin embargo, su padre, quien nunca vio con buenos ojos esta afición, termina por darle un ultimátum, con lo que Caruso ha de abandonar la casa paterna y buscarse la vida por su cuenta. Siendo todavía menor, se dedicará a cantar canciones populares napolitanas por cafés y tabernas para obtener algún dinero, circunstancia que hace que el público se fije en él, admire su manera de cantar y empiece a llamarlo "Carusiello" y "el divo pequeño". Es en estas circunstancias, en 1891, cuando conoce a Gugliemo Vergine, afamado profesor de canto en Nápoles, quien se ofrece a enseñarle a cambio de percibir el 25% de sus ganancias durante los cinco primeros años que siguiesen a su debut como artista. Enrico, que a la sazón cuenta con dieciocho años, acepta sin prever las posibles consecuencias de su decisión. Éstas con el tiempo serán nefastas ya que Vergine le exigirá el pago de fuertes sumas de dinero en concepto no de cinco años naturales, sino de 1825 días de actuaciones.

A la edad de 21 años, coincidiendo con la finalización de los estudios con Vergine, es llamado a filas. Ha de abandonar Nápoles y dirigirse a Rieti, para incorporarse al decimotercer batallón de artillería. Allí es presentado por su comandante al barón Costa, quien considera que Caruso pierde el tiempo en el regimiento cuando debería de estar actuando. Por este motivo, se le dispensa de cualquier obligación militar y es de nuevo enviado a Nápoles. Años más tarde Caruso se referirá a este hecho contando la siguiente anécdota: "Un día, era Pascua, el batallón fue invitado a una cena, dada por los oficiales a los soldados. El comandante Nagliotti presidió la mesa. Después del postre, los soldados, al unísono, exigieron que yo cantase el “Brindisi de Cavalleria Rusticana”. Yo lo canté, fui aplaudido y se pidió que se repitiese. Pero el comandante Nagliotti subió y reprendió a todos por insistir que yo cantase de nuevo ya que de esta forma daban a entender que no habían agradecido suficientemente el primer canto, cuando solicitaban otro. Unos días después, el comandante me llamó a su lado, me eximió de algunos de mis trabajos, me presentó al barón y me sugirió que debería de abandonar el ejercito mandando a mi hermano en mi lugar.”

Nada más volver a su ciudad natal (1894) debuta en la ópera con L´amico Francesco de Morelli en el Teatro Nuovo de Nápoles. Tras esta aparición siguieron otras en donde destacó en muchos y variados papeles. Su primer gran éxito, sin embargo, no llegó hasta el año 1898, en Milán, cuando representó el papel de Loris en El sombrero, obra del italiano Umberto Giordano. Muchos compromisos surgieron tras el éxito: San Petersburgo, Montecarlo, Londres, Roma, y Lisboa. Debutando en 1900 en la Scala de Milán con el papel principal de La Bohéme de Puccini. Un año más tarde regresa a Nápoles donde estrena en el teatro de san Carlos L'elisir d'amore de Donizetti, obra muy criticada que tuvo una acogida negativa entre el público, lo cual hizo que jurase no volver a actuar en su ciudad natal. Juramento que mantuvo durante toda su vida.

El reconocimiento mundial llegó en la primavera de 1902 después de sus actuaciones en Montecarlo con La Bohème y en el Covent Garden de Londres con Rigoletto de Verdi. La misma ópera que estrenaría meses después en su debut americano en el Metropolitan Opera House de nueva York la noche del  23 de Noviembre de 1903. Éste fue el primero de sus diecisiete años ininterrumpidos que estuvo estrenando en dicha ciudad, representando un total de 36 papeles diferentes en 607 actuaciones. En su vida como artista representó un total de 57 papeles diferentes en 832 actuaciones distintas, lo que significa que más del 70% de su carrera la realizó para el Metropolitam, de hecho su última aparición para el gran público fue allí, el 24 de diciembre de 1920 en el papel de Eléazar en La Juive de Aubert.
Caruso, a partir de 1903 se convertiría en uno de los más famosos y mejor pagados tenores de su tiempo firmando contratos millonarios. A su fama en el escenario se le suma el hecho de ser uno de los primeros líricos en realizar grabaciones con fonógrafo, lo que hizo que adquiriese fama mundial y que su voz fuese escuchada y admirada en distintos lugares del planeta llegando a grabar más de 200 piezas de su extenso repertorio operístico además de diversas canciones. Algunas de estas obras se han ido reeditando en nuevos formatos y permanecen disponibles en nuestros días.

