Word: caruso
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During the first quarter of the century records had their first boom. Disc-fans of that period paid the late Enrico Caruso alone some $3,000,000 in record royalties. What they paid for was a croaking shadow of Caruso's ringing voice. But in the days of hand-cranked Victrolas, even shadows were marvels of scientific progress. When the radio arrived in the early 20s, Victor Talking Machine Co., with Caruso as its biggest name, was doing more than half the industry's business to the tune of more than $50,000,000 annually...
...record (standard prices had previously ranged from 75? to $2). Signing up big names in the popular field (biggest: Crooner Bing Crosby-see p. 50), Decca put this contention to the test, and sales began to skyrocket. Today, the five-year-old Decca concern, with Crosby as its Caruso, stands second only to RCA Victor, with an estimated annual gross...
...little worn at the edges," eh? It may interest TIME to know that in spite of supercilious critics there are thousands of music lovers and many big-league critics who rate Martinelli as the greatest of all tenors [TIME, July 3]. Caruso was never the "undisputed" supreme among the "chandelier-jigglers" either. Caruso's voice, though thrilling, certainly, was something like a trip hammer, and eventually busted his neck...
Like sopranos, unlike basses and baritones, tenor voices go to seed early. When golden-voiced Enrico Caruso died at 48, he had passed his prime. Jean de Reszke and gut-busting Francesco Tamagno retired at 51. But not yet retired is Giovanni Martinelli, 53, robust, white-mopped tenor who made his debut at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera the year before the War. Never the undisputed best of the Metropolitan's chandelier-jigglers, Martinelli has been a dependable artist in an enormous repertory (57 roles). In two operas, Verdi's Otello and Halevy's La Juive, critics...
...ways & means of this extraordinary group are best exemplified by Eddie Bernays, a swart, jittery nephew of Sigmund Freud (a fact of which he is inordinately proud). He began his career as a newshawk, then as pressagent for Enrico Caruso. Now he likes to consider himself a "priest to Big Business" and he ministers only at a high retainer. Procter & Gamble is said to pay him $25,000 a year...