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There exist only a few singers who are still household names for the general opera public, if we except the small circle of connoisseurs. One of the reasons why roles are no longer associated or identified with their interpreters – such as Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov with Chaliapin, Puccini’s Scarpia with Tito Gobbi or Bellini’s Norma with Maria Callas – can be explained by a change in paradigms: the increasing importance of directors and the primacy of visual effects (which often must compensate audiences for the pains inflicted on their ears).

Do people still know Enrico Caruso – not only as a name or popular myth, but as an artist? “His immortality is ensured”, Sir Compton Mackenzie, the founder of “The Gramophone” magazine, once wrote, “because every day somebody somewhere will hear his voice for the first time and say, ‘Now that was a singer’”. Is this statement still valid today? Shortly after the death of the Neapolitan tenor, the composer and pianist Sidney Homer, whose wife Louise Homer had frequently performed with Caruso at the Metropolitan Opera, noted, “Before the advent of Caruso, I had never heard a voice that was even remotely similar to his. But since then, I have heard voice after voice – big and small, high and deep voices – that tried to emulate him, often in a forced manner”.

There is much to be said for the assumption that Caruso is no longer one of the singers who influence current taste or the expectations invested in tenor voices. The idea that the recordings of singers who performed during the lifetimes of Verdi and Puccini, Giordano and Leoncavallo might show us the way towards the style of these composers, much as a compass would, has been all but forgotten. The opinion that these recordings might serve as musical “teaching aids” for young singers (or also for audiences) is dismissed as anachronistic, nostalgic, if not reactionary. Moreover, many listeners simply do not tolerate the old recordings coated “with noble historic rust” (Thomas Mann); they cannot or will not accept the re-dimensioning of a voice, as it were, an effect comparable to the optical reduction in size that results when we look through the wrong end of an opera glass.

When a small group of enthusiasts at the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) announced the “Caruso 2000” project and promised to embed the “voice of the century” in the “brilliant sound of a modern orchestra”, the endeavour triggered a great deal of sometimes vehement controversy. By the way, this was not the first attempt of its kind; already in the 1920s and 1930s, Rosario Bourdon (musical director of RCA Victor), Nathaniel Shilkert and Lawrence Collingwood had engineered 36 re-recordings using the electric recording process. There has been widespread agreement that the new effort by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gottfried Rabl is the most successful one; its champions also include the British critic John Steane.

No, no listener will be under the impression of hearing a modern-day singer when Caruso first comes in after the short prelude to “Amor ti vieta” – he had created the role of Loris on 27 November, 1897, and was instantly prompted by enthusiastic applause to an encore. He sounds like a troubadour whose voice comes from somewhere at the back of the stage. But what a sound it is that surges here – a sound of liquid gold. This recording is a perfect example of flowing sostenuto singing, with a unique, dynamic arc of tension culminating in the high A. The voice of the then 29-year-old tenor is bright and lyrical, its texture soft and velvety, the sound enchanting and sensuous.

When Caruso for the first time stepped in front of the recording bell and sang ten songs on 11 April, 1902 – so quickly that the engineers hardly had the time to change the matrixes –, he made the tiny mistake of coming in too early in Faust’s aria “Dai campi, dai prati” from Arrigo Boito’s “Mefistofele”. In the second recording made seven months later, this tiny mistake is avoided; again we hear Caruso’s superbly lyrical mezza voce singing, which despite all gentleness still abounds in surprising fullness, vibrating intensity and virility. The sustained incrementation of sound (messa di voce) rising from the piano in the last phrases of the aria is unique.

Ten weeks after his moderately successful début at the Met in the role of the Duke of Mantua (on 23 November, 1903), Caruso made his first ten records – still with piano accompaniment – for the U.S. Victor Corporation, to which he remained loyal with all his further recordings (until 16 September, 1920). Here, his most captivating and stylistically interesting interpretation is Nemorino’s romance “Una furtive lagrima” from Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’amore”. Caruso had first sung the role on 23 January, 1904, at the Met, exactly seven days before the recording. The review in the “New York Times” indicates that it is an exact replica of his performance, a lovingly detailed interpretation, whose length required two discs with a diameter of ten and twelve inches, respectively. His singing is described as “flowery in its old-fashioned rhetorical passion”. Obviously, Caruso had felt motivated after the first few performances together with the greatest vocalists of the era to further hone his technique in order to shape and nuance every single ornamentation with calligraphic clarity. The dolce touch at the beginning of the first phrase; the gruppetti that seem wrought like silver thread entwined in brocade; the emphatic crescendo of “Io vo, m’ama, si, m’ama”, rapidly followed by the diminuendo; the messa di voce of “Ah – cielo”; the agilità of the coloratura passage of the cadence and the crescendo of the last passage, which shortly before the end is intensified by a pulsating vibrato – all this adds up to a truly perfect example of bel canto singing.

