Bob Wilson

‘Fee exorbitant, forbid you to record,’ was the cable the Gramophone Company sent producer Fred Gaisberg, another gramophone pioneer born in 1873. Guessing that the project would break even, he paid the hefty £100 fee out of his own pocket.

It was money well spent. Over the next 20 years, the Gramophone Company and its American associate Victor would earn over £2 million from Caruso recordings. The repertory that afternoon was mainly contemporary. Caruso’s craft was rooted in Italian bel canto, but it was he who gave the tenor voice the resources demanded by the new musical realists from Verdi to his great admirer Puccini.

Opera is a form of heightened experience or it’s nothing. Caruso’s genius lay in the fact that the power, which held audiences in thrall and took colleagues to new expressive heights, was underwritten by a sovereign technique married to a certain natural discretion. No tearing of a passion to tatters for him.

couple, both Communists, went to Detroit, where Rivera was commissioned by Henry Ford to paint 27 frescoes celebrating the success of his motor industry. Thousands of workers had just been laid off and some of them had been shot dead, on Ford’s orders, during a peaceful protest.

So why did Rivera accept the job? The question is beyond the remit of the documentary. He was then commissioned by Rockefeller, who was, as Rivera’s charming grandson tells us, ‘the reechest man eever existed on earth. Nobody else eever has put so many money in one hand eever. How was possible that he was doing murals to Rockefeller? Being a Communist and work for Rockefeller, if you can think of the worst thing in life eever was Rockefaller.’

Meanwhile, Frida was bored, depressed and tearful.

‘Winter here is the saddest thing,’ she wrote. ‘The sky is the colour of a fly’s wing and the streets are full of melting snow. I’m completely disillusioned with the famous United States. Everything is just for appearances, and underneath it all is nothing but crap.’

When he wasn’t painting, Rivera was shagging other women. Kahlo had a revenge flirtation with Georgia O’Keeffe but her love for her husband, she said, was more important than life itself.

A miscarriage resulted in the painting Henry Ford Hospital, 1932, where she lies naked on a bed with a foetus floating above her like a balloon. ‘It’s as though pain drove her to paint,’ we are told by an expert.

Rivera’s affair with her sister resulted in Kahlo’s painting of herself lying ‘murdered by life’, multiple stab wounds on her naked body. How, when and where were these canvases painted? Who knows.

She died, relatively unknown, aged 47. Will we now be told about the birth of the Kahlo myth; how this spitting wildcat became as tame as a household tabby? No, we won’t.

The searing questions posed at the start of this low-wattage Frida-fest remain overlooked and unanswered. As if her life wasn’t sad enough.

Music

Richard Osborne Caruso Masterclass

It’s 150 years since the birth in a Naples slum on 25th February 1873 of the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso.

His mother’s 18th child, and the first to survive infancy, he would become one of the most famous men of his age.

2023 is a vintage year for remembering singers whose art transcends the familiar ravages of time. Caruso’s friend the mighty bass Chaliapin was born into a Russian peasant family just 12 days before him. And December will bring the centenary of the birth of Maria Callas.

The gramophone helps preserve their work. And it was Caruso who effectively ‘made’ the medium one afternoon in Milan in April 1902.

And the legacy still matters. His recordings were a vade-mecum throughout the careers of his two great latter-day successors, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti. As Austrian tenor Richard Tauber remarked, ‘Caruso’s recordings are the finest lessons any young singer could have.’

And not just tenors. I’m still reeling from Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s fury, expressed over afternoon tea in her home near Zurich in the early 1990s. She was recalling her meeting with a prize-winning young soprano who’d never heard of Caruso, let alone studied the fabled mastery of phrasing, tone colour and the long legato line from which Schwarzkopf herself had learned so much.

True, the legacy was badly compromised in the 1970s by RCA Victor’s artificially ‘improved’ LP transfers. Happily, we now have Naxos’s Complete Caruso Edition, a 12-CD set, painstakingly assembled from original sources by the incomparable Ward Marston, still available for a little over £50 from Naxos Direct.

There are those who think that 1906 to 1910 (volumes 3 to 5 in the Naxos edition) were Caruso’s vintage years. Yet as the voice darkened and life experiences took their toll, so the art deepened. Listen to the oath-swearing duet from Act 2 of Verdi’s Otello recorded with Tita Ruffo in 1914, or Caruso’s matchless account of Macduff’s lament for his slaughtered children in Verdi’s Macbeth recorded in 1916.

And what of those extracts from the last – some say greatest – of his stage recreations: Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Eléazar the tormented goldsmith in Halévy’s La Juive?

Caruso was a gifted actor. Witness Edward José’s 1918 silent film My Cousin – long neglected but now on YouTube. The director’s technical legerdemain allows Caruso to play both the impoverished Neapolitan-born sculptor Tommasso and his cousin, Caroli the celebrity tenor, whose unexpected arrival in New York causes private mayhem.

Until Caruso’s mismanaged final illness, this affable, life-affirming, famously generous man appeared to be a born survivor. He survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which destroyed the Opera House but not the Palace Hotel where Caruso was sleeping. He’d later survive the attentions of a notorious gang of Sicilian extortionists – as well as the allegations of a woman (in cahoots with the arresting officer) who’d triggered a tabloid storm by falsely accusing Caruso of molesting her in the Monkey House in New York Zoo.

