ENRICO IN THE JUNGLE: Reflections on Caruso and the Film Fitzcarraldo
When Enrico Caruso made his Metropolitan Opera debut on November 23, 1903 as the Duke in Verdi’s Rigoletto opposite Marcella Sembrich as his Gilda, American audiences marveled on first hearing the rich tones of the unknown tenor resonating in the opening bars of the opera’s beloved Quartet. Let’s begin our journey deep into the Amazon rain forest and Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo with that very same Quartet in the 1908 Victor recording, with Caruso joined by Sembrich, Severina, and Scotti (from the Library of Congress):
Playbill announcing Caruso's first performance at the Met. From The Sembrich Collection. Click to view full image
Here’s how visionary German film director Werner Herzog describes the inspiration for his 1982 film Fitzcarraldo:
Werner Herzog on location in the Amazon for the filming of Fitzcarraldo.
A vision had seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that had sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunter gives up trying to calm him. It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong.
This passage is taken from Herzog’s 2004 book on the making of his film, entitled Conquest of the Useless, recollections that the filmmaker defines as “inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle.”
Described by film critic Roger Ebert as “one of the great visions of the cinema,” Fitzcarraldo portrays an opera-loving madman obsessed by his mission in life: to become rich, to build an opera house in the jungle and to hire Caruso to sing in it.
The film is derived from the historic events of Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald and his real-life feat of transporting a disassembled steamboat over the Isthmus of Fitzcarrald.
The making of the film was as audacious and bold a venture as Fitzcarraldo’s own quest to build an opera house in the Amazon. The ill-fated production has become the stuff of legend in the annals of filmdom, its troubled history chronicled uncompromisingly in the highly-acclaimed feature documentary, Burden of Dreams. The following video from Fandor also takes on the trials of the film-in-progress, in a succinct and entertaining way:
Barrymore Laurence Scherer. Click to enalrge
At the heart of Fitzcarraldo is the voice of Enrico Caruso. After all, it wasn’t merely an opera house in the Amazon that Fitzcarraldo was looking to build, but an opera house “for Caruso to sing in.” This factor caused us to ponder:
What is it about the magnetism and allure of Caruso that has potential to drive Fitzcarraldo--- and (one might argue) filmmaker Werner Herzog himself---to the very brink of madness?
We put this question to Barrymore Laurence Scherer, classical music and fine-art critic for the Wall Street Journal and frequent guest lecturer at The Sembrich. Barrymore directed us to his wonderful book, Bravo! A Guide to Opera for the Perplexed, specifically to an essay on Caruso which he graciously allowed us to excerpt here, accompanied by Caruso-related images from The Sembrich Collection and one of the great tenor’s legendary recordings:
Enrico Caruso (1873-1921) went from the slums of Naples to supremacy in the operatic world on the strength and beauty of his matchless voice. And this was no mean accomplishment in an era that boasted other Italian tenors such as Alessandro Bonci and Giovanni Martinelli, as well as non-Italians like Dmitry Smirnov, Leo Slezak, and Edmond Clément. They were all famous, but with the exception of the Irishman John McCormack, Caruso alone was the operatic icon familiar even to those who knew little or nothing of opera or classical music in general.
Caruso in Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots, 1905. From The Sembrich Collection. Click to enlarge.
For nearly two decades, starting in 1903, Caruso was the chief ornament of both New York’s Metropolitan Opera and the Victor Talking Machine Company in Camden, New Jersey. Because that voice was providentially suited to the requirements of the acoustical recording horn, he was one of the earliest musicians to develop a symbiotic relationship with the budding record industry. When he made his first recordings for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company of London in 1902, the phonograph was still regarded as something of a toy—those typewriters were a stopgap in case the gramophones didn’t pan out. But the compelling quality of Caruso’s initial discs helped legitimize the phonograph as a serious musical medium.
Moreover, in the days before radio, the single-sided Victor Red Seals made Caruso’s voice familiar even to those who lived well off the route of his personal tours. And because people everywhere bought Caruso’s recordings of arias, Italian canzoni, and a surprising number of popular American songs, the originals have survived in countless attics and basements. Hence, more than seventy years after his death Caruso’s name is still a household word, and the sound of his voice still makes your pulse quicken.
To call that voice “beautiful” scarcely does it justice. In his most famous recording, the 1907 “Vesti la giubba” (Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci), it not only rings with a clarion brilliance but with a heartbreaking pathos. Yet even in its most anguished moments, Caruso’s Canio never overdoes the tearjerking, for no matter how heated the emotional content of the music, Caruso always sang like a gentleman:
Caruso as Canio in Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. 1910. From The Sembrich Collection. Click to enlarge.
Caruso was not only blessed with the right voice to take center stage in the opera world of his time, he also had the looks and personality of a leading figure. By looks, one doesn’t mean those of a matinee idol. But his dark, expressive eyes, bulbous nose, and ready smile lent vitality and distinction to a large, open face that was easily remembered. In addition, despite his humble Neapolitan roots, Caruso was endowed with an innate dignity, reflected in the many photographs of him in stage costume. He also acquired a polished sense of style. After his best friend and fellow Neapolitan, Scotti, brought Caruso to his London tailor, the tenor learned to wear his beautifully cut suits, his suedetopped shoes and fine hats with an easy elegance. From his thirties on, Caruso always presented an image of fashionable affluence without ostentation…
Caruso as Rodolfo in Puccini's La Boheme, 1907. From The Sembrich Collection. Click to enlarge.