A esta fama fruto de su voz, se le suma una especial relación de confianza que supo crear entre su publico y él, se cuentan muchas e innumerables anécdotas al respecto, como que  prefería ir a pequeñas fondas para evitar los grandes restaurantes donde al verlo llegar los presentes estallaban en aplausos y él se paraba a conversar con su público. Otra anécdota asegura que cierta noche, en Bruselas, escuchó desde su camerino el descontento de varias decenas de personas que no habían conseguido entrada. Así, sin pensarlo demasiado, empezó a cantar las principales piezas de la ópera para la gente que se agrupaba en la calle. Si a esto le sumamos la calidad humana del artista que sustentaba y ayudaba económicamente alrededor de doscientas familias, se entiende que a consecuencia de todos estos hechos, naciese la leyenda de Caruso, y sólo así se puede explicar los alborotos callejeros que se producían a su llegada a los teatros. En definitiva un fenómeno de masas como más tarde se dará con otro tipo de ídolos de la música pop.

En agosto de 1290 Caruso empezó a experimentar señales tempranas de lo que sería una larga enfermedad. Se trataba de una pleuritis que le producía grandes dolores en el pecho. Esta circunstancia se mantuvo en secreto y Caruso continuó con sus giras por toda América. La enfermedad, pese al tratamiento de los médicos, siguió avanzando y así el 8 de Diciembre del mismo año, Caruso en medio de una representación en Brooklyn, empezó a sangrar por la boca y terminó perdiendo el conocimiento poco antes de terminar la representación que quiso finalizar a toda costa. Aún así, pese al dolor y la sangre, previendo un desenlace fatal, no quiere retirarse sin cantar de nuevo en el Metropolitam como despedida de su público. De esta manera realizará su última actuación la víspera de la Navidad de 1920. Tras esta actuación decidirá regresar a su ciudad natal.

Ya en Nápoles la enfermedad sigue agravándose hasta tal punto que la infección termina por alcanzar un riñón. Los médicos deciden extirparlo por lo que ha de ir a Roma para la intervención. El viaje comenzará el primer día de Agosto, pero en el camino sufre una fuerte recaída, muriendo poco después.

Biography - Henry Rosner - feedback@henryrosner.org

CHAPTER I: BEGINNING

IT APPEARS TO HAVE CHANGED LITTLE in the past eighty years. Far from being a national monument, there is not so much as a plaque to tell you that here is the birthplace of the greatest singer of his time, perhaps of all time.

The neighborhood is not the most ancient part of Naples. Compared with the jungle of right angles in the old quarter, through which even a tiny Italian-made car can hardly pass without mowing down a substantial percentage of the population, the street is light, airy and open. And it has the luxury, however narrow, of sidewalks.

If the building has had a coat of paint since Enrico Caruso was born there all trace of it has vanished. Two miserable shops with the inevitable neon signs mar the front of the ground floor. Otherwise, the facade preserves that dignity of balance between mass and line which in Italy, more than in any country on earth, is bestowed on the homes of rich and poor alike.

The courtyard is no filthier than many in New Orleans; nor is it any the more attractive because this happens to be Europe. But once in the room where the voice sounded for the first time, something takes hold of you.

The sweet-faced tenant is courteous after the manner of most of her compatriots, the open friendliness which is neither servility nor condescension. Yes, she tells you, this is the place. Eight or ten children, cleaner than those in the street, swarm around the double bed which all but fills the room.

What angel hovered over this room the morning of February 25, 1873? Thank God it was not the dark one which visited the house most often in those years. Enrico Caruso was the eighteenth of twenty-one children and the first to live past infancy.

You give a few lire to the beautiful children, who have been eying you as though you were a visitor from another planet, and go back into the blinding sunlight. Although in photographs the Church of SS. John and Paul next door is quite impressive, another example that dignity and beauty in this land are no respecters of wealth and rank, it is probably the smallest house of public worship in the world. In this tiny church Enrico was baptized -- Errico, the parish register reads, which in Neapolitan is to Enrico as Harry is to Henry in English. Enrico did not evolve until some years later.

The financial situation of the Caruso family, while never flush, was neither as dire as has been pictured. A good mechanic and a two-fisted drinker, Marcellino Caruso held a responsible job with the Meuricofire factory which made cottonseed oil and purified cream of tartar. In time he moved up to superintendent of the establishment.

After Enrico there was another little boy "without the strength to live." Giovanni, the brother who survived him, was born in 1876 and, six years later, the only girl, Assunta.

There is no photograph of the child Caruso. To compensate for this you find yourself mentally pinning his face on every urchin you see. Usually it fits. Huneker says he was always a boy.

In one of his rare autobiographical moments, Caruso tells of lying in bed, the covers pulled over his head, while his mother and father had a violent argument as to his future. Marcellino was for putting him to work then and there. Anna demanded he go on with school. Anna won but it was she who had to find the tuition money, five lire (one dollar) a month.

