I only judge beauty.And this is pure beauty.PURE BEAUTY!
By he way,mt grandparents,whom lsitened t him in lots of opportubities,used to say he could sing in the three tessiture,,,....so,nthing new under the sun
...anytime I can hear the great man, in a more tonally accurate voice, it is a rare gift..perhaps a hundred years from now, technology can make his voice sound like it is alive today.....
The pitch of this recording has been lowered several tones from the original, this is way it's much more baritone-like. This is not to say that he couldn't sing with a baritone color. He was a tenor through and through and like all great voices could sing in various ranges and colorations.
Thank you so much for your work and your gift to us. We owe you so much. I have waited all my life to hear the real Caruso. I thought that I would have to wait until I got to Heaven (if I get there). Now, I don't have to wait.
I also must say this , I think, this study is very important for opera world. Thanks lincolncar1 for this. This is nearly same of Caruso's voice in my mind. Beatiful . Thank you again...
But also I must said, the characteristic of his voice(not the vocal organ), I think, is tenor. Also the reflexes are ultimately tenor's. Look at Mario Del Monaco. He has also very dark and baritonal voice. I can say that he had bass-baritones material (vocal organ). However, with proper work he carried his passagio to E-F region from D-D#. We couldn't say Caruso or MDM or Vinay ( once sang Grand Inquisitor) are not tenor. They are all tenor with proper tenor characteristics and reflexes...
@GermanOperaSinger like i said in my recent post, in my oppinion, the voice characterization shouldn't made according to passagio, range etc.There are many opera singer existed ,exists and will exist sing different from his or her nature. Like bassos singing as tenors.Contraltos singing Coloratura soprano or tenors singing baritone etc.Passagio , scientificly, can be always carried to higher notes with proper work (Bastianini) . However the passagio never goes to lower notes after the ages28-32.
I've recently read the book "Caruso's Method of Voice Production ..." by Prof. Pasqual Mario Marafioti. Prof. Marafioti made many observations on Caruso's vocal organ and says his vocal cords have a regular baritone characteristics and dimensions and also he has nothing extraordinary in his organ. But he says his range is extraordinary like from the basso's Low F to High C-D region. However this is not an unusual thing, look at Vladimir Galouzine, used to be a bass-baritone.
@onaykk Marafioti maintains that Caruso had unusually thick vocal cords for a tenor voice. This makes perfect sense to me. They were not long cords as in a baritone or bass voice, just thickened, which gave his timbre a dark sonorous hue to it, while disadvantaging the larynx for extreme top notes, because the necessary thinning out of the cords to facillitate high notes was more difficult than with thinnish cords, like Bjorling's or Lauri-Volpi's for example. 80 cigarettes a day didn't help!
I think your research is correct. Caruso was probably more a baritone than a tenor (often struggling with the high notes).
But for me as a layman, knowing very little about singing, it isn't so important. What communicates to me is his empathy. He pours out his heart - as in this terrific restoration. How did you "recreate" this magic? Obviously it's not the original orchestra. - You dont have to reveal your secret, but this is the greatest version/restoration I've ever heard!
John McCormack told the great accompanist Gerald Moore that if he had never heard Enrico Caruso, then he did not know the sound of a tenor voice. This come directly from Moore's wonderful book "Am I Too Loud?"
I would love to hear what his voice would sound like on one of the higher Tenor pieces, after this process is done to clean it up. Caruso was more a high baritone then a Tenor. Tenor's who use their high C often usually can sing up to a high D or Eb in full belt. That makes the High C usable on a regular basis. Caruso was probably just a high baritone whose high B was his usable top note, but the C is there. It's just his very Top. Caruso didn't use his High C when he didn't have to.
No he was a tenor. Why would he sing tenor if he was only a high baritone? Leonard Warren was a high baritone and could vocalize up to high C 'in the shower'. It's about passagio location, not darkness or weight of the voice. Caruso like. all other tenors had a passagio at F, F#. Baritones do not.