What he never got over was the desertion in 1908 of his common-law wife and mother of his two sons, the singer Ada Giachetti. The break-up (in which he was by no means blameless) inspired his deeply affecting song Tiempo antico (Olden Times), which he recorded in 1916.

Popular Italian song was another Caruso speciality, bringing him riches comparable to those of Scotland’s Harry Lauder, a singer he much admired.

Nearly 100 songs were specially written for Caruso, alongside the handful he himself helped create. A selection of these has been made for the two-CD Enrico Caruso: His Songs (Urania LDV14096). It’s an ambitious 150th anniversary compilation, edited, annotated and realised by Italophone English tenor Mark Milhofer with pianist Marco Scolastra – persuasive advocates both, even of those songs Caruso himself recorded.

GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON ROCKERS’ REQUIEM

So far, this year has been a boulevard of broken dreams.

There are, as Eric Clapton would wail, all too many tears in heaven.

Jeff Beck and David Crosby gone within a fortnight of each other, followed by Barrett Strong, probably the best songwriter you’d never heard of. I hadn’t either, till it was announced on the midnight news that the Motown hitmaker who wrote Money, I Heard It Through the Grapevine and Papa Was a Rolling

Stone was now jamming with Beck, Crosby, David Bowie and John Lennon etc etc at the ‘late great’ gig in the sky.

I hope when he knocked on heaven’s door, Barrett got extra St Peter brownie points for writing his biggest hits for others, as Prince did for Sinéad O’Connor (Nothing Compares 2 U). Greater love hath no musician than to lay down his tracks for others to slalom into the rock-and-roll hall of fame. That seems to be the definition of creative generosity.

Anyway, another troubadour has laid down his lute – or, in the case of Jeff Beck, one of the best guitarists of all time, one of his six-string Fender Stratocasters.

‘Twenty twenty-three,’ sighed David Gilmour of Pink Floyd to me. ‘What a brutal year.’

It is. Several greats have already been ‘gathered’.

When those who have given us the soundtrack of our lives die, a little bit of us dies with them, and so far it does look blacker just when – no, thanks very much, Mr Cohen – we don’t want it darker. I feel protective about who is left – Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Rod Stewart, Paul McCartney, Elton – and anxious about who is next.

Last year, we bade farewell to Ronnie Spector, Meat Loaf, Taylor Hawkins, Coolio, Loretta Lynn, Jerry Lee Lewis, Irene Cara and Christine McVie.

Much as I love Fleetwood Mac, arguably the most consequential figure on the Valete list for 2022 was Michael Lang, impresario of the Woodstock festival, which brings us full circle back to David Crosby, and of course Stills and Nash (and Young).

David Crosby expected to be dead when he was ‘about 30’, but instead of joining the famous 27 Club along with Jimi, Janis, Kurt and other doomed youth he made old bones and died aged 81.

Crosby called his debut solo album If Only I Could Remember My Name, in 1971. That’s inclusive both of the fried old hippies who couldn’t remember the ’60s and those who can’t remember anything anyway, which is most of us here.

RIP Jeff Beck, David Crosby, Barrett Strong – we don’t make ’em like that any more.

Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

JULIAN STAIR: ART, DEATH AND THE AFTERLIFE

Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, 18th February to 17th September

Once we had read Proust and Anthony Powell and reordered our gardens during lockdowns and inter-lockdowns, some of us at least made starts on writing the books we had been pondering for ages. Mine, Listening to Dry Paint, on the ways artists have deliberately put sounds into our minds, is due later in the year.

I haven’t yet heard of any painters inspired by the plague but Julian Stair, one of our leading potters, has had a very apposite reaction. He had already been making cinerary pots (the archaeological term; otherwise known as funerary urns) since 2012. But he concluded that more

Clockwise from left: African memorial figure; Cycladic winged ‘bud’ form; male memorial figure from Abeokuta; Stair’s Figural jars; Japanese pot with face on rim was needed in response to the pandemic: ‘I don’t think the victims of the pandemic, let alone the survivors, have received appropriate recognition.’

As part of his preliminary research, he went to a Death Café. Death Cafés aren’t covens or conventions of horror film fans. According to Su Hines, the Norwich organiser, they are ‘informal spaces where people come together and talk about death over tea and cake with a view to helping us all make the most of our finite lives. The conversations are always very stimulating and also life affirming.’

The exhibition of about 30 urns ranges down from life-size, some of which contain human ashes, to ‘embodied’ pots which have ash mixed into the clay. It’s more than a response to the pandemic since not all the participants, so to speak, died of COVID.

Where he has an image of the deceased, Stair has tried to infuse their pot with something of their character, and the images and biographical details will be included in the display. The four largest urns are reminiscent of wrapped mummies, or perhaps large chess kings and queens. Studio pots are among the most tactile of all works of art, and these should have a quite extraordinary charge.

Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury were among Stair’s early collectors, and the centre holds 18 of his pots. As well as the urns, there are ancient, Cycladic, marble figures, and anthropomorphic vessels from Ecuador, Nigeria and Japan. Drawings by Alberto Giacometti have been chosen from the centre’s collection by the artist to ‘create a poetic and moving meditation on the human condition’.

After the exhibition, the urns will either be returned to their families or friends or become part of the Sainsbury Centre collection.