"Italian singers have a way of delaying their singing, or perhaps, the precision of the time measured, while the orchestra continues its prescribed movement. This approach creates a wonderful effect if brought off with taste and coupled with the singer's awareness of how to re-establish balance. Examples of this effect cannot be described but must be heard in a performance."
It was these lines from Pier Francesco Tosis ãOpinioni de' cantori antichi e moderni, o sieno Osservazioni sopra il canto figuratoÒ that came to my mind when listening for the first time to the old, original Caruso recordings. After all, the freedom of the individual voice within an overall musical structure has always been one of the great achievements of western music.

In my mind, Caruso's inimitable mezza voce, his legati and portamenti seemed to create the purest, albeit sometimes arbitrary, embodiment of the above-described tempo rubato - by this I mean the tempo rubato of an international superstar entitled to do whatever he pleased from the musical viewpoint, which duly caused substantial difficulties for the orchestras performing with him on the recordings. Taste? Well, there is no accounting for taste.

As a conductor, I was faced with a twofold problem:
 
 The first was the question of how I could, as discreetly as possible, balance the extreme liberties taken by Caruso while at the same time meeting modern
standards of artistic interpretation. This mainly concerned passages in which Caruso, fired by true tenoral enthusiasm, simply "jumped" parts of a beat or - opposite effect but same cause - held them for such a long time, that it became very difficult to fit in the written orchestral accompaniment. These arbitrary fermatas prevented perfect faithfulness to the score Ð above all in the recitatives. Further concessions were necessary for reasons of recording technology.

The second problem was, surprisingly, unforeseeable. It resulted from a practical necessity: during recording, the musicians and myself listened only to Caruso's voice without the original accompaniment. But to be able to recognize rhythmic liberties, you need a metre as a point of reference as only the axiom of constant speed permits us to identify deviations as such. While the old - albeit clumsy - accompaniment had enabled us to recognize the most subtle liberties taken by Caruso, its elimination made us feel like astronauts floating through space, without weight or direction. Despite filling our consciousness with Caruso's bel canto, the musical time had suddenly become uncertain, relative - time as another form of emptiness. The metrical force-field had been annulled, and the orchestra and myself entered a kind of musical state of suspension, propelled from the safety of the metre into absolute space. In the beginning of our recording work, the obvious lack of any form of contact with the soloist brought us astonishingly close to Karl Popper's statement, "We do not know, we guess." The tiniest shifts in Caruso's interpretations had to be, as it were, "sensed in advance" by painstakingly following the implacable requirements of the tape. It goes without saying that this proved a difficult task for both orchestra and conductor.

For this reason, I would like to avail myself of this opportunity to express my warmest thanks to the musicians of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Their musical sensitivity and professional enthusiasm have contributed immensely to making this production reality.

However, the simple fact that all parties involved in this "collaboration" with Caruso were guided and motivated by the suggestive power of his voice even today, at the beginning of a new century, bears witness to Caruso's unique artistic personality. It is with the very greatest respect that I shake your hand, Mr. Caruso ...


Gottfried Rabl