Listen to him sing 'celeste aida' and you will see what I mean. His passagio is at F/F#. A baritone's passagio would be at D/D#. Caruso had a rich warm and thick spinto voice with a baritonal quality to it. It doesn't mean he was a baritone. Plenty of spinto and dramatic tenors sound baritonal. It doesn't mean they were baritones. Some like Vinay were true borderline tenors who could/and did sing in both registers. But Caruso was not one of those. He was clearly a tenor.
Haha well all verdi baritones should be able TO VOCALIZE up to around high C. What was special about Warren was that his high C was PERFORMANCE QUALITY, so I bet he could vocalize a step or step and a half higher.
@leadoffeohippus Any baritone that can sing a high C of performance quality, is truly a heavy tenor voice living safely. True, there are many tenors past & present, who don't possess a live high C. (Tauber & Domingo) for example, don't even possess it in the recording studio, but they did at least endure the higher tessitura of tenor, rather than hiding away in the baritone fach.
@VincentRicciardi It isn't the extreme notes which determine the catagory in which a singing voice belongs, but the tessitura in which it is most comfortable. Tauber & De Lucia had a top of just Bb, but no one would suggest that either were baritones! Similarly, I had the bottom C of the basso profundo to the high Bb above tenor high C, but I'm neither a bass nor a castrato! - Have you heard Caruso's high C# in the Cujus animam?
@freirant In Magiche note he hit the high C sharp in falsetto, but in Cujus Animam he used head voice. The note had a very different quality & vibrato, & was perfectly connected to his chest voice, descending without any break or change in quality, which would not have been possible from falsetto. Magiche Note is the only record in which he used falsetto.
You have to give Zucker credit he's got a real pair of balls to allow his capon like bleats to be heard while trashing Caruso's lack of nuance. This from a man who seemed to have nothing but good words for Corelli!!!! Give me a break all ready. Caruso had the same basic range as Domingo (before he became a baritone) being lower b-flat to top B. The overtones are there in the old recordings which fully covered the tenor range. Try Bernardo DeMuro for overtones.!!!!
I agree. What I did with Caruso recordings was to carefully sound clean and noticed vibrations in the recordings that corresponded with the lower regions of his voice. I digitally changed the pitch of his lower voice till there was a match to the pitch of the vibrations. Spent the last 2 years trying to prove my research wrong but couldn't. Then I learned Caruso was a baritone or near baritone and concluded my research must be at worst really close to how he sounded.
Excellent restoration work, lincolncar. I've heard it said that the frequency limitations of the acoustic recording horn were between 300 hertz & 3000 hertz, which would damp out almost all of the lower partials that give richness to the lower voice, & all the upper partials of the high notes that give the voice squillo & ring. When you listen to Caruso's A's & B naturals, you can hear they are diamond hard & blazing with squillo overtones, but the horn damps them all out! Great job!
Not sure what the "Zucker" comments refer to but I am sure I read that caruso was not booed in Naples for this performance. In fact I recall that Gatti Cazzara stated that this was the performance that Toscanini said "if this neapolitan continues to sing like this he will have the whole world talking about him." He was compelled by the audience to give him an encore although he disliked the practice and almost gave him a second encore.
The best existing recordings are by RCA in "The Complete Caruso---including---the original victor talking machine co. master recordings," or in short: "The Complete Caruso." There, they are noise free, properly handled, for RCA owned all the yet existing metal master disks/molds. They even bought out other companies to get them, whom Caruso had sung for previously. Caruso was RCAs life line, their golden goose. (This Zucker, by the way was born in 1949; and his opinions quoted, are wrong.)
If you listen carefully, to a highly compressed and a carefully "noise cleaned" recording. Harmonics, partials & overtone were recorded on to those old disks. It's important to equalize the recordings properly first, which is a very big job.
