Enrico Caruso (25 February 1873 – 2 August 1921) was an Italian tenor opera singer who performed at famous opera houses in Europe and the Americas. He sang many different types of roles, ranging from lyric to dramatic. He is widely known as the first international recording star and created about 250 recordings that were sold to the public between 1902 and 1920.

Biography

Enrico Caruso was born in Naples, Italy, on February 25, 1873, at 7 Via Santi Giovanni e Paolo. He was baptized the next day at the nearby Church of San Giovanni e Paolo. His parents originally came from Piedimonte d'Alife, now called Piedimonte Matese, in the Province of Caserta, Campania, Southern Italy.

Caruso was the third of seven children, and only three of them lived to be adults. For many years, people believed Caruso’s parents had 21 children, 18 of whom died as infants. However, research by historians, including family friend Guido D’Onofrio, and biographers Pierre Key, Francis Robinson, Enrico Caruso Jr., and Andrew Farkas, showed this was not true. Caruso and his brother Giovanni may have shared this story, and his wife Dorothy also included it in her 1945 book about him. She quoted Caruso saying his mother had 21 children, 20 boys and one girl, and he was the nineteenth boy.

The Caruso family was poor but not extremely poor. His father, Marcellino, worked as a mechanic and foundry worker. He wanted Enrico to follow the same trade, so at age 11, Enrico was apprenticed to an engineer who built public water fountains. Later, he worked with his father at the Meuricoffre factory in Naples. His mother insisted he attend school, where he learned to write neatly and studied technical drawing. He also sang in a church choir, and his voice showed promise for a music career.

Caruso’s mother encouraged his musical dreams until she died in 1888. To help his family, he sang on the streets of Naples and performed at cafes and parties. In 1894, his singing career was interrupted by 45 days of required military service, which his brother Giovanni completed for him. After returning from the army, Caruso continued his vocal training.

On March 15, 1895, at age 22, Caruso made his professional stage debut at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples in the opera L’Amico Francesco by Mario Morelli. He performed in other opera houses and studied with Vincenzo Lombardi, who helped improve his high notes and singing style. Other singers trained by Lombardi included Antonio Scotti, Pasquale Amato, and Fernando De Lucia, who later performed with Caruso.

Money was scarce for young Caruso. A photo from 1896 shows him wearing a bedspread like a toga because his only dress shirt was being cleaned.

In the late 1800s, Caruso performed in many Italian theaters until 1900, when he signed a contract to sing at La Scala in Milan. His La Scala debut was on December 26, 1900, in La bohème by Giacomo Puccini. He also performed in Monte Carlo, Warsaw, Buenos Aires, and for the Tsar of Russia at the Mariinsky Theatre and Bolshoi Theatre.

Caruso first created the role of Federico in L’arlesiana by Francesco Cilea in 1897, then Loris in Fedora by Umberto Giordano in 1898. He later created the role of Maurizio in Adriana Lecouvreur by Cilea in 1902. Puccini considered casting Caruso in Tosca but chose a more experienced singer instead. Caruso later performed the role and Puccini said he sang it better.

In February 1901, Caruso participated in a concert at La Scala organized by Arturo Toscanini to honor Giuseppe Verdi. Other singers at the concert included Francesco Tamagno and Giuseppe Borgatti. In December 1901, Caruso’s performance at Naples’ San Carlo Opera House was poorly received, and he vowed never to sing there again. He said, “I will never return to Naples to sing; only to eat spaghetti.” In March 1902, Caruso performed his final series of shows at La Scala, including the premiere of Germania by Alberto Franchetti.

In April 1902, Caruso signed a contract with the British Gramophone Company to record his first songs in Milan for 100 pounds. His recordings became popular and helped spread his fame. He later performed at London’s Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and made his successful debut there in Rigoletto as the Duke of Mantua. He sang with Nellie Melba, a famous soprano, who praised his voice but said he was less skilled than another tenor, Jean de Reszke.

On November 23, 1903, Caruso made his debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. His contract was arranged by his agent, Pasquale Simonelli. He performed in Rigoletto with Marcella Sembrich as Gilda. Later, he signed with the Victor Talking Machine Company and made his first American recordings in Carnegie Hall in 1904. His recordings and performances supported each other until his death in 1921.

In 1904, Caruso bought a villa near Florence called Villa Bellosguardo, where he relaxed away from his busy career. In New York, he stayed at the Knickerbocker Hotel. He also had a 24-carat gold medal made by Tiffany & Co. with his image and gave it to Simonelli as a thank-you for his work.

