Word: caruso
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...swankest of the arts in 18th-Century London was Italian opera. Periwigged courtiers, who could not understand a word of it, raised their lace cuffs to applaud the ornate trilling of swivel-voiced prima donnas. Fashionable composers like Handel had to write their librettos in Italian. The Caruso of the period was the Italian eunuch-Francesco Bernardi Senesino, whose misfortunate voice earned fabulous sums at London's Royal Academy of Music. Lustier London wits like Henry Fielding began poking fun at this artificial art, inveighed against London's "wanton, affected fondness for foreign musick," with its "squeaking recitatives...
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...
Ninety-five per cent of its output consists of the 35? popular discs advocated by President Kapp, and Crooner Crosby sells about 2,000,000 of these a year, a post-Caruso record record...
...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...