'Restoring' Carusos voice would be an admirable aim if it were possible. Certainly, no small resources have been put forward in that quest. Sadly, it will never be possible. Recordings of his singing have been placed in echo chambers to try to capture his harmonics, partials, volume & overtones. But since they were never captured in the first place by the primitive recording apparatus, you can never reproduce that which was absent in the original.
''What I deplore is not Caruso's voice, which was sonically opulent,'' he said, ''but that he had relatively little musical nuance and variety of dynamics. In short, Caruso lacked musical imagination.''
''We must ask why Caruso was booed when singing 'L'Elisir d'Amore' at Naples in 1901,'' Mr. Zucker said. ''It was because the audience thought he had forsaken nuance and delicacy. And they were right.''
I don't believe that. There were singers like De Lucia, Bonci and others that did an exagerated amount of fiorituras and cadenzas some of them of dubiuos taste. Caruso did not sing that way and it did not agree with what the audience in Naples was used to hear.
I'm not certain if you are disputing if he was booed off of the stage at San Carlo, but he indeed was. Caruso never again returned to Napule to sing after that.
It's unclear about the fach of Caruso, IMO. We can hear at the beginning a sweet lyric- full lyric tenor, that is certain. As he matured and his technique developed he found access to a darker sound (which was natural to begin with.) I don't think that Caruso though of himself as anything but a Tenor.
@Nello7 I'm disputing that there is question on whether Caruso was a tenor or not. Caruso smoked regularly which surely contributed to his "darkening" sound. In addition, recording technology was atrocious back then. I feel that he was a great tenor nonetheless, regardless of what fach he was classified as.
@Nello7 Thanks for your response. I am not certain if you can accurately make the argument about smoking being a contributing factor to the darkening in his voice. I would love to see any scientific evidence that supports that. He smoked clean tobacco which did not have the same impact on health as today's. I think that technique and age were significant factors in his darker qualities. In terms of recording quality, it was subpar, but Caruso's technique was unhindered as witnessed here!
@lincolncar1 I don't know if you've heard Caruso's recording's of Una Furtiva Lagrima, but those recording's make Zucker out to be a liar if I've ever heard one in this instance.
@lincolncar1 Stefan who ? What the hell would he know about Voice, the most confused vocal timbre I have ever heard...and thats spoken voice.......what because he did some interviews....wow. Stefan wash your mouth with soap before you speak about Caruso. Grazie lincolncar1 ....I really enjoyed this...remastering...the sound is seducingly natural...you can hear his particular colonna sonora equalised within a common place among all vowels..very special. Still the king of kings!!!
Здорово спасибо
NatashaGordienkoFan 3 days ago
I only judge beauty.And this is pure beauty.PURE BEAUTY!
By he way,mt grandparents,whom lsitened t him in lots of opportubities,used to say he could sing in the three tessiture,,,....so,nthing new under the sun
Ankhsnammon 2 months ago
...anytime I can hear the great man, in a more tonally accurate voice, it is a rare gift..perhaps a hundred years from now, technology can make his voice sound like it is alive today.....
valdengo1 3 months ago
THE ICON..
jcab2323 3 months ago
Caruso was booed because he didn't pass out free tickets to those who thought that they were suppose to get them!
CD122344 5 months ago
you should make more of therse remasterd recordings of the great caruso
poirot594 8 months ago 2
The pitch of this recording has been lowered several tones from the original, this is way it's much more baritone-like. This is not to say that he couldn't sing with a baritone color. He was a tenor through and through and like all great voices could sing in various ranges and colorations.
fbsv 1 year ago 4
Thank you so much for your work and your gift to us. We owe you so much. I have waited all my life to hear the real Caruso. I thought that I would have to wait until I got to Heaven (if I get there). Now, I don't have to wait.