In addition to his New York performances, Caruso sang in opera and gave concerts in other places.

Voice and technique

Mario Marafioti, Caruso's personal doctor and voice expert, explains Caruso's singing style and techniques in detail in his book, Caruso's Method of Voice Production. The book was published soon after Caruso passed away.

Marafioti claims that singing can be learned using a method based on science. He calls Caruso's approach "natural" but believes it can be taught. He describes singing as "speaking in musical rhythm" and advises singers to focus on improving their speaking voice, clear pronunciation, and strong, clear sound.

Historical and musical significance

Enrico Caruso’s career, which began in 1895 and ended in 1920, included 863 performances with the New York Metropolitan Opera (both at the Met and during tours) before his death in 1921 at the age of 48. His fame grew largely because of his popular phonograph records, making him one of the most well-known entertainers of his time. His popularity has continued into the present day. Caruso was among the first people to become famous worldwide through media. His name became known to millions around the world through newspapers, books, magazines, and new technologies of the 20th century, such as movies, telephones, and telegraphs.

Caruso frequently performed with the Metropolitan Opera company and sometimes gave solo performances. He also sang in opera productions across Europe, North America, and South America. He worked with Edward Bernays, a well-known promoter, during Bernays’ time as a press agent in the United States. Beverly Sills, a later opera singer, said in an interview: “I was able to become famous with television, radio, and other media. The fact that Caruso became famous without these tools is amazing.”

Writers about Caruso, including Pierre Key, Bruno Zirato, and Stanley Jackson, say his fame came not only from his singing talent but also from his good business skills and his willingness to use commercial sound recordings, a new technology at the time. Many opera singers of his era avoided phonographs, calling them toys or novelties. Others, like Adelina Patti, Francesco Tamagno, and Nellie Melba, began using the technology after seeing Caruso earn money from his early recordings.

From 1904 to 1920, Caruso made over 260 recordings that still exist today for the Victor Talking Machine Company (later known as RCA Victor). He and his family earned millions of dollars from the sales of these records. In 1910, he was heard live on the radio during the first public radio broadcast in the United States.

Caruso appeared in two movies. In 1918, he played two roles in the American silent film My Cousin, which was fully restored in July 2021. This film showed him singing the aria Vesti la giubba from the opera Pagliacci. The next year, he played a character named Cosimo in another film, The Splendid Romance. The film’s producer, Jesse Lasky, paid Caruso $100,000 (about $2.14 million in 2025) for each film. However, My Cousin did not do well at the movies, and The Splendid Romance was never released in the United States. Some short, informal videos of Caruso offstage have been saved in old newsreels.

Caruso performed at famous venues such as La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London, the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. He performed most often at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, where he was the lead tenor for 18 years in a row. At the Met, in 1910, he first performed the role of Dick Johnson in Giacomo Puccini’s opera La fanciulla del West.

Caruso’s voice could reach high D-flat at its strongest. As he aged, his voice became stronger and more powerful. At times, his voice had a deep, almost baritone sound. He sang many different types of roles, including lyric, spinto, and dramatic parts, in Italian and French operas. In German operas, he sang only two roles: Assad in Karl Goldmark’s The Queen of Sheba and Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin. He performed both roles in Italian in Buenos Aires in 1899 and 1901, respectively.

Honors and recognitions

Throughout his life, Enrico Caruso received many awards, honors, and special recognitions from kings, governments, and various cultural groups in the countries and cities where he performed. He also received Italian knighthoods. In 1917, he became an honorary member of the Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, a national music fraternity, through its Alpha chapter at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Dorothy Caruso noted that a special award given to him in 1918, "Honorary Captain of the New York Police Force," was more meaningful to him than any other honor he received. In 1960, Caruso was awarded a star at 6625 Hollywood Boulevard on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to the recording industry. In 1987, he was posthumously honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. On February 27 of that same year, the United States Postal Service released a 22-cent stamp featuring his image in his honor. In 2012, Caruso was inducted into Gramophone's Hall of Fame.

Repertoire

Enrico Caruso mostly performed Italian operas, with a few roles in French operas. He also sang two German operas, Wagner’s Lohengrin and Goldmark’s Die Königin von Saba, but he sang these in Italian early in his career. Below is a list of Caruso’s first performances of each opera he sang on stage, in the order they happened. World premieres are marked with **.