Father Bronzetti, who ran a school at 33 via Postica Maddalena, had drilled his choir until it was one of the best in all the city, in demand on every religious holiday and at many private social functions in between.

While we are wishing, those of us who have never heard Caruso may just as well yearn to know what he was like as the finest boy contralto in Naples. He came to be known as "Carusiello" and "the little divo" and he began to misbehave accordingly. Once when he had sung the Mercadante Mass particularly well at Amalfi he refused to ride home inside the carriage with his teacher and the other boys. His place, he insisted, was on the box up with the coachman; and there he perched until he dropped off to sleep, came perilously near falling under the wheels, and was transferred bodily to safety below.

Such outbursts didn't go down at all well with Marcellino. In his second year at the Bronzetti Institute Carusiello took first prize. As he was returning to his place, the gold medal gleaming on his little chest, the deposed champion, identified by Caruso only as Pietro, sprang from his desk and attacked him. In the ensuing fight Caruso drew his assailant's blood. Instantly the spectators' sympathy swung to Pietro. Even Father Bronzetti took it upon himself to rebuke Enrico, whereupon the little divo tore his prize from his lapel and threw it at the principal's feet.

It was now Marcellino's turn to get into the act. A chunky, powerful man, he dealt a blow which his son never forgot. What followed was infinitely more painful. "Kneel down," he roared, "and kiss Father Bronzetti's feet."

"I vowed I would never sing for the Institute again," Caruso wrote years later, the sting of that humiliation still on him, "and this vow was kept sacred and inviolate." After a year, he left school and took a job in a mechanical laboratory.

Instinctively neat and orderly, he excelled at mechanical drawing and was quite aware of the value of his services. He was about twelve when he went in to his boss and asked for a raise. It was refused. Forthwith he quit and went to work for a manufacturer of drinking fountains.

On the feast of Corpus Christi, 1888, Anna Caruso lay seriously ill. Enrico did not want to sing but his mother insisted. With a heavy heart he trudged to the Church of San Severino. It was one of only two performances in his life he was unable to finish. In the middle of the service the weeping neighbors came to tell him his mother was gone.

"Out of regard for her," he said, "I had resigned myself to pursuing my work as a mechanic's apprentice. After her death, though my heart was filled with sadness over my irreparable loss, I could see no reason for continuing this sacrifice. I left the office never to return and decided to dedi- cate all to music."

Marcellino was furious at this turn of events. Being a mechanic had been good enough for him. Why wasn't it for his son? He ordered Enrico out of the house. "Was he simply threatening me?" Many years later Caruso still did not have the answer; but he did know he could no longer remain under his father's roof. To his credit he never held this against the old man. Indeed he was extremely close to the stepmother Marcellino provided, less than six months after poor Anna had been laid to rest.

For ten years the Carusos had been living at 54 via San Cosmo e Damiano. The organist in the nearby Church of Sant' Anna alle Paludi took in the sixteen-year-old boy and gave him (these are Caruso's words) "the joy of a first engagement." What wouldn't his admirers give to hear, just once, the litany he told of singing a hundred times for two lire--forty cents--at the long Tuesday services.

Every visitor to Naples remembers the public swimming places which line the Bay. At one of these, the Risorgimento Baths, Enrico did his first secular singing. In the summer of 1891, while playing the resort circuit, he met Eduardo Missiano, one of a sizable list of people who would be anonymous today had they not helped Caruso mount the ladder of fame. To Missiano must go the credit of being Caruso's real discoverer. Never forgetting an act of kindness, Caruso, when he came into his own, saw to it that his baritone friend was engaged for small roles at the Metropolitan.

Missiano's teacher, Vergine, was unimpressed by Caruso's voice; or at least he said he was. "It sounds," he remarked, "like the wind whistling through the windows." Another time he com- mented, "It is like gold at the bottom of the Tiber, hardly worth digging for." Nevertheless, he accepted him as a pupil and drew up a contract which Caruso eight years later had hell's own time getting out of: twenty-five per cent of all earnings for the first five years--and here is the joker- of actual singing.

At twenty, like every young Italian of the time, Caruso was greeted for military service. There was in the land neither war nor rumors of war, but Caruso was thrown into something akin to shock. His friends assured him he would be classified the nineteenth-century Italian equivalent of 4-F, but he passed the physical in a walk. Shortly after his twenty-first birthday, pale and trembling, he reported to the Thirteenth Artillery in Rieti.