BostonRimini 1 year ago
I also must say this , I think, this study is very important for opera world. Thanks lincolncar1 for this. This is nearly same of Caruso's voice in my mind. Beatiful . Thank you again...
onaykk 1 year ago
But also I must said, the characteristic of his voice(not the vocal organ), I think, is tenor. Also the reflexes are ultimately tenor's. Look at Mario Del Monaco. He has also very dark and baritonal voice. I can say that he had bass-baritones material (vocal organ). However, with proper work he carried his passagio to E-F region from D-D#. We couldn't say Caruso or MDM or Vinay ( once sang Grand Inquisitor) are not tenor. They are all tenor with proper tenor characteristics and reflexes...
onaykk 1 year ago
@GermanOperaSinger like i said in my recent post, in my oppinion, the voice characterization shouldn't made according to passagio, range etc.There are many opera singer existed ,exists and will exist sing different from his or her nature. Like bassos singing as tenors.Contraltos singing Coloratura soprano or tenors singing baritone etc.Passagio , scientificly, can be always carried to higher notes with proper work (Bastianini) . However the passagio never goes to lower notes after the ages28-32.
onaykk 1 year ago
I've recently read the book "Caruso's Method of Voice Production ..." by Prof. Pasqual Mario Marafioti. Prof. Marafioti made many observations on Caruso's vocal organ and says his vocal cords have a regular baritone characteristics and dimensions and also he has nothing extraordinary in his organ. But he says his range is extraordinary like from the basso's Low F to High C-D region. However this is not an unusual thing, look at Vladimir Galouzine, used to be a bass-baritone.
onaykk 1 year ago
@onaykk Marafioti maintains that Caruso had unusually thick vocal cords for a tenor voice. This makes perfect sense to me. They were not long cords as in a baritone or bass voice, just thickened, which gave his timbre a dark sonorous hue to it, while disadvantaging the larynx for extreme top notes, because the necessary thinning out of the cords to facillitate high notes was more difficult than with thinnish cords, like Bjorling's or Lauri-Volpi's for example. 80 cigarettes a day didn't help!
hiyadroogs 1 year ago
I think your research is correct. Caruso was probably more a baritone than a tenor (often struggling with the high notes).
But for me as a layman, knowing very little about singing, it isn't so important. What communicates to me is his empathy. He pours out his heart - as in this terrific restoration. How did you "recreate" this magic? Obviously it's not the original orchestra. - You dont have to reveal your secret, but this is the greatest version/restoration I've ever heard!
tomfroekjaer 1 year ago 3
John McCormack told the great accompanist Gerald Moore that if he had never heard Enrico Caruso, then he did not know the sound of a tenor voice. This come directly from Moore's wonderful book "Am I Too Loud?"
goodboybuddy1 2 years ago
Simply amazing voice! Like a river, deep, wide, shimmering, live and beautiful...
gkopij 2 years ago
This is amazing and gives such validity to the real be canto schools of singing. What an amazing job. Way better than the "complete recordings"!
cjschne2 2 years ago
I would love to hear what his voice would sound like on one of the higher Tenor pieces, after this process is done to clean it up. Caruso was more a high baritone then a Tenor. Tenor's who use their high C often usually can sing up to a high D or Eb in full belt. That makes the High C usable on a regular basis. Caruso was probably just a high baritone whose high B was his usable top note, but the C is there. It's just his very Top. Caruso didn't use his High C when he didn't have to.
VincentRicciardi 2 years ago
No he was a tenor. Why would he sing tenor if he was only a high baritone? Leonard Warren was a high baritone and could vocalize up to high C 'in the shower'. It's about passagio location, not darkness or weight of the voice. Caruso like. all other tenors had a passagio at F, F#. Baritones do not.
GermanOperaSinger 2 years ago
Listen to him sing 'celeste aida' and you will see what I mean. His passagio is at F/F#. A baritone's passagio would be at D/D#. Caruso had a rich warm and thick spinto voice with a baritonal quality to it. It doesn't mean he was a baritone. Plenty of spinto and dramatic tenors sound baritonal. It doesn't mean they were baritones. Some like Vinay were true borderline tenors who could/and did sing in both registers. But Caruso was not one of those. He was clearly a tenor.