• L’amico Francesco (Morelli) – Teatro Nuovo, Napoli, 15 March 1895 (debut) **
• Faust – Caserta, 28 March 1895
• Cavalleria rusticana – Caserta, April 1895
• Camoens (Musoni) – Caserta, May 1895
• Rigoletto – Napoli, 21 July 1895
• La traviata – Napoli, 25 August 1895
• Lucia di Lammermoor – Cairo, 30 October 1895
• La Gioconda – Cairo, 9 November 1895
• Manon Lescaut – Cairo, 15 November 1895
• I Capuleti e i Montecchi – Napoli, 7 December 1895
• Malia (Francesco Paolo Frontini) – Trapani, 21 March 1896
• La sonnambula – Trapani, 25 March 1896
• Mariedda (Gianni Bucceri) – Napoli, 23 June 1896
• I puritani – Salerno, 10 September 1896
• La Favorita – Salerno, 22 November 1896
• A San Francisco (Sebastiani) – Salerno, 23 November 1896
• Carmen – Salerno, 6 December 1896

• Un Dramma in vendemmia (Fornari) – Napoli, 1 February 1897
• Celeste (Marengo) – Napoli, 6 March 1897 **
• Il Profeta Velato (Napolitano) – Salerno, 8 April 1897
• La bohème – Livorno, 14 August 1897
• La Navarrese – Milano, 3 November 1897
• Il Voto (Giordano) – Milano, 10 November 1897 **
• L’arlesiana – Milano, 27 November 1897 **
• Pagliacci – Milano, 31 December 1897
• La bohème (Leoncavallo) – Genova, 20 January 1898
• The Pearl Fishers – Genova, 3 February 1898
• Hedda (Leborne) – Milano, 2 April 1898 **
• Mefistofele – Fiume, 4 March 1898
• Sapho (Massenet) – Trento, 3 June (?) 1898
• Fedora – Milano, 17 November 1898 **
• Iris – Buenos Aires, 22 June 1899
• La regina di Saba (Goldmark) – Buenos Aires, 4 July 1899
• Yupanki (Berutti) – Buenos Aires, 25 July 1899 **
• Aida – St. Petersburg, 3 January 1900
• Un ballo in maschera – St. Petersburg, 11 January 1900
• Maria di Rohan – St. Petersburg, 2 March 1900

• Manon – Buenos Aires, 28 July 1900
• Tosca – Treviso, 23 October 1900
• Le maschere (Mascagni) – Milano, 17 January 1901 **
• L’elisir d’amore – Milano, 17 February 1901
• Lohengrin – Buenos Aires, 7 July 1901
• Germania – Milano, 11 March 1902 **
• Don Giovanni – London, 19 July 1902
• Adriana Lecouvreur – Milano, 6 November 1902 **
• Lucrezia Borgia – Lisbon, 10 March 1903
• Les Huguenots – New York, 3 February 1905
• Martha – New York, 9 February 1906
• Madama Butterfly – London, 26 May 1906
• L’Africana – New York, 11 January 1907
• Andrea Chénier – London, 20 July 1907
• Il trovatore – New York, 26 February 1908
• Armide – New York, 14 November 1910
• La fanciulla del West – New York, 10 December 1910 **
• Julien – New York, 26 December 1914
• Samson et Dalila – New York, 24 November 1916
• Lodoletta – Buenos Aires, 29 July 1917
• Le prophète – New York, 7 February 1918
• L’amore dei tre re – New York, 14 March 1918
• La forza del destino – New York, 15 November 1918
• La Juive – New York, 22 November 1919

Caruso also performed over 500 songs. These included classical music, traditional Italian songs, and popular tunes from his time. A few of these songs were in English, such as George M. Cohan’s “Over There,” Henry Geehl’s “For You Alone,” and Arthur Sullivan’s “The Lost Chord.”

Recorded legacy

Enrico Caruso died in 1921, before electrical recording technology was developed in 1925. All of his recordings were made using an old method called the acoustic process. This method required singers to sing into a metal horn or funnel. The sound was then transferred directly onto a wax disc using a small tool called a stylus. This method did not capture all the sounds and details in a singer’s voice. Caruso’s 12-inch records could only play for about four and a half minutes. Because of this, most of the operatic songs he recorded were limited to this length or were edited to fit. Sometimes, longer songs were released on two or more sides of a record.

