Home > The Great Caruso Summary & Study Guide

• Study Guide
• Group

The Great Caruso (Magill Book Reviews)

No question that Enrico Caruso was great. Among discriminating critics of an earlier generation, who had heard notable singers of the nineteenth century--from Giovanni Rubini to Italo Campanini--the verdict was nearly unanimous: Caruso’s voice was richer, his musicianship more thorough. Phonograph records, ranging from the tinny acoustical to the dry electrical records of the artist’s era, amply demonstrate today that Caruso surpassed his contemporaries, Alessandro Bonci and Giovanni Martinelli. His successors, Beniamino Gigli, Jussi Bjorling, and lesser contemporary claimants, have always been compared against the high standards of Caruso’s art. Michael Scott points out that the tenor not only set these standards, he also changed the popular taste in operatic singing from the high-vibrato style of his time to an open-voiced bel canto technique that, at its best, requires sonority, great breath control, and flexibility. How Caruso impressed his listeners can best be judged when, in 1895, as a yet-uncelebrated singer of twenty-four years of age, he sang for Giacomo Puccini. The composer exclaimed, “Who sent you? God?” In meticulous detail, Scott reviews Caruso’s career, citing the musical reviews from wherever the artist traveled, from his beginnings in a Naples slum to his presence in elegant opera houses throughout most of the Western world. During this time, opera critics tended to judge not only the technical qualities of an artist’s performance but also, in full-blown rhetoric (unlike modern musical reviewers), the audience’s reaction. Even if a reader of Scott’s biography has little musical training, he can enjoy the flavor of these reviews.

For all of its pleasures, one aspect of Scott’s work is disappointing. One learns very little about the actual life of this extraordinary man. One learns little or nothing about the artist’s relationship with his longtime mistress, Ada Ciachetti, or with his children, or with his American wife. Only a brief quoted remark helps the reader understand what kind of tension Caruso must have endured to sustain his powerful voice: “I strain myself to keep my voice from sounding strained. It is only after the hardest training that a man can regulate his voice so that it always sounds easy and natural.” To maintain this discipline, Caruso destroyed his health. When he died at age forty-seven, he looked, according to Scott, “as if he were nearer sixty.” To understand the man behind the voice, the reader must wait for another biography--a true life-story--that will probe the psychology of this artist, nearly as remarkable a human being as he was great on the operatic stage.

See Also