GermanOperaSinger 2 years ago
@GermanOperaSinger I agree with you, Caruso was a tenor.
seektheforce 1 year ago
Haha well all verdi baritones should be able TO VOCALIZE up to around high C. What was special about Warren was that his high C was PERFORMANCE QUALITY, so I bet he could vocalize a step or step and a half higher.
leadoffeohippus 2 years ago
@leadoffeohippus Any baritone that can sing a high C of performance quality, is truly a heavy tenor voice living safely. True, there are many tenors past & present, who don't possess a live high C. (Tauber & Domingo) for example, don't even possess it in the recording studio, but they did at least endure the higher tessitura of tenor, rather than hiding away in the baritone fach.
hiyadroogs 1 year ago
@VincentRicciardi It isn't the extreme notes which determine the catagory in which a singing voice belongs, but the tessitura in which it is most comfortable. Tauber & De Lucia had a top of just Bb, but no one would suggest that either were baritones! Similarly, I had the bottom C of the basso profundo to the high Bb above tenor high C, but I'm neither a bass nor a castrato! - Have you heard Caruso's high C# in the Cujus animam?
hiyadroogs 1 year ago
Yes I have heard Caruso hit the High C in Cujus Animan........falsetto.
freirant 1 year ago
@freirant In Magiche note he hit the high C sharp in falsetto, but in Cujus Animam he used head voice. The note had a very different quality & vibrato, & was perfectly connected to his chest voice, descending without any break or change in quality, which would not have been possible from falsetto. Magiche Note is the only record in which he used falsetto.
hiyadroogs 1 year ago
You have to give Zucker credit he's got a real pair of balls to allow his capon like bleats to be heard while trashing Caruso's lack of nuance. This from a man who seemed to have nothing but good words for Corelli!!!! Give me a break all ready. Caruso had the same basic range as Domingo (before he became a baritone) being lower b-flat to top B. The overtones are there in the old recordings which fully covered the tenor range. Try Bernardo DeMuro for overtones.!!!!
gaytenor 2 years ago
oops. Didn't mean to diss your comment.
cjschne2 2 years ago
I agree. What I did with Caruso recordings was to carefully sound clean and noticed vibrations in the recordings that corresponded with the lower regions of his voice. I digitally changed the pitch of his lower voice till there was a match to the pitch of the vibrations. Spent the last 2 years trying to prove my research wrong but couldn't. Then I learned Caruso was a baritone or near baritone and concluded my research must be at worst really close to how he sounded.
lincolncar1 3 years ago
Excellent restoration work, lincolncar. I've heard it said that the frequency limitations of the acoustic recording horn were between 300 hertz & 3000 hertz, which would damp out almost all of the lower partials that give richness to the lower voice, & all the upper partials of the high notes that give the voice squillo & ring. When you listen to Caruso's A's & B naturals, you can hear they are diamond hard & blazing with squillo overtones, but the horn damps them all out! Great job!
hiyadroogs 2 years ago
@lincolncar1 If you listen to his Che gelida manina, he's obviously a tenor...
seektheforce 1 year ago
This sound nothing like his other other recordings its hard to believe he sounded like this.
OperaBaritoneJoe 3 years ago
Not sure what the "Zucker" comments refer to but I am sure I read that caruso was not booed in Naples for this performance. In fact I recall that Gatti Cazzara stated that this was the performance that Toscanini said "if this neapolitan continues to sing like this he will have the whole world talking about him." He was compelled by the audience to give him an encore although he disliked the practice and almost gave him a second encore.
smemr 3 years ago
"The Complete Caruso." does have some record noise. The thing I like least about those recordings is the fact that they are so compressed.