Caruso is widely recognized as the first major recording star in the music industry. He had a voice that was described as strong and powerful but also sweet and musical. His recordings and the disc phonograph (called a gramophone in the United Kingdom) helped promote each other during the first two decades of the 20th century. Caruso earned more money from his record sales than from performing in operas. Between 1902 and 1921, his record royalties totaled over two million dollars, which would be about $36 million today. Many of his recordings have been available for sale since they were first released over 100 years ago. All of his surviving recordings, including some that were not released for a long time, have been remastered and reissued multiple times. Although some full opera recordings were made in the early 1900s, Caruso never recorded an entire opera. However, he did record parts of Gounod’s Faust with a group of famous singers for Victor Records.

Caruso’s first recordings were arranged by Fred Gaisberg, a recording pioneer. These recordings were made in Milan in April, November, and December 1902 for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company, which later became EMI Records. In April 1903, he made seven more recordings in Milan for the Anglo-Italian Commerce Company (AICC), which were released on discs with the Zonophone label. Three additional recordings were made in October 1903 and released by Pathé Records on both cylinders and discs. In February 1904, Caruso recorded for the first time in the United States for the Victor Talking Machine Company. After one final recording for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company in April 1904, he only recorded for Victor. His American recordings were made in Victor’s studios in New York and Camden, New Jersey. Some of his later recordings were made in Victor’s Trinity Church studio in Camden, which was chosen for its excellent acoustics and ability to hold large musical groups. His first Victor recordings in 1904 were made in Room 826, a small vocal studio in Carnegie Hall in New York. The first songs recorded were “Questa o quella” and “La donna è mobile” from Verdi’s Rigoletto. His final recording session took place on September 16, 1920, in Camden, where he sang “Domine Deus” and “Crucifixus” from Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle.

Caruso’s earliest Victor recordings of operatic arias from 1904 and 1905, like his earlier recordings in Milan, were all accompanied by piano. Starting in February 1906, orchestral accompaniments became the standard, using groups of 11 to 20 musicians. The regular conductors for these sessions were Walter B. Rogers and, from 1916, Josef Pasternack. Beginning in 1932, RCA Victor in the United States and EMI (His Master’s Voice) in the United Kingdom reissued some of Caruso’s records with the original accompaniment combined with a larger orchestra recorded using electrical methods. Earlier attempts by Victor in 1927 to use this method were not well received. Although some critics praised these reissued recordings when they were first released in the 1930s, they are now mostly forgotten or disliked by collectors. In 1947, RCA Victor began reissuing Caruso’s recordings on 78-rpm discs made of red vinylite instead of the usual shellac. In 1950, RCA Victor started making long-playing records (LPs) and added electronic effects like reverb, bass, and treble to Caruso’s recordings to make them sound fuller. RCA Victor released its first Caruso LP collections in 1951, with many of these also released on the new 45-rpm format introduced in 1949. In 1956, RCA Victor released a limited edition 3-LP anthology in a special album with an illustrated booklet. By 1959, more than half of Caruso’s recordings had been reissued on LPs. Additional collections of previously unavailable recordings were released by RCA Victor throughout the 1960s. In 1973, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Caruso’s birth, RCA Victor released a 4-record boxed set containing his remaining recordings not previously transferred to LP, including some previously unpublished songs. In Italy, RCA Italiana released a 12-LP boxed set containing most of Caruso’s Victor recordings.

In the 1970s, Thomas G. Stockham of the University of Utah developed the “Soundstream” computer process to remaster Caruso’s recordings for RCA. This early digital method aimed to reduce unwanted sounds, distortion, and noise common in older recordings. Some critics later claimed that the process only adjusted the balance of bass and treble. In 1976, RCA released an LP collection of sixteen of Caruso’s most popular opera arias using the Soundstream process. From 1978 to 1985, RCA issued The Complete Caruso LP series, which included Soundstream remastered recordings. After the introduction of the compact disc in the early 1980s, RCA never completed The Complete Caruso series on LP, and some of Caruso’s European and 1904–05 Victor recordings were never remastered using the Soundstream process. RCA released its first Caruso compact disc, a collection of 21 operatic arias, in 1987. In 1990, RCA Victor issued The Complete Caruso boxed set on 12 CDs. This set was reissued again in 2004 and a third time in 2017. Other complete sets of Caruso’s recordings were released on CD by the Pearl label and Naxos between 2000 and 2004. These sets were remastered by Ward Marston, a well-known audio engineer. In 1993, Pearl released a two-CD collection focusing on RCA and EMI’s electrically overdubbed versions of some of Caruso’s original recordings.