p>Caruso: “Lasciati amar”; “Les rameaux”; “Cuius animam”; “Addio alla madre”; and others.
Enrico Caruso, tenor; Titta Ruffo, baritone; Victor Orchestra; various conductors.
Naxos 8.110729. Recorded 1913–14, New York. Transfers from original shellac. CD.
There’s a moment in the duet from Otello—track fourteen on this Naxos release—where Caruso and Titta Ruffo lock together in something that transcends the scratchy surface noise, the feeble orchestra, the cramped acoustic of a New York studio in 1913. You forget the technology entirely. That’s the test, really, and these recordings pass it more often than you might expect.
Naxos continues its invaluable complete Caruso edition with vol. 8, covering sessions from 1913 and 1914—the tenor at roughly forty, his voice fully settled into its dark, barrel-chested maturity yet still capable of those upwardly extended C-sharps that made conductors and colleagues alike go slightly slack-jawed.
The program is eclectic, to put it mildly. Neapolitan songs, French sacred music, Spanish zarzuela excerpts, operatic arias—all squeezed into three to five minutes apiece, the tyranny of the ten-inch shellac disc imposing its own peculiar dramaturgy on everything. Singers who worked under these conditions had to compress, recalibrate, and sometimes sacrifice the long architectural phrase for something more concentrated. Caruso understood this instinctively.
Leoncavallo’s “Lasciati amar” opens the disc, and the portamento is—well, excessive is the word. Modern ears will flinch. But strip away the historical strangeness and what remains is a line of extraordinary suppleness, the breath control alone enough to silence skeptics.
The two recordings of Fauré’s “Les rameaux” make for a fascinating comparison. The first was released only in Europe; the second pressed for both markets. Subtle differences in phrasing, in the weight Caruso gives certain syllables—the second version marginally more expansive, as though he trusted the microphone slightly more the second time around. Or perhaps he was simply having a better afternoon. We’ll never know.
Rossini’s “Cuius animam” from the Stabat Mater is magnificent. The tessitura sits high and stays there, and Caruso navigates it without a trace of strain—the tone remaining round and centered where lesser tenors begin to thin out and sharpen. And Mascagni’s “Addio alla madre” from Cavalleria rusticana—brief as it is—carries real emotional weight, the voice darkening perceptibly on the lower phrases.
But back to that Otello excerpt. Ruffo’s baritone was one of the great natural phenomena of the age—massive, slightly dangerous-sounding, almost too much voice for any room. Against him, Caruso doesn’t recede. He pushes back. The duet builds to an intensity that the recording equipment can barely contain, and the result is one of those moments that justifies the whole enterprise of historical recording preservation.
The Victor Orchestra sounds, as it always does on these early discs, like musicians playing behind a closed door in an adjacent building. This is simply the condition of the thing. The transfers here are clean—surface noise rarely intrudes to the point of distraction—and Naxos’s restoration work strikes the right balance between reducing crackle and preserving presence.
Decisive verdict: essential for anyone who cares about the history of singing, and revelatory for those who don’t yet know why they should.
