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Enrico Caruso () (February 25, 1873 – August 2, 1921) was an Italian tenor. He sang to great acclaim at the major opera houses of Europe and North and South America, appearing in a wide variety of roles from the Italian and French repertoires that ranged from the lyric to the dramatic. Caruso also made approximately 290 commercially released recordings from 1902 to 1920. All of these recordings, which span most of his stage career, are available today on CDs and as digital downloads.
Caruso's 1904 recording of ''Vesti la giubba'' was the first sound recording to sell a million copies.
Caruso biographers Pierre Key, Bruno Zirato and Stanley Jackson attribute Caruso's fame not only to his voice and musicianship but also to a keen business sense and an enthusiastic embrace of commercial sound recording, then in its infancy. Many opera singers of Caruso's time rejected the phonograph (or gramophone) due to the low fidelity of early discs. Others, including Adelina Patti, Francesco Tamagno and Nellie Melba, exploited the new technology once they became aware of the financial returns that 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, and he earned millions of dollars in royalties from the retail sales of the resulting 78-rpm discs. (Previously, in Italy in 1902–1903, he had cut five batches of records for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company, the Zonophone label and Pathé Records.) He was also heard live from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in 1910, when he participated in the first public radio broadcast to be transmitted in the United States.
Caruso appeared in newsreels, too, as well as a short experimental film made by Thomas Edison and two commercial motion pictures. For Edison, in 1911, Caruso portrayed the role of Edgardo in a filmed scene from Donizetti's opera ''Lucia di Lammermoor''. In 1918, he appeared in a dual role in the American silent film ''My Cousin'' for Paramount Pictures. This movie included a sequence of him on stage performing the aria "Vesti la giubba" from Leoncavallo's opera ''Pagliacci''. The following year Caruso played a character called Cosimo in another movie, ''The Splendid Romance''. Producer Jesse Lasky paid Caruso $100,000 to appear in these two efforts but they both flopped at the box office.
While Caruso sang at such venues as La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in London, the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, he was also the leading tenor of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City for 18 consecutive seasons. It was at the Met, in 1910, that he created the role of Dick Johnson in Giacomo Puccini's ''La fanciulla del West''.
Caruso's voice extended up to high C in its prime and grew in power and weight as he grew older. He sang a broad spectrum of roles, ranging from lyric, to spinto, to dramatic parts, in the Italian and French repertoires. In the German repertoire, Caruso sang only two roles, Assad (in Karl Goldmark's ''The Queen of Sheba'') and Richard Wagner's Lohengrin, both of which he performed in Italian in Buenos Aires in 1899 and 1901 respectively.
Caruso was the third of seven children born to the same parents, and one of only three to survive infancy. There is an often repeated story of Caruso having had 17 or 18 siblings who died in infancy. Two of his biographers, Francis Robinson and Pierre Key, mentioned the tale in their books but genealogical research conducted by Caruso family friend Guido D'Onofrio has suggested it is false. According to Caruso's son Enrico, Jr., Caruso himself and his brother Giovanni may have been the source of the exaggerated number. Caruso's widow Dorothy also included the story in a memoir that she wrote about her late husband. She quotes the tenor as follows in relation to his mother, Anna Caruso (née Baldini): "She had twenty-one children. Twenty boys and one girl – too many. I am number nineteen boy."
Caruso's father, Marcellino, was a mechanic and foundry worker with a steady job. Initially, Marcellino thought that his son should adopt the same trade and at the age of 11, the boy was apprenticed to a mechanical engineer named Palmieri who constructed public water fountains. (Whenever visiting Naples in future years, Caruso liked to point out a fountain that he had helped to install.) Caruso later worked alongside his father at the Meuricoffre factory in Naples. At his mother's insistence, he also attended school for a time, receiving a basic education under the tutelage of a local priest. He learned to write in a handsome script and studied technical draftsmanship. During this period he sang in his church choir, and his voice showed enough promise for him to contemplate a possible adult career in music.
Caruso was encouraged in his early musical ambitions by his mother, who died in 1888. In order to raise much needed cash for his family, he found supplementary work as a street singer in Naples and performed at cafes and soirees. Aged 18, he used the fees that he had earned by singing at an Italian resort to buy his first pair of new shoes. His progress as a paid entertainer was interrupted, however, by 45 days of compulsory military service. He completed this in 1894, resuming his voice lessons with Vergine upon discharge from the army.
Money continued to be in short supply for the young Caruso. One of his first publicity photographs, taken on a visit to Sicily in 1896, depicts him wearing a bedspread draped like a toga since his sole dress shirt was away being laundered. At a notorious early performance in Naples, he was booed by a section of the audience because he failed to pay a claque to cheer for him. This incident hurt Caruso's pride. He never appeared again on stage in his native city, stating later that he would return "only to eat spaghetti".