As a soldier Caruso was a hopeless misfit, and his commanding officer, a certain Major Nagliotti, was the first to know it. More important, he was as quick to recognize Caruso the singer. Here is the story in the tenor's own words:
"One day, it was Easter, the battalion all dined together at a dinner given by the officers to the soldiers. Major Nagliotti presided at the head of the table. After the dessert, the soldiers, in unison, demanded that I sing the Brindisi from Cavalleria Rusticana. I sang it, was applauded and requested to give an encore. But Major Nagliotti rose and reproved everyone for insisting that I sing it again and above all rebuked me for not appreciating my gift. He said he felt obliged to assume the care of it and this he would do by jailing everyone who asked me to sing. He added that he would treat me in like manner should I accede to their demands. The rebuke restrained the enthusiasm instantly. A few days later, the respected major called me aside and besides favoring me with exemption from some of the difficult exercises he suggested that I retire from military service and substitute my brother in my place."

As to just how this extraordinary transfer was accomplished Caruso is silent, but poor Giovanni, perhaps as reluctantly, certainly no more inappropriately, suddenly found himself under arms. Like any of his able-bodied young countrymen, Enrico had a military life expectancy of three years. He was out in two months, but not before Nagliotti had done him another service. The major had brought him to a rich nobleman in the town who loved music and was a good pianist. The baron was a kind man and enjoyed playing for the young recruit, painstakingly correcting his mistakes. On the piano was a score of Cavalleria Rusticana which had burst on the world in nearby Rome four years before. They went to work on it, In five days Caruso had learned the entire role of Turiddu. A year later this was to be his first part in standard opera--but that is another chapter.

CHAPTER II: THE CAREER

"A LONG CRESCENDO" is the way a New York Times headline described Caruso's career, a summation so true and appropriate it points up the three harsh discords which crashed amid the chorus of praise.

After alternately cheering and hissing, Barcelona let him finish his 1904 debut there in stony silence. Budapest whistled him in 1907. He never returned to either place. But the cruelest blow he suffered was the first, in 1901, when the audience in all the world he wanted most to please denied him, the great San Carlo Theater in Naples. Many a time as a boy he must have passed the beautiful old house and dreamed of singing there.

The very fact that he had a success at La Scala under his belt worked against him in the city of his birth. He had also declined to pay his respects to the sicofanti, an incredible bunch of phonies led by a self-appointed tribunal of effete noblemen and journalists.

Once he had delivered, however, the public, including his initial detractors, tried to make up to him. They did not know their man. He played out the remaining nine performances of his contract magnificently but with cold disdain. He never appeared before a Neapolitan audience again.

His entry in the official history of the Teatro di San Carlo is a meager four lines:
"ENRICO CARUSO. Singing son of singing Naples. Nearly all his splendid career was spent in America where he created, among other operas, The Girl of the Golden West at the Metropolitan in New York. He sang at San Carlo in 1905 in L'Elisir d'Amore and Manon. After that he did not wish to sing in Naples..."

The three dots as well as the incorrect date are the San Carlo historian's. What an epitaph for Naples' most famous son.

With the less pretentious public of his home town Caruso had been a different story. His first appearance on any stage was at the Tea tro Nuovo seven years before and even in that modest framework he scored a success.

Not long out of the army, he was offered the leading role in a little piece called L'Amico Francesco by Mario Morelli, a wealthy and untalented amateur. Francesco had only two performances, but at one of the intermissions the impresario of the Cimarosa Theater in Caserta wandered back with a contract for the following April. His debut was in Cavalleria Rusticana just a year after he learned it from the kindly baron in Rieti.

Business at the box office was not so good in Caserta that spring. Every morning Caruso had to ask the harassed impresario for his ten-lire cachet from the night before. Ultimately, the season was cut short and Enrico landed back in Naples with twelve cents in his pocket. "I was often hungry," Caruso once said of his youth, "but never unhappy."

Cairo beckoned next; not the famous opera house for the opening of which Verdi had written Aida, but a kind of resort spot called the Ezbekieh Gardens. After the Egyptian engagement he was tapped by the Bellini and then the Mercadante Theater in Naples.

At Salerno the conductor was Vincenzo Lombardi, Caruso's only other teacher. In Vergine's class Enrico had been known as "a glass voice" because he broke so easily. Every time he attacked the B-flat in the "Flower Song" from Carmen it split wide open. Lombardi came to the rescue. A man may not add a cubit to his stature, but Caruso by sheer determination built a top to his voice.

He was only twenty-five when he was catapulted into world fame by creating the tenor lead in the world premiere of Fedora, but this was the Teatro Lirico, Milan's second theater, and not La Scala. It did not matter. The news of his success went round the world. Offers poured in, from Russia and South America, from La Scala itself.

Late in 1899 Caruso had agreed with Maurice Grau to come to the Metropolitan at $200 a week for twenty weeks. There was a fifteen-day grace period. It stretched on into two months during which Mr. Grau disappeared. The impresario, it turned out, was at Karlsbad nursing the gout. He could not be reached. Caruso signed to return to St. Petersburg. "I've waited long enough," he sput- tered to Grau's Italian agent. "I must have a new overcoat for the winter and some coal for my fireplace."

