Italian opera singer Enrico Caruso is the world’s first ever international recording star.
Born in 1873, he sang professionally from the age of 22 until a year before his death at age 48 in 1921.
Caruso’s career included 863 appearances at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House.
Thanks largely to his tremendously popular phonograph records, Caruso was one of the most famous entertainment personalities prior to the Jazz Age of The Roaring 20s (1918-1929).
He was one of the very first examples of a global media celebrity superstar.
Beyond records, Caruso’s name became familiar to millions around the world through newspapers, books, magazines, and the new media technology of the 20th century: cinema, telephone and the telegraph.
Caruso’s fame was not only attributed to his voice and musicianship but also his enthusiastic embrace of commercial sound recording, then in its infancy.
Many opera singers of Caruso’s time rejected the phonograph record, or gramophone, due to the low fidelity and poor sound quality of the early discs.
Others, however, exploited the new technology once they became aware of the financial returns Caruso was reaping from his initial recording sessions.
Caruso made more than 260 extant recordings in America for the Victor Talking Machine Company (later RCA Victor) from 1904 to 1920, earning millions of dollars in royalties from the retail sales of these records.
He was also heard live from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1910 when he participated in the first ever public radio broadcast to be transmitted in the United States.
While Caruso sang at such venues as La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London, the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, and the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, he appeared most often at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, where he was the leading tenor for 18 consecutive seasons.