The Great Caruso Author:Michael Scott He was born in the squalid slums of Naples, in 1873. Although his voice as he grew up was of astonishing beauty, Enrico Caruso's technique was rudimentary and his style vehement and crude. But just as he was winning his first success, music itself was undergoing a historic shift -- away from the exquisite artifice of nineteenth-century bel c... more »anto opera to a taste for the new naturalism of the verismo school. And, simultaneously, the new technological miracle of the phonograph was allowing a vast new audience to enjoy the human voice. It was a new century, and the age of the common man. Caruso's natural gifts and his personality - uninhibited, emotional, immediate -- catapulted him to world fame in a very short period of time.
And from 1903 until his death, his home was the Metropolitan, in New York. In the next seventeen years until his death, he starred 622 times at the Met (an astonishing thirty-seven major roles each year); he toured the world constantly, singing in other opera houses and giving recitals (he could command a fee of $10,000 to sing songs for one evening in Cuba -- and he did it!); he created new roles, revived old ones, recorded a vast repertory -- and paid the price. By the time he was forty-five, he looked sixty; he collapsed and died in 1921. The achievement and output were prodigious, and never equaled by any artist since; his magnificent vocal legacy still manifests itself today, not only in the great tenor style heard on opera stages all over the world but in the performances of popular singer, too -- because Caruso's impact on the unfolding world of popular music was also profound.
The interweaving of the three crucial elements -- the personal, the musical, and the technological -- is what gives Michael Scott's book its depth and authority. The Great Caruso also contains a full discography and chronology. It will be an essential reference work for anyone interested in the history of singing and recording.
Contains 16 pages of photographs, index, chapter notes, and bibliography.« less
ISBN-13: 9780394536811 ISBN-10: 0394536819 Publication Date: 6/12/1988 Pages:322 Edition:1st American ed Rating: