Caruso nella storia della vocalità

The history of Opera is intimately related to the vocal styles of its performers, which have seen countless variations over the centuries. The Baroque period of the 18th century was centered upon the hedonistic virtuosity of the Castrati, and musicians composed their works expressly for these extraordinary singers with their feminized voices, the only true divas for theater audiences. As the new aesthetic of Classicism emerged, composers such as Christoph Gluck and W.A. Mozart and, in Italy, primarily Gioacchino Rossini, changed the more virile tenor role into the tenore contraltino and later, as Romanticism began, the baritenor. This trend contributed to the formation of a new period called the Belcanto, during which renowned singers such as Isabella Colbran, Giuditta Pasta, and Maria Malibran were popular, along with important male pioneers such as Giovan Battista Rubini and Domenico Donzelli, whose singing talent inspired composers when writing their own works.
The 19th century saw a rise in popularity of the romantic/lyric tenor, represented first by the French tenor Gilbert Duprez, the first to employ the operatic high-C from the chest, for whom Gaetano Donizetti composed Lucia di Lammermoor, and later Napoleone Moriani, who was known as «the tenor of the beautiful death». In the years of Verdi, the roles were inverted, in that it was no longer the vocal performer’s singing style to influence the composer, but the opposite: there was no longer any single or absolute point of reference for the tenor range. At the dawn of the Decadent movement, a return to the past was to be seen, with a style of singing called neobelcantismo. This was the style that Enrico Caruso challenged and reversed, using his instincts as an artist as he fearlessly interpreted and performed for his own era, embracing a new movement called Verismo (naturalism). It should be noted that four of the five musketeers of the giovane scuola were southern Italians who studied in Naples: Ruggero Leoncavallo, Umberto Giordano, Francesco Cilea, and Franco Alfano, and there was a fundamental quality they shared in their music which was that of the very Neapolitan Caruso. Indeed, Caruso’s style proved to be a leading influence, and the ‘natural’ way that he sang was, and continued to be, the characteristic sound of tenors during the entire 20th century.
The extraordinary fame of the tenor, who was celebrated in 2021 on the 100th anniversary of his death, is also due to the fact that he was the first to transform Thomas Edison’s “Talking Machine” into a “Singing Machine” from which the entire music industry was born. In 1910, his recording of «Vesti la giubba» from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci sold millions of copies. It was thanks to Caruso that music emerged from the small and privileged spaces of the theater and concert halls and entered the private homes of the general public.