A century and a half after his birth, the Italian tenor and opera legend Enrico Caruso is finally celebrated by his hometown of Naples, which is devoting a new museum to him, inaugurated on Wednesday.
Long before Luciano Pavarotti, it was Caruso who represented Italian opera in the vast world, opening the way to music accessible to the greatest number thanks to his prolific recordings at the time of the rise of the gramophone. Born in 1873, the tenor and his international career now have the honor of a small museum located in the Royal Palace of Naples, inaugurated on Wednesday July 19.
“He’s the greatest tenor the world has ever known“, assures the curator Laura Valente. “Because beyond his great talent and his extraordinary voice, he invented a new way of singing and expressing himself on stage, in this sense like Maria Callas“, she explains to AFP. During his life, Caruso gave nearly two thousand concerts and made nearly 250 recordings, making him a media star recognized around the world. His tours took him from Saint Petersburg to Mexico City, from Buenos Aires to New York.
“He was a tenor of the new century. Above all, he understood that this technology [l’enregistrement audio] would not weaken her voice, but that she would make it known to the whole world. And this is its innovation“, details Laura Valente. The multimedia fund of the Museo Caruso, which includes old recordings, films, posters and photographs, exalts the talent and the sense of marketing of the singer, whose voice has been described as “magical”, oscillating between that of a tenor and that of a baritone.
Admired by kings and loved by the people
“If this Neapolitan continues to sing like this, he will be talked about all over the world“, the conductor Arturo Toscanini predicted of the young Caruso after one of the tenor’s first performances at La Scala in Milan. He was right. After a triumphant interpretation of The Elixir of Love in February 1901 at La Scala—which earned him two encores—Caruso began touring the world, drawing crowds worldwide. Admired by kings and loved by the people, Caruso is the first singer to sell a million records. Nearly half of his performances were at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where he sang for 18 consecutive seasons beginning in 1903. Caruso represents a “positive image of Naples in the world“, told AFP the Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, who attended the inauguration of the museum.
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Drawing from the archives of opera houses around the world, the Library of Congress and other institutions, the museum presents a small selection of the singer’s costumes, including that of his most famous role, Canio the Clown in Pagliacci. Also featured are excerpts from a silent film Caruso made, his old gramophone, and even watercolors he painted by the seaside. Despite his worldwide success, Caruso maintained a bittersweet relationship with his hometown. A cold reception and poor review following a performance at the Teatro San Carlo in 1901 caused the young singer to swear never to sing in Naples again. He died there in 1921, at the age of 48.