lincolncar1 3 years ago
The best existing recordings are by RCA in "The Complete Caruso---including---the original victor talking machine co. master recordings," or in short: "The Complete Caruso." There, they are noise free, properly handled, for RCA owned all the yet existing metal master disks/molds. They even bought out other companies to get them, whom Caruso had sung for previously. Caruso was RCAs life line, their golden goose. (This Zucker, by the way was born in 1949; and his opinions quoted, are wrong.)
idiotnumber8 3 years ago
If you listen carefully, to a highly compressed and a carefully "noise cleaned" recording. Harmonics, partials & overtone were recorded on to those old disks. It's important to equalize the recordings properly first, which is a very big job.
lincolncar1 3 years ago
'Restoring' Carusos voice would be an admirable aim if it were possible. Certainly, no small resources have been put forward in that quest. Sadly, it will never be possible. Recordings of his singing have been placed in echo chambers to try to capture his harmonics, partials, volume & overtones. But since they were never captured in the first place by the primitive recording apparatus, you can never reproduce that which was absent in the original.
hiyadroogs 3 years ago
I've been working on this Caruso restoration research since 1964. I dedicate this work to my Dad in heaven, who was an opera trained tenor, himself.
lincolncar1 3 years ago
Stefan Zucker never heard Caruso restored.
lincolncar1 3 years ago
Stefan Zucker:
''What I deplore is not Caruso's voice, which was sonically opulent,'' he said, ''but that he had relatively little musical nuance and variety of dynamics. In short, Caruso lacked musical imagination.''
''We must ask why Caruso was booed when singing 'L'Elisir d'Amore' at Naples in 1901,'' Mr. Zucker said. ''It was because the audience thought he had forsaken nuance and delicacy. And they were right.''
lincolncar1 3 years ago
I don't believe that. There were singers like De Lucia, Bonci and others that did an exagerated amount of fiorituras and cadenzas some of them of dubiuos taste. Caruso did not sing that way and it did not agree with what the audience in Naples was used to hear.
freirant 1 year ago
@lincolncar1 booed off the stage? Caruso was absolutely a tenor, but a dramatic tenor. Like Del Monaco, which is where the confusion lies.
seektheforce 1 year ago 4
@seektheforce
I'm not certain if you are disputing if he was booed off of the stage at San Carlo, but he indeed was. Caruso never again returned to Napule to sing after that.
It's unclear about the fach of Caruso, IMO. We can hear at the beginning a sweet lyric- full lyric tenor, that is certain. As he matured and his technique developed he found access to a darker sound (which was natural to begin with.) I don't think that Caruso though of himself as anything but a Tenor.
Nello7 6 months ago
@Nello7 I'm disputing that there is question on whether Caruso was a tenor or not. Caruso smoked regularly which surely contributed to his "darkening" sound. In addition, recording technology was atrocious back then. I feel that he was a great tenor nonetheless, regardless of what fach he was classified as.
seektheforce 6 months ago
@Nello7 Thanks for your response. I am not certain if you can accurately make the argument about smoking being a contributing factor to the darkening in his voice. I would love to see any scientific evidence that supports that. He smoked clean tobacco which did not have the same impact on health as today's. I think that technique and age were significant factors in his darker qualities. In terms of recording quality, it was subpar, but Caruso's technique was unhindered as witnessed here!
Nello7 6 months ago
@lincolncar1 I don't know if you've heard Caruso's recording's of Una Furtiva Lagrima, but those recording's make Zucker out to be a liar if I've ever heard one in this instance.
seektheforce 6 months ago
@lincolncar1 Stefan who ? What the hell would he know about Voice, the most confused vocal timbre I have ever heard...and thats spoken voice.......what because he did some interviews....wow. Stefan wash your mouth with soap before you speak about Caruso. Grazie lincolncar1 ....I really enjoyed this...remastering...the sound is seducingly natural...you can hear his particular colonna sonora equalised within a common place among all vowels..very special. Still the king of kings!!!
kingcorelli 6 months ago