Word: carusos
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Speaking of Caruso and his operatic antics in your Oct. 11 issue, I believe top honors should go to his trickery in a performance of La Bohème. Before the death scene, he removed two of the rollers from the ancient iron bed. . . . Every time the consumptive Mimi (Frances Alda) dared move, the bedstead shuddered, groaned, and gave every sign of collapsing...
...Enrico Caruso remained a highly informal character. Once when Lillian Nordica was about to lift her voice in a love duet with him, he deposited a hot potato in her hand. In Tosca, when Antonio Scotti stooped to pick up the paint brush beneath Cavaradossi's easel, he had to yank at it for minutes-Caruso had nailed it to the floor. Caruso's most celebrated peccadillo led to his arrest on the complaint of a Mrs. Hannah Graham who had run into him at the Central Park Zoo and testified breathlessly: "He insulted me. He brushed against...
...years Enrico Caruso carried on a feud against his native Naples. In 1901, after his early European successes, the Neapolitans hissed him. Caruso vowed he would never sing in Naples again, would visit his home only "to eat a plate of spaghetti." He kept his vow. During World War I he was begged to sing at Naples' San Carlo opera house for a Red Cross benefit. Caruso wrote a check for 50,000 lire, but refused to sing...
...December 1920, while singing L'Elisir d'Amore at the Brooklyn Academy, a blood vessel broke in Caruso's throat. A seasoned trouper, he insisted on going on with the show. While stagehands and fellow singers stood in the wings passing handkerchiefs and towels, he finished the first act though bleeding profusely from the mouth. The audience, noticing that something was wrong, demanded that he stop...
Later, apparently fully recovered, Caruso sang four performances, the last on Christmas Eve. The next day he collapsed. His trouble, diagnosed as acute pleurisy, worsened. He had several operations for abscesses of the lungs. Early in the summer of 1921 he sailed for Naples. There, a few weeks later, in a waterfront hotel room from which he could look out on Mt. Vesuvius, Enrico Caruso died. His body, embalmed and buried for two years, was subsequently disinterred, carried in state through the Naples streets to its final resting place in the Campo Santo di Poggioreale cemetery. For several years thereafter...