Homage by tenor Mark Milhofer with pianist Marco Scolasta.
Enrico Caruso was not only a famous interpreter of immortal musical masterpieces. Between 1907 and 1919, the great tenor was also the author of nine songs now collected in the double CD 'Enrico Caruso, His Songs composed for him and by him' to be released in February, with which tenor Mark Milhofer and pianist Marco Scolastra pay homage to him 150 years after his birth.
The recording for the Urania Records label is the result of a long research and study of autographs, manuscripts, publications and historical recordings. The recording of the songs written by Caruso and for him, some of which were world premieres, took place in the magnificent sixteenth-century villa Bellosguardo in Lastra a Signa, which belonged to the tenor who loved to rest here.
A symbol of Italianness and bel canto, Enrico Caruso (Naples, February 25, 1873 – August 2, 1921) moved from the stages of the Neapolitan province to the most prestigious opera houses in the world and, with the same naturalness with which he plays the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto, he knew how to wear the clothes of the scugnizzo of popular songs. What is less known is, in fact, that he was the author of that small group of songs. Caruso sometimes wrote only the melody, sometimes only the words, in one case (Tiempo antico, 1912) he wrote both.
For the harmonization he then relied on his collaborators (Riccardo Barthelemy, Alfredo Sarmiento, Vincenzo Bellezza). He himself told it in 1912 in an interview with the New York Times: “Many times when I am alone, little ideas come to me, I have the quiet I love, and my thoughts wander alone. The little music comes. Alone in the quiet I hear it. Ah, but I don't know how to write the notes! I only know how to sing and play them. I don't understand the technique of writing music.”
For this reason, he explained that he would ask his Parisian friend Barthelemy for help or summon his other friend Max Van Praag to the Knickerbocker Hotel in New York, where he stayed when he had shows in the Big Apple. “I sing the little song that came to me by itself in the quiet, and he writes it down. Or maybe I go to the piano and finger it for him – just the tune. I don’t know how to do the orchestration, no.
But I can make the melody, in the quiet that I love.” Along with Caruso’s nine songs, the double CD includes a wide selection of pieces written especially for him by friends (Tosti, Tirindelli, Buzzi-Peccia) and colleagues (the baritone Antonio Pini-Corsi and the conductor Leopoldo Mugnone), admirers (Josephine Uterhart, Natalie Townsend, Mary Helen Brown and Ariadne Holmes Edwards) and even Luis Mendoza Lopez, his prompter when he sang in Mexico. The lyrics are mostly in Italian, with songs also in French, English, Spanish and Neapolitan.
Article published on 20 February 2023 - 18:00
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