The next contract was for fifty performances a season at $1,000 each--five years with annual increases. Before this contract could take effect illness forced Grau's retirement. To his successor, Heinrich Conried, fell the honor of presenting Caruso for the first time in the United States.

Triumphal European engagements continued--London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna--until the outbreak of the war, but after his New York debut, November 23, 1903, the Metropolitan was Caruso's artistic home. In eighteen seasons there he sang 607 times in thirty-seven different operas.

Oddly enough, he did not create an immediate furor with either the press or the public. The critics complained of "his tiresome Italian affectations" and pined for Jean de Reszke. A month after he arrived, long enough for him to have caught on, there was a Traviata with Madame Sembrich, Caruso, and Scotti. The Sun next day noted the performance had been heard by "a small and apathetic audience" but did go on to say that Caruso "sang his music beautifully and succeeded in evoking warm applause which was hard to get last night."

About this time Caruso was becoming involved in something which at the start hardly anybody took seriously but which was to bring him his greatest rewards in fame as well as money. He had just participated in another world premiere, Germania, when F. W. Gaisberg of the Gramophone and Typewriter Company arrived in Milan and set up shop in the Grand Hotel, directly above the suite where Verdi had died the year before. The proposition relayed to London was for ten arias, to be done in a single afternoon, at a fee of one hundred pounds for the lot--about fifty dollars a record. London cabled back, "Fee exorbitant. Forbid you to record."

Mainly because he was too embarrassed to go back to Caruso with such an answer, Gaisberg took matters in his own hands and ordered the recording session to proceed. Caruso sauntered in, tossed off his ten numbers in two hours--without blemish, Gaisberg says--and was on his way.

The precious waxes were rushed to Hanover; the finished products reached London in time for release to coincide with Caruso's Covent Garden debut. They were a sensation. The Victor Talking Machine Company took over the G. and T. masters and also Caruso. His first records in this country were made less than three months after his Metropolitan debut, his last within a year of his death.

During his lifetime the Victor Company paid him $1,825,000, about $130,000 more than his earnings at the Metropolitan. Since his death his estate has reaped another near $2,000,000 in royalties from his records.

There are two stories as to how his final fee per performance at the Metropolitan was arrived at. His last contract is said to have been handed him with a blank space for the figure, but it had been whispered to Caruso that the board was prepared to go as high as $4,000.

"I don't think there is a singer in this world who in one performance can give more than twenty-five hundred dollars' worth of singing," Caruso is said to have replied. "If I ask for one cent more than twenty-five hundred dollars the public, one way or another, will find out and want from me that one cent more of singing which I have not got. Therefore, leave matters as they are, with only one difference; instead of giving me one first-class cabin from Italy to America and back, put down what they call today cabin de luxe."

The other came to light in the obituaries of Gatti-Casazza, who ruled the Metropolitan with an iron hand for twenty-seven years. Caruso came to the general manager's office with the news that he had been offered five thousand dollars a night by Hammerstein, who was giving the Met a run for its money and finally had to be paid to leave town.

"If you wish five thousand dollars we shall have to give it to you," Mr. Gatti is reported to have answered more in sorrow than in anger. "We will never let our Caruso go. Of course, we shall have to put second-rate singers in your cast. We shall hire a poor conductor and underpay him. We shall have to save on others to pay you. But we will pay you."

Caruso's face reddened. "I insist," he shouted, "that you pay me only twenty-five hundred!"

Such were the rewards. What about the penalties? Smothered by well-meant admiration on one side, he was beset all the days of his greatness by those who envied that greatness or who sought to take advantage of him. Reports that he had lost his voice circulated on regular schedule, but he probably suffered more from the admiration he excited than from the envy. He could never appear in public without involuntarily inciting a riot. Souvenir hunters, hero-worshipers, cranks, and inter- viewers haunted him. I am quoting a newspaper on this last.

But the battle which he had to fight alone was the hardest of all. "I never step on the stage, he once said, "without asking myself whether I will succeed in finishing the opera." In this very element of doubt--this compulsion to be everything or nothing, his merciless demands on himself, his relentless self-appraisal--lay so much of his greatness.

"Work, work, and again work," was his answer when asked his rule of success. Another time he said, "This is how I have succeeded. I never refused an engagement and I have never been without work with the exception of two months in Naples after my second engagement. . . .