…But aside from the pictorial images and written memories, what lives today is Caruso’s voice, tragically silenced by his early death. He was only forty-eight when he died in great suffering in a sweltering Naples hotel room. Popular opinion has often attributed his death to cancer, but Michael Scott’s thoroughly researched biography The Great Caruso (1988) makes it clear that he died of a resistant infection that was abetted by medical incompetence, and by the wear and tear of Caruso’s own career, until it overwhelmed and poisoned his constitution.
The news of his death was received like a thunderclap. And the response was equivalent. When Giuseppe Verdi had died twenty years earlier all Italy draped itself in mourning, and at his final internment the official procession included members of the Italian royal family. However, it seemed that not just Italy but the whole world mourned Caruso’s passing, and at the tenor’s funeral the king himself opened the church doors…
Had Caruso lived out his full threescore and ten, he might have gone on singing into the 1930’s. Quite possibly he would have made a few sound films, which would have given us the chance to see him in action as well as hear him. (McCormack, Martinelli, and certainly Beniamino Gigli all made feature films and shorts in the ‘30s, and Caruso himself did make two silent films, the first, a comedy, failing so badly in the theaters that the second was never released.)
Yet electrical recording and even film might well have captured the decline of his powers, as it did McCormack’s. Furthermore, had Caruso lived into the flapper age and beyond, his historical identity would have been somewhat dissipated. The fact that Caruso died when he did has only strengthened his position in the public mind. “They Needed a Songbird in Heaven (So God Took Caruso Away)” was the bathetic title of a Tin Pan Alley commentary. But however morbid or mawkish, such a perception proves how Caruso’s tragic end, like that of Rudolph Valentino, has etched his memory that much more vividly upon ours.
Caruso began his career while Verdi was still alive, yet he predeceased Puccini, his elder by two decades. Caruso’s America spanned only three presidencies, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson - his seasons at Covent Garden were within the reigns of only two English kings---Edward VII and the first half of George V’s. Therefore, Caruso has come to symbolize almost all that was best about a distant operatic era that we like to consider “golden”---a sumptuous musical age, generously endowed and vastly appealing. Yet such is the immediacy of his singing that the Chicago Tribune music critic Claudia Cassidy could write many years after his death, “Caruso is as urgent in communication as if he had closed the door of a room, not of life.” And therein lies the secret of his immortality.
© Barrymore Laurence Scherer, excerpt from Bravo! A Guide to Opera for the Perplexed.
Enrico Caruso, 1910. From the National Portrait Gallery, London.
When news of Caruso’s death reached Sembrich on Lake Placid in August of 1921, she replied: “I feel as though I’ve lost a member of my own family.” Tiffany loving cup inscribed to Marcella Sembrich from Enrico Caruso. From The Sembrich Collection.
Enrico Caruso---so beautifully profiled in Barrymore Scherer’s essay---served as the primary source of inspiration for Fitzcarraldo. Yet two other musical names figure prominently in the film as well, composers Giuseppe Verdi and Vincenzo Bellini. For more information on this aspect of Fitzcarraldo, we turned to OperaWire, a website founded by brothers David and Francisco Salazar.
Francisco and David Salazar (in the forefront), co-founders of OperaWire, at a meet-and-greet with soprano Anna Netrebko (center). Click to enlarge.
“In the three-plus years since my brother and I created OperaWire, our goal has always been to illuminate audiences about opera all around the world,” wrote David Salazar in a recent email, “Giving a voice to both the best-known names in the industry, as well as providing a platform for those who don't normally have one.”
OperaWire includes a series called Opera Meets Film, a feature dedicated to exploring the ways in which opera has been employed in film. The series includes an article on Fitzcarraldo which details the significance of the opera scenes by Verdi and Bellini that frame the film. David generously offered to share the article with us through this link to his site:
OperaWire - How Opera Meets Film: Fitzcarraldo
Additional articles from this excellent series can be accessed through this link:
Miniature lobby card from the Anchor Bay DVD. Click to enlarge.
Opera, by its scope and very nature, is a form that inspires a certain amount of extravagance---and the singers who bring the form to life on the stages of the world, deservedly, earn the accolades of a devoted following. But the level of obsession displayed by filmmaker Werner Herzog in bringing the voice of Enrico Caruso to the jungle in his celluloid epic, Fitzcarraldo, reached unprecedented heights.
For those interested in screening Fitzcarraldo, you can watch it free on Amazon with commercial interruptions:
To view Burden of Dreams, the documentary on the making of Fitzcarraldo:
In closing, we want to express our sincere thanks to our longtime friend, Barrymore Laurence Scherer--- and to our new friends, David and Francisco Salazar from OperaWire---for their generous contributions to this post.
Until next time,
Richard Wargo
Artistic Director