But perfection always spells an end as well. Contrary to his Neapolitan colleague Fernando de Lucia, Caruso is no rococo tenor. He endows the graphic elegance of his vocal delineation of musical phrases with the emphatic means of expression typical of canto verismo: the powerful messa di voce as well as the expressive, sometimes sighing catches in his breath, the little sobs. This fluid amalgamation is evident in the two arias from “Tosca”. It is a rarity to find a tenor who moves into the first phrases so delicately and tenderly using the mezza voce. The intensified phonation in the last phrase “Ah il mio pensier sei tu, Tosca, sei tu” leading up to the high B is simply ravishing. After the final note, Caruso uses the so-called “back vowel strategy” to intensify the sonority of the F (for the last syllable, “tu”). By modifying the “u” more towards an “o”, he achieves an immense, almost explosive intensification of sound. In the first phases as in the luxurious smorzandi of “E lucevan le stelle”, he fuses the orthodox art of bel canto with the emphasis of verismo singing that at the end of the aria allows for a sob – an imitation of sentiment that reduces affect to mere effect.

Because of the perfect adaptation of singing technique to musical manner, the session of 11 February, 1906, during which Caruso created his first five orchestra records, is amongst the most important of his entire recording career. In Faust’s aria, he keeps the tone deliberately supple and slender, singing the high C with the head-voice sonority of voix mixte, while transposing Rodolfo’s aria with full, Italian phonation (an approach endorsed by the composer himself).

The improvviso of Andrea Chénier is a unique feat: the beginning is sung with concentrated lyricism and then brought to a peak of supreme intensity without drawing breath before the high Bs, quite without the superficial effects his successors (Gigli, Martinelli) considered necessary to legitimate the emphasis of the French Revolution poet. This is one of Caruso’s most brilliant recordings. Equally striking achievements are the Duke’s ballata from “Rigoletto” – entrancing in its rhythmic lightness, aggressive verve and bravado – and Alvaro’s romanza from “La Forza del destino”, recorded nine years after Caruso’s first performance of this role. The singer knows perfectly how to reconcile dramatic declamation with bel canto phrasing in the recitative.

At the peak of his career, Caruso put himself under undue stress, sometimes singing as many as six performances in only eight days. This strain led to the formation of singer’s nodules; although these were successfully removed, it is noticeable that the voice – albeit still incomparably beautiful – was gradually losing its velvety-sunny glow. He recorded Don José’s Flower Song on 7 November, 1909, in Italian and French – the latter version is surprisingly idiomatic despite the Italian-style rolled “r” and the too open vowel “e”. While he does sing the phrase “Et j’étais une chose à toi”, which rises to the high B, in one breath, he misses the correct timing – the performance seems rushed.

Much has been written about the dark, baritonal tinta that Caruso’s voice assumed in the second decade of his career and which motivated the conductor and composer René Leibowitz to speak of a “masculinisation of the tenor voice”. Despite the powerful projections of sound observed with equal measures of admiration and scepticism by critics such as William James Henderson or Henry Krehbiel, Caruso did not force his voice in any wrong sense. On 31 December, 1916, he informed the readers of the “Brooklyn Eagle” as follows, “I try hard to avoid that my voice should ever sound strained. A man needs the utmost training to be able to control his voice so that it will always sound effortless and natural. The audience must not get the impression that I am forcing my voice, but they should be aware that I am tightening every nerve so that it will sound supple and natural”.

The increased tension of later recordings – for example in Otello’s goodbye to arms (“Ora per sempre addio”) or in Canio’s ecstatically intensified and heartrending final monologue from “Pagliacci” – was less a consequence of physical or muscular exertion than a stylistic decision in favour of the emphatic phonation of canto verismo. And even where moments of effort are palpable in his recording of the Duke’s aria (“Ella mi fu rapita – Parmi veder le lagrime”) – the baritonal tinta does not sit too well with the high tessitura –, the rapid, vibrating and firm tonal touch, the very basis of plastic articulation, remains unaltered.

By way of conclusion, we may say that any attempt to achieve perfect balance between the sound of a voice recorded almost one hundred years ago and that of a modern-day orchestra means reaching for the near-impossible. Yet these new editions – a true labour of love – bring contemporary audiences, who as a rule have little sympathy for the brittle charm of acoustic antiques, closer to the ravishingly beautiful voice and the art of a unique singer. The connoisseurs, in their turn, will certainly recognise their Caruso – their “old” Caruso; all others are provided with an opportunity to encounter him and learn what a tenor can be.

Jürgen Kesting

(translation: Mag. Sigrid Szabó)