"I never refused to work. If one would come to me and say, 'Will you go to such and such a place for the summer and sing?' I would ask 'How much will you pay me?' The answer is 'Two thousand dollars.' But I say, 'The price for that was three thousand.' 'Never mind,' they say, 'two thousand dollars is all that can be paid this summer,' and I refuse. 'Very well,' they say, 'we get so-and-so.' Then I make quick thoughts in my head"--describing swift geometric patterns on his brow--"and I say, 'I will go.' Otherwise I lose the summer and the experience. And the experience is everything."

When I am asked, as I often am, what has Caruso to say for today, I cite the above. In my time I have known at least six young tenors endowed with as much voice as Caruso had--when he started.

A reviewer of Mrs. Caruso's beautiful book, written twenty-four years after his death, knowingly summed it up:
"The source of his existence lay only in himself. This was true in every aspect of his life. . . . All in all he was himself the great work of art, the masterpiece."

CHAPTER III: OFF STAGE

NO ARTIST WITHIN MEMORY EVER KINDLED THE RAPPORT WITH HIS PUBLIC THAT CARUSO did. No barrier of footlights or anything else stood between them. One Saturday night after an Aida the curtain calls were stretching out longer than usual. After about the dozenth Caruso good-naturedly rubbed his stomach as if to say, "I'm hungry now. Please go home and let me have my supper." The fans roared their approval and the house lights went up.

These informal communications were by no means confined to pantomime on his part. More than once in the third act of L'Elisir d'Amore when the audience demanded a repeat of "Un a fur tiva lagrima" he would confide, "I can't; they won't let me." This was after Toscanini had done his work and forever banished encores at the Metropolitan as he had in Milan.

Nor was the direction all one-way. On the evening of December 19, 1919, Caruso was again singing L'Elisir. He had given a brilliant performance, exceptional even by his standards, and for a very good reason. For the same reason the ovation was tremendous. There was not a soul in the big auditorium who did not know his news that evening and rejoice with him. Gloria had made her appearance the night before. "Viva pappa!" the shouts rolled down galleries and loges alike.

No event in his life was allowed to go uncommented upon. While he was singing in Cuba the summer of 1920 his house in Easthampton was robbed of jewelry estimated in value by the news- papers at the time between $236,000 and $500,000. No official statement was ever made as to the exact loss, and although the papers never said it in so many words the notion was widespread that it might have been an inside job. Caruso's only concern was the safety of his wife and baby. "'Lots of jewels will come," he cabled.

His first date after he got back to New York was a recital at Ocean Grove. Those ancient timbers reverberated more to Methodist hymns than to any other harmonies, but the sprawling old tabernacle on the Jersey shore was always hospitable to the greats of opera and concert, the camp- meeting schedule permitting.

That August night Caruso was singing, as he often did in recital, Rodolfo's "Narrative" from La Boheme. There is a phrase as he approaches the climax in which the poet tells Mimi, ". . . your lovely eyes have robbed me of all my jewels." When Caruso came to that line he could not resist. Neither could the audience. Almost imperceptibly he shrugged his shoulders, assumed a rueful expression and ever so slightly turned his open palms to the public. The roof came down.

Caruso's only pupil was Ed McNamara, the singing cop from Paterson, New Jersey. While he was still in uniform McNamara used to electioneer in saloons for Senator William Hughes. On the nights he wasn't so engaged he would go to the non-Hughes taverns and heckle the opposition. It was probably senatorial influence or perhaps the equally weighty intercession of Madame Schumann-Heink, who discovered McNamara at a sort of Jersey May festival, that got him a hearing. Pressure or no pressure, you may be sure Caruso would never have accepted him had he not thought the strapping young hopeful had a good voice, which McNamara did--and big.

Mac finally gave up music--or, more accurately, music gave him up. Thereafter he became a highly succcessful actor playing, of all things, cops. On stage, as in real life, he never made an arrest. It was type-casting. His sergeant in Paterson once complained that the only time McNamara's name ever appeared on the station-house blotter was payday. No one who saw it will ever forget that first act speakeasy in Strictly Dishonorable. "I thought," a bibulous judge rebuked him, "policemen never drank."

"It just seems like never," was Mac's sharp reply.

In the so-called "musical subjects" Mac was a bigger dud than most singers, which is saying something. Once in a sight-reading lesson with Buzzi-Peccia (Deems Taylor is authority for this one) the maestro stopped him.

"Mr. McNamara," he warned, "that is a dotted eighth. You will please to treat it as such."

"That," Mac blurted, "is one man's opinion!" Some idea of the size of his voice may be gathered from the fact that Caruso constantly insisted his pupil sing with less force. "Piano, piano," he would plead, "not so loud." Remembering the block-busters Caruso used to release even on records, one wonders just what the McNamara instrument was like that his mentor should want it soft-pedaled.

