The Writing of Caruso

This is the story of a song, and I have not done a post like this before. 

I discovered Amira about two years ago, and she has been a beacon of light for me into a whole new world of classical singing, and more recently old songs from classical cinema. 

About a year ago I heard Amira in a radio interview asked if she kept up on the other young musicians, and if there was anyone she especially liked. And she named Jonathan Antoine. I never would have heard of him had I not heard Amira's referral. 

It was in turn through Antoine that I first heard the song Caruso. When I first heard Antoine singing this song, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard by a male voice. I even bought the album. Amira also performed this song more recently, and her soprano version is fabulous, but the copyright holder restricts it from YouTube so I cannot embed it here 

Nonetheless, my interest grew in the song until I began to learn the story of its writing. It is an extremely unusual and moving story, both strange and mysterious. I don't even know how to classify the song. Here is a short encapsulation of the story. 

Enrico Caruso was an Italian opera singer in the late 19th and early 20th century. He soon lost favor with opera houses in Italy, but then found an admiring audience still in America. And it was in America that he recorded the first operatic recordings ever done, some from as early as 1902. Caruso had a troubled life, having many affairs with married women, some of whom he even had children with, and these all naturally ended badly.

Growing ill he found himself in a hotel on a beach in Italy near the end of his life. He was with his last love of his life, a woman 20 years his junior. Caruso died in Italy in 1921 at the age of 48, remembered as one of the greatest tenors of all time, before the arrival of Pavarotti.

And then he was largely forgotten. 

Now I must begin the story of another man, for it is where their stories intersect that our real story begins. 

Lucio Dalla was an Italian jazz singer born long after Caruso's death, but raised on stories of him and his music. One summer he came to stay in a hotel on the beach in the coastal town of Sorrento in Italy. There he learned that the room he checked into was used by Enrico Caruso and his last lover shortly before his death. And the staff at the hotel even filled him with memories of him there and the things he did. 

Dalla himself had a troubled career, and never quite had success, partly due to his messy bohemian appearance and the experimental nature of his music. But in the hotel, he became inspired to write a song about Caruso, written as if by Caruso to his young love on his deathbed. The song is extremely moving and captures life's joys and sorrows, incorporating both love and death. 

To hear Dalla sing the song himself is to hear its real mystique and oddness. This is a music video with Dalla himself singing the song 'Caruso' in 2009. Dalla died 3 years after this recording.

 

Notice in the above music video at the end Dalla backs away from the microphone as his voice continues to be heard singing, and he walks off stage right. It is as if he knew he was leaving something great for the world that would live on long after his death. And now I wish you to hear Pavoratti sing the song after Dalla's death, with English subtitles.

 

There is nothing to add after that.

English Translation

Here, where the sea shines and where the wind howls,

on the old terrace infront of the Gulf of Sorrento,

a man embraces a girl after she has cried

then he clears his voice and continues the song:

I love you very much,

very, very much, you know

it is a chain by now

that melts the blood inside the veins, you know

He saw the lights in the middle of the sea, thought of the nights there in America,

but they were only the fishermens lamps and the white wake of a propeller (stern)

He felt the pain in the music and got up from the piano,

but when he saw the moon emerging from a cloud

also the death seemed sweeter to him.

He looked in girls eyes, those eyes as green as the sea,

then suddenly a tear fell and he believed he was drowning.

I love you very much,

very, very much, you know,

it is a chain by now

that melts the blood inside the vein you know

The power of lyric, where every drama is fake

with a little make-up and with mime you can become someone else.

But two eyes that look at you so close and real

makes you to forget the words and confuse the thoughts

So everything became small, even the nights in America

You turn and you see your life like a wake of a propeller (stern)

Yeah, it's life that ends, but he didn't think too much about it

on the opposite, he felt already happy and began again to sing

I love you very much

very very much, you know

it's become a chain

that melts the blood inside the veins, you know