David Suisman
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| Enrico Caruso |
David Suisman on the life of Enrico Caruso and the first celebrity trial of the 20th century @ The Believer.
At a key moment in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982), the title character (played by Klaus Kinski) pacifies a murderous tribe of South American Indians by playing Enrico Caruso records on a portable phonograph mounted on his riverboat. Set in the early twentieth century, the story centers on Fitzcarraldo’s monomaniacal drive to build an opera house in the jungle and have Caruso sing there on opening night. Over the course of the film, both the phonograph and the tenor’s voice act as awesome, transcultural forces, capable of enchanting hostile natives and “civilized” Europeans alike. More than any other vocalist of his era, Caruso enjoyed a reputation for commanding a voice that approached mythical levels of greatness.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Enrico Caruso (1873–1921) was the best-known singer in the world—both an internationally renowned performer and the standard-bearer of the young international phonograph industry. He embodied, in fact, a new kind of public figure, one whose celebrity grew out of the emerging culture industries and circulated through the modern mass media. But Caruso’s stature as a celebrity depended on his charisma as much as his voice. After working with him, Edward Bernays, the pioneering public relations consultant, described Caruso’s star power in his 1965 autobiography. Caruso, he recalled, was like “a sun god” whose “light obliterated his surroundings,” and for those who came in contact with him, Bernays quipped, the experience was “gilt by association.” The pun was ironic: in addition to his groundbreaking fame, Caruso was the subject of the first celebrity trial of the twentieth century.
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