One day Caruso reversed himself. "Louder, louder!" he kept urging. When the chandeliers were coming loose and the windows beginning to rattle, Mac, somewhat mystified, asked, "Why, Mr. Caruso? I thought you told me to hold back."

"I know," Caruso gleefully replied, "but Scotti's home today," pointing to the apartment below, "and he's sick."

Another time he counseled, "Mac, you go to the bathroom in the morning. You push down. When you come to the high note, push up!" This is about as close as Caruso ever got to codifying his vocal method.

"The social man in him was irresistible," Huneker said of Caruso. "His company was a tonic for all ailments," Tetrazzini testified. "A simplicity which sprang from innate kindness," is what Geraldine Farrar remembers.

The stories of his generosity are legion. His bounty was like Antony's. There was no winter in it. An autumn indeed it was, that grew the more by reaping.

"Even in his caricatures he shows the sweetness of his nature," Victor Herbert said at a dinner which the Lotus Club gave in Caruso's honor. "He has never drawn me as fat as others have."

On a June afternoon just six months before she died I heard from Mrs. Caruso herself some of the stories I had loved in her book and some that were new to me. She was staying at the Pavilion Henri IV in St. Germain-en-Laye, half an hour from Paris. Like her adored Rico she was making a brave fight for life. No one will ever know whether or not she realized how ill she was. The eyes were as blue as everybody had told me they would be, her manner as direct and winning.

Through her kindness I found Martino Ceccanti, Caruso's old valet and friend, in Florence. Together we journeyed up to the villa at Signa. We walked through the gardens which were Caruso's pride, past the courts where Princess Marie Jose later played tennis, the bocce court where Marshal Badoglio often relaxed. As we left, Martino, gentleman's gentleman as ever was, thanked the caretaker. "I know it would make him happy," he said, "to see it so beautifully kept."

From boyhood, Caruso was a miracle of order. Throughout his career he kept his own accounts and scrapbooks. Bruno Zirato, managing director of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, who served as his secretary, recalls an entry in his personal ledger. "Expenses for my marriage"... $50.00.', In all his career he never asked for a complimentary ticket. Earle R. Lewis, former assistant manager of the Metropolitan, says the ticket bill for his performances ran eight to nine thousand dollars a season. He handed them out by the fistful to friends able as well as unable to pay their own way. He was the grand seigneur.

Toward the end he gave up the handsome big tooled-leather scrapbooks which were made especially for him and, instead, mounted his cuttings on big leaves of heavy gray paper. The last clipping he pasted up was from the Brooklyn Eagle of December 12,1920. It told of his appearance at the Academy of Music the night before when he had begun to bleed at the mouth. The audience was dismissed after the first act but not until Caruso in full view of everyone had filled towel after towel with blood in a superhuman effort to finish the performance.

He and Mrs. Caruso drove back to their apartment in the Vanderbilt Hotel, never once mentioning the fearful events of the evening. It was a nightmare to be forgotten as quickly as possible. He ordered supper as usual. It might have been any of hundreds of nights after a performance, except that it was early and he was not smoking.

That was a Saturday. He was scheduled to sing the following Monday. He did.

Such was his sense of responsibility to the management, the public and himself. He was the most expensive artist of his time and the cheapest. His record of cancellations was almost zero. And to the end he kept his head in the face of such adulation as few champions in any field have ever known.

CHAPTER IV: THE LAST YEAR

ON AUGUST 3, 1920, IN A LETTER TO BRUNO ZIRATO, Caruso complained of "dolore in genere"-- "pain all over." He was not long back from a month's engagement in Havana but there was no rest for the weary. He embarked late September on a concert tour. There were only twelve dates, but what an itinerary--Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, St. Paul, Denver, Omaha, Tulsa, Fort Worth, Houston, two in Charlotte, and Norfolk. Before he left he got in a recording session at Camden.

Always hypersensitive to criticism, he was upset by a trio of bad reviews when the opera season opened. "If I sing as those critics say I do," he served notice, "it is time I appeared no more before the New York public." Mr. Gatti was panic-stricken. Eventually Caruso was dissuaded.

There were six performances in the opera house, then the night of horror in Brooklyn. Intercostal neuralgia, his physician diagnosed it. "Intercostal neuralgia," Mrs. Caruso repeated it bitterly to me thirty-four years later. "It became a kind of incantation."

Christmas Eve he sang La Juive. Bodanzky, the conductor, visited his dressing room at intermission. Caruso was bolt upright in a chair, weeping with pain. "If it's your throat," Bodanzky asked, "why are you holding your side?" Too bad the doctors were not as scientific.

