More than a thousand previously unknown letters, said to have been written by the legendary tenor Enrico Caruso, are to be made available to the public next month, according to a report published on Sunday.
Mystery surrounds the find, which promises to be among the most exciting musicological discoveries of recent years. A Verona lawyer said he was handling the release of the papers for a client who wished to remain anonymous.
”We can say that 1 200 [of the] letters were written by Caruso,” the lawyer, Alberto Franchi, told the newspaper Il Giornale. ”Then there are those to Caruso.”
Altogether, the lawyer said, there were about 2 000 documents, including cheques and other records. Franchi said the letters were due to go on display at an exhibition in Verona from June 17.
His client was an elderly industrialist from northern Italy, who wanted to make the documents, bequeathed to him by his grandfather, publicly available before he died.
How the papers originally came into his grandfather’s possession is unclear. Franchi said he had had the letters examined by handwriting experts who confirmed they were written by the man many consider to be the 20th century’s greatest tenor.
Caruso had a voice of unrivalled power and beauty. He was also the first leading opera singer to embrace the then new technology of gramophone recording and thereby immortalise his contribution to music.
His life was as melodramatic as the plots of some of the operas he sang.
He was born in Naples in 1873, the son of a cleaning woman and a foundry worker. He left school at the age of 10 and some of his early singing was done for a pittance in bars and cafes. The young tenor was offered a fee of 80 lire for his opera debut in 1894, but it was cut to 2 lire because so few people turned up.
Desperate affair
Within a few years he had established a reputation in and around Naples and even performed abroad. In 1897 the conductor Vincenzo Lombardi suggested they should perform together during the summer in the Tuscan port city of Livorno, and it was there that he met the soprano Ada Giachetti, a married woman with a child.
The letters include fresh insights into Caruso’s desperate, 11-year love affair with Giachetti.
”The relationship with Ada was tempestuous in the extreme,” Franchi said. ”She continually betrayed him, yet he loved her madly.”
One of the letters in the collection was written aboard a steam ship that had just left Italy. ”My Ada,” Caruso wrote, ”already, too soon, I feel the lack of you.”
Giachetti left her husband but never married Caruso, for whom she bore two children, Rodolfo and Enrico junior.
The newly discovered correspondence includes letters written by Caruso concerning such everyday matters as the refurbishment of his villa near Siena.
But, said Il Giornale, it also contained deeply personal documents.
In one, Caruso wrote to Giachetti about a performance of Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci in which he sang the role of Canio, the clown who mistakenly believes he has been betrayed by his wife.
I Pagliacci includes one of the best-known scenes in opera — that of the weeping clown 0- and one of the most famous lines, ”Ridi, pagliaccio” (Laugh, clown). Caruso wrote that he cried real tears as he thought of his mistress’s philandering.
Unlike the infidelities of which Canio’s wife, Nedda, was accused, Ada Giachetti’s were entirely real: she was sleeping with Caruso’s chauffeur and eventually ran away with him. The couple then tried to extort money from the singer. Giachetti was put on trial and sentenced to three months in prison.
It was not until 1918 that Caruso found a wife, the American Dorothy Benjamin, who was 20 years his junior. It was she who was with him for the finale in this real-life epic.
After a fiasco at the San Carlo opera house in Naples, after which Caruso was accused of singing like a baritone, he swore never to return to his home city to perform. He was as good as his word.
Sun seeker
But in June 1921, already suffering from the pleurisy that was to kill him, he stepped on to the quayside at Naples and wept as he looked up at the city. After a brief trip to Sorrento he returned to Naples and booked into the Hotel Vesuvio.
Almost every Italian has at some time heard or read his instructions to his young wife: ”Dorothy, fammi portare al sole” (Dorothy, have me taken into the sun).
They were not his last words, though. Those were too pathetically ironic to be fit for a legend: ”Doro, I can’t get my breath.” – Guardian Unlimited Â