Caruso, Enrico

(1873–1921)

   The “great Caruso” was one of the most famous opera tenors of all time. Like Placido Domingo or Luciano Pavarotti today, he also reached a wide public: His recording in 1902 of Leoncavallo’s Vesti la giubba was the first gramophone record to sell one million copies.

   Caruso was born in Naples to a desperately poor working-class family and began singing in the choir of the local parish priest, Padre Giuseppe Bronzetti. He paid for singing lessons by working alongside his father as a mechanic. Caruso began his public career in Naples in 1894, although his break came in 1897 when auditioning for a performance of La Boheme in Leghorn before the great composer Giacomo Puccini, who allegedly asked, “Who sent you to me? God himself?” Between then and 1903 he performed all over Italy, in Argentina, and in Russia. In 1903, he began a lengthy professional relationship with the New York Metropolitan Opera that lasted until his untimely death from pleurisy in 1921. In all, Caruso appeared more than 600 times on the New York stage in almost 40 productions. Caruso’s repertoire ranged across the classics of contemporary Italian opera to Mozart and to popular Neapolitan folk songs. The one Italian folk song everyone knows, “O sole mio,” was made internationally famous through Caruso’s recording of it.