The celebration of Christmas went on as in years past -- the gold pieces had to be put in the little coin boxes, hundreds of them, for everybody at the Metropolitan -- until shortly after noon. A bloodcurdling scream bent the air. Let the patient himself tell the story, a letter to his brother, published here for the first time:

Caruso's brave mind and spirit were about two months ahead of his body's schedule. It had been necessary to remove a rib which he did not know about until weeks later. In all, he had undergone six operations, only three of which had been made known to the public at the time. There were circulars daily, sometimes oftener, just as for royalty. He was not able to sail for Italy until May 28. Mr. Gatti, departing earlier in the month, had issued a windy statement: "Enrico Caruso will without any doubt again take his glorious post at the Metropolitan."

Before he left, Caruso paid a visit to the opera house. Even off-season the Metropolitan is a good-sized family. From all over they came running as the news shot through the theater, "Mr. Caruso is here!" The comptroller locked the safe and closed shop. The Fortieth Street stage door was left unattended. The porters dropped their mops and brooms.

"How wonderful you look, Mr. Caruso!" was the exclamation on all sides. The performance was going over perfectly because everybody wanted so much to believe it--going over perfectly, that is, with everyone but the central figure of the tragedy. He was not deceived. Neither apparently was Gatti, who, twenty years later, confessed in his memoirs that the first collapse in Brooklyn had filled him with grave forebodings. "At that very moment," he said, "I had a fleeting premonition that Caruso was lost."

Annie Kempter was not fooled either. Annie was head of the cleaning women and dared sound the only baleful note. What she beheld crushed her and she couldn't hold it back.

"Mr. Caruso," she whispered, "I think you look terrible."

"Annie," Caruso replied quietly, "you are the only one who tells me the truth."

With Mrs. Caruso and Gloria he sailed from Brooklyn on the Presidente Wilson. There was a great turnout and general merrymaking on the pier.

The rooms the Carusos occupied at the Hotel Vittoria in Sorrento are pretty much today as they were then except that the great gilt piano is gone. Undeterred by the heavy blinds, the sunlight and salt air have faded the ornate damask covering the walls. The overblown Louis XVI furniture is the same.

Enrico swam every day, Gloria never far from his side. He found his way through the Vittoria's gardens to the beautiful little town square. Everywhere he was greeted like a king. He was gaining weight as his photographs show and he was gorgeously tanned. But he foolishly insisted on making trips to Capri and Pompeii.

On July 15, he felt the old pain in his side. It was July 28 before he would consent to see the famous Bastianelli brothers, the best doctors in Italy at the time. Their verdict was that a kidney must be removed. The operation would be done at their clinic in Rome the next week. Two days later Caruso sank into delirium. Mrs. Caruso called Giovanni and the sad little party set forth, deciding to break the journey in Naples. They checked into the Hotel Vesuvio. The end was swift and terrible, in indescribable heat and pain. He began to scream again, those same dreadful cries of Christmas Day.

Tuesday morning, August 2, Mrs. Caruso remembered hearing the clock strike nine. In the next five minutes he spoke three times.

"Doro--I--am--thirsty."
"Doro--they--hurt--me--again."
"Doro--I--can't--get--my--breath."
That was all.

I am often asked, "What did Caruso die of?" The letter to his brother is a painfully accurate medical history. Several of the doctors Mrs. Caruso never forgave, particularly him of the intercostal neuralgia diagnosis. She also had some definite ideas about the Neapolitan practitioners who couldn't be roused those awful first days of August or who, when finally rounded up, were so overwhelmed by the celebrity of their patient as to be completely ineffectual.

Mr. Gatti said, "He was truly a victim of his own wilfulness." He might have said of his own fear of doctors. "He listened to the conflicting advice of many physicians and even to charlatans. And then it was too late."

Claudia Cassidy is perhaps nearest the truth when she writes, . . . in his fierce striving to be more than his public expected he was his own executioner And, again, he was "a warrior to whom every performance was a battle against the supreme odds of his own previous triumphs..."

Always the tantalizing question raises itself, "What if he had lived?" He was forty-eight and at the height of his powers. When asked at what age the singing voice is best he once said, "For tenors I think between thirty and forty-five." But a healthy Caruso could easily have gone on another ten years at the top. "Indeed," Irving Kolodin speculates, "with his power and endurance, he might have passed sixty still vocally hale."

And what if he had survived the illness? One of his doctors told Mr. Gatti, "Caruso will perhaps pull through, and he will keep his voice, for the voice has nothing to do with pleurisy. But this man will never again have the necessary breath with all these operations."

Caruso had his wife and baby to live for. More than once in his adorable letters to his young wife he expressed a longing to retire. But the most beloved singer of all time not singing? One remembers the entry William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) made in his diary a few days after the death, at thirty-eight, of John Millington Synge (1871-1909): "We pity the living and not such dead as he. He has gone upward out of his ailing body into the heroical fountains. We are parched by time."

Francis Robinson, 1957.

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