Enrico Caruso (February 24, 1873 – August 2, 1921) was an Italian opera tenor of tremendous international renown and a key pioneer in the field of recorded music.

Caruso's enormous record sales and extraordinary voice, celebrated for its beauty, power and unequalled richness of tone, made him the number-one male operatic star of his era. Such was his influence on singing style, virtually all subsequent Italian and Spanish tenors (and most non-Mediterranean tenors, too) have been his heirs to a greater or lesser extent.

His musical career spanned the years 1895 to 1920 but was cut short by a serious illness which eventually killed him at the age of 48. He remains famous while few other early 20th century opera performers are still remembered by the general public. In the 21st century, many people might think of this as a remarkable achievement in itself because unlike modern-day singers, he did not have access to a sophisticated marketing and communications industry with the capacity to publicise his attainments instantly and globally via the media. (He did, however, become a client of Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, during the latter's tenure as a press agent in the United States.)^[1]

Biographers ^[2][3] generally attribute Caruso's global success (in addition to the unique quality of his voice) to his sharp business sense, and to his enthusiastic use of cutting-edge technology for its time—commercial sound recording. Many opera singers of an older generation than Caruso's had rejected the phonograph (or gramophone) due to various factors such as the low fidelity of early discs, and their voices have been lost to us as a result. Other veteran opera singers of the first magnitude, such asAdelina Patti, Francesco Tamagno and Nellie Melba, accepted the new technology after seeing the swift financial profits generated by Caruso's initial recordings.^[4]

Caruso made more than 260 extant recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company (later RCA Victor) over an 18-year period and earned millions of dollars from the sale of the resulting 78-rpm discs. These discs, recorded from 1902 to 1920, chart the development of Caruso's voice from that of a lyric tenor, to that of a spinto tenor, to that of a fully-fledged dramatic tenor with a potent, almost baritonal timbre. Caruso's vocal range extended up to High C in its prime.

There is a visual record of Caruso, too. He appears in a number of newsreels, a short experimental film made by Thomas Edison, and two commercial motion pictures. For Edison in 1911, he played Edgardo, with the bass singer Pol Plancon as Raimondo, in a filmed scene fromLucia di Lammermoor. In 1919, he acted in a dual role in the silent movie, My [Italian] Cousin, for Paramount Pictures. This movie included a sequence showing him on stage singing the aria "Vesti la giubba" from Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci. The following year Caruso appeared as a character called Cosimo in another movie, The Splendid Romance. Producer Jesse Lasky paid Caruso $100,000 to appear in these two romantic comedies but they both flopped at the box office.

While Caruso sang at most of the world's foremost opera houses, including La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, inLondon and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, he is best known for being the leading tenor of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City for 17 consecutive years. His total Met appearances exceeded 800.

Both Caruso's vocal technique and his virile style of singing were without precedent. They combined like no other the best aspects of the 19th-century tradition of elegant bel canto vocalism with the ardent delivery and big, exciting tenor sound demanded by 20th century composers ofverismo opera such as Puccini, Leoncavallo, Mascagni and Giordano. Regarded as a good and attentive musician by his colleagues, he was able to invest his interpretations with an exceptional degree of emotional force without becoming lachrymose or 'hammy'. Judging by contemporary reviews of his Met performances he was an enthusiastic and sincere actor, too, if not always a terribly subtle one.