The Complete Caruso Vol. 12 (1902-1920)

For him there was to be no long, slow deterioration of the voice, no painful subsiding into ordinariness. Countless admirers were shocked and saddened by his early death, but the Caruso legend has thrived on it, to the point where a unique aura now surrounds his reputation. Great singers may come and go, but none will ever take over the mantle of Caruso.


There is something here that goes beyond mere questions of quality, something to do with his lowly origins in a disease-ridden Naples where the poorest families (though not the Carusos) lived on the ground floors of warehouses together with their livestock, and the women of the house swept out the animal droppings and emptied the chamber pots into the gutter. Cows and goats were driven through the streets to be milked on demand. Boys dived for coins in the filthy waters of the port, into which the street sweepers dumped the contents of their carts when they finished their rounds. Hygiene was unknown and death was a familiar visitor. In such circumstances it is hardly fanciful to suppose that transient beauties become more precious and life affirms itself with a fiercer intensity.


Add to this the bars and restaurants echoing to the popular songs of the day, a wonderful treasury of lyrics and melodies that sprang from specifically Neapolitan roots and helped define the city's particular identity. Here was an education rather different from that offered in any conservatory of music. Any tenor now can sing 'O sole mio or Torna a Surriento or Guardanno 'a luna, but he can hardly say that he sat and joked with the men who wrote these songs, or grew up speaking the dialect in which they were written - or, indeed, that when he started out on his career in opera Verdi was still living. Caruso is not just a singer, he illuminates a vanished musical landscape which continues to captivate our imagination.

Even Caruso's death had a heroic quality that went beyond the sad procession of infections, operations, recoveries and relapses. A couple of decades later, the whole business could have been easily cleared up with antibiotics, but in 1921 a bacterial invasion of the pleural cavity was all too likely to prove fatal. What sparked it off was probably an accident that occurred on stage one night at the Met in early December 1920, during a performance of Samson et Dalila, when one of the falling pillars (made out of wire and basketwork) struck Caruso in the left side. In the days that followed he complained of pains just below the kidney, and a week later sang the whole of Act I of L'elisir d'amore while wiping the blood from his mouth onto a succession of handkerchiefs passed to him from the wings. The rest of the performance had to be cancelled. His doctor persisted in reassuring everyone that the trouble was only a burst blood vessel at the base of the tongue, and Caruso himself was reluctant to admit there was anything seriously wrong. The trouble worsened. On Christmas Eve, during one of the intervals in La Juive, the conductor visited his dressing-room and found him sitting in a chair weeping with pain. It was the last time he ever appeared on stage. The next day he was seized with such agonizing pain that, as he later wrote to his brother Giovanni, his howls were 'so loud they heard me on the street from the eighteenth floor'.


An operation was carried out under local anaesthetic to drain fluid and pus from the chest. Over the following weeks, more abscesses formed, necessitating a further five operations: during one of these a four-inch piece of rib had to be removed to gain access to the seat of the infection. Over a period of three months Caruso lost an alarming proportion of his 215-pound weight, but though still weak and shaky and looking ten years older, by April he seemed to be mending. During his illness he had often talked of wanting to die in Italy, and against the wishes of his wife and doctors he insisted on going through with plans for travel even when the danger was apparently past. His party sailed for Italy on 28th May. For a month or more he enjoyed the sun and air of Naples, his days a ceaseless round of visits from friends, admirers and hangers-on. Whether the strain was too much for an exhausted man, or whether the trouble came from an old operation wound which had still not fully healed, he contracted a new infection, probably an abscess close to the kidney. Preparations were made to transport him to Rome for surgery, but the only part of the journey he managed to complete was the short distance from Sorrento to Naples. He died there, in the Hotel Vesuvio, during the night of 1st August, 1921.


What was left for Caruso to achieve? His career had been a succession of triumphs and superlatives. The voice was stupendous, colossal, glorious, rounded, mellifluous, it had thrilled and melted millions upon millions of those who heard it, even through the crude medium of pre-electric recordings. More to the point, its owner had endeared himself to all he met. The public, of course, adored him, but from colleagues too came nothing but affection and praise. The man knew his worth and expected to be duly paid for it, but he also knew the worth of everyone around him, and would have scorned to allow himself to be exalted at their expense.


What was left for him to record? Very little, as this disc shows. A few rather unmemorable songs, Handel and Lully sung with funereal reverence in the manner of the day; even one aria originally written for soprano and here transposed down a ninth, Mia piccirella 4. Evidence, if any more were needed, that Caruso really had done it all. Time to leave the stage: let those who came after see if they could do any better.