La Voce di Enrico Caruso
After more than a century, the greatest tenor voice of all times, Enrico Caruso re-lives through more than four hundred pages of letters written and received by the great artist. This is a most impressive cache of unpublished material produced by Caruso over a period of twenty-four years, ranging from 1897 until just before his death on 2nd of August 1921 in his native city of Naples, Italy. Within the epistolary material there are drawings, caricatures and illustrations by Caruso who was an inspired cartoonist. The material, also consists of various assortments of insurance policies, monetary awards, reimbursements, receipts, bank chits, bank statements, hotel receipts from all over the world and legal documents regarding his trial for ‘disorderly conduct’ of which he was duly acquitted in New York. The letters were mainly correspondence with his first companion, Ada Giachetti who bore him his two sons, Enrico junior and Rodolfo, and with his American wife, Dorothy Benjamin Park who gave birth to his daughter Gloria, but there was also correspondence with eminent contemporaries such as Giacomo Puccini and Guglielmo Marconi. The finding of these interesting documents, is such a treasure trove that it helps in the composition of a final biography of the unapproachable tenor and allows us to acquire as never before a full picture of the most important protagonists of Italian melodrama. The extraordinary documentation was found by the journalist Michele Bovi and writer Pasquale Panella which they used to produce the prize winning best Italian Rai TV documentary of the year 2008 Tg2 Dossier entitled “La Voce di Enrico Caruso” (The Voice of Enrico Caruso).
It starts with the story told directly by the players through their letters; followed by interviews withthe Italians (Ada Giachetti) and Americans (Dorothy Benjamin Park) descendants of Enrico Caruso.
“The Voice of Enrico Caruso” by Michele Bovi and Pasquale Panella, Tg2 Dossier RAI, 22 November 2008. [SUBTITLES IN ENGLISH]
