Homage by tenor Mark Milhofer with pianist Marco Scolasta.
Enrico Caruso wasn't just a celebrated interpreter of timeless musical masterpieces. Between 1907 and 1919, the great tenor also composed nine songs, now collected in the double CD "Enrico Caruso, His Songs Composed for Him and by Him," released in February. Tenor Mark Milhofer and pianist Marco Scolastra pay tribute to him on the 150th anniversary of his birth.
The recording for Urania Records is the result of extensive research and study of autographs, manuscripts, publications, and historical recordings. The recording of songs written by and for Caruso, some of which were world premieres, took place in the magnificent 16th-century Villa Bellosguardo in Lastra a Signa, which belonged to the tenor, who loved to relax there.
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 around the world. He effortlessly assumed the role of the street urchin in popular songs, as effortlessly as the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto. What is less well known is that he wrote that small group of songs. Caruso sometimes wrote only the melody, sometimes only the lyrics; 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 explained it in a 1912 interview with the New York Times: "Many times, when I'm alone, little ideas come to me, I have the quiet I love, and my thoughts wander alone. The little music arrives. 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 alone 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 orchestrate, 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 (baritone Antonio Pini-Corsi and 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.
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