During the final few years of the 19th century, Caruso performed at a succession of theaters throughout Italy until, in 1900, he was rewarded with a contract to sing at La Scala in Milan, the country's premier opera house. His La Scala debut occurred on December 26 of that year in the part of Rodolfo in Giacomo Puccini's ''La bohème'' with Arturo Toscanini conducting. Audiences in Monte Carlo, Warsaw and Buenos Aires also heard Caruso sing during this pivotal phase of his career and, in 1899–1900, he appeared before the Tsar and the Russian aristocracy at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg and the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow as part of a touring company of first-class Italian singers.
The first major operatic role that Caruso was given the responsibility of creating was Loris in Umberto Giordano's ''Fedora'', at the Teatro Lirico, Milan, on November 17, 1898. At that same theater, on November 6, 1902, he would create the role of Maurizio in Francesco Cilea's ''Adriana Lecouvreur''. (Puccini considered casting the young Caruso in the role of Cavaradossi in ''Tosca'' at its premiere in 1900, but ultimately chose the older, more established Emilio De Marchi instead.)
Caruso took part in a "grand concert" at La Scala in February 1901 that Toscanini organised to mark the recent death of Giuseppe Verdi. Among those appearing with him at the concert were two other leading Italian tenors of the day, Francesco Tamagno (the creator of the protagonist's role in Verdi's ''Otello'') and Giuseppe Borgatti (the creator of the protagonist's role in Giordano's ''Andrea Chénier''). He embarked on his last series of La Scala performances in March 1902, creating along the way the principal tenor part in ''Germania'' by Alberto Franchetti.
A month later, he was engaged by the Gramophone & Typewriter Company to make his first group of acoustic recordings, in a Milan hotel room, for a fee of 100 pounds sterling. These 10 discs swiftly became best-sellers. Among other things, they helped to spread 29-year-old Caruso's fame throughout the English-speaking world. The management of London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, signed him for a season of appearances in eight different operas ranging from Verdi's ''Aida'' to ''Don Giovanni'' by Mozart. His successful debut at Covent Garden occurred on May 14, 1902, as the Duke of Mantua in Verdi's ''Rigoletto''. Covent Garden's highest-paid diva, the Australian soprano Nellie Melba, partnered him as Gilda. They would sing together often during the early 1900s. In her memoirs, Melba praised Caruso's voice but considered him to be a less sophisticated musician and interpretive artist than Jean de Reszke—the Met's biggest tenor drawcard prior to Caruso.
Caruso purchased the Villa Bellosguardo, a palatial country house near Florence, in 1904. The villa became his retreat away from the pressures of the operatic stage and the grind of travel. Caruso's preferred address in New York City was a suite at Manhattan's Knickerbocker Hotel. (The Knickerbocker was erected in 1906 on the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street.) Caruso commissioned the New York jewelers Tiffany & Co. to strike a 24-carat-gold medal adorned with the tenor's profile. He presented the medal in gratitude to Simonelli as a souvenir of his many well remunerated performances at the Met (see illustration, above).
In addition to his regular New York engagements, Caruso gave recitals and operatic performances in a large number of cities across the United States and sang in Canada. He also continued to sing widely in Europe, appearing again at Covent Garden in 1904–07 and 1913–14. Audiences in France, Belgium, Monaco, Austria, Hungary and Germany heard him, too, prior to the outbreak of World War I. In 1909, Melba asked him to participate in her forthcoming tour of Australia; but he declined the invitation because of the significant amount of travel time such a trip would entail.
Members of the Met's roster of artists, including Caruso, had visited San Francisco in April 1906 for a series of performances. Following an appearance as Don Jose in ''Carmen'' at the city's Grand Opera House, a strong jolt awakened Caruso at 5:13 on the morning of the 18th in his suite at the Palace Hotel. He found himself in the middle of the San Francisco Earthquake, which led to a series of fires that destroyed most of the city. The Met lost all the sets and costumes that it had brought on tour but none of the artists was harmed. Holding an autographed photo of President Theodore Roosevelt, Caruso made an ultimately successful effort to flee the city, first by boat and then by train. He vowed never to return to San Francisco and kept his word.
In November 1906, Caruso was charged with an indecent act allegedly committed in the monkey house of New York's Central Park Zoo. The police accused him of pinching the bottom of a married woman. Caruso claimed a monkey did the bottom-pinching. He was found guilty as charged, however, and fined 10 dollars, although suspicions linger that he may have been entrapped by the victim and the arresting officer. The leaders of New York's opera-going high society were outraged initially by the incident, which received widespread newspaper coverage, but they soon forgot about it and continued to attend Caruso's Met performances. Caruso's fan base at the Met was not restricted, however, to the wealthy. Members of America's middle-classes also paid to hear him sing—or buy copies of his recordings—and he enjoyed a substantial following among New York's 500,000 Italian immigrants.
Caruso created the role of Dick Johnson in the world premiere of Puccini's ''La fanciulla del West'' on December 10, 1910. The composer conceived the music for the tenor hero with Caruso's voice specifically in mind. With Caruso appeared two more of the Met's star singers, the Czech soprano Emmy Destinn and baritone Pasquale Amato. Toscanini, then the Met's principal conductor, presided in the orchestra pit.
Caruso toured the South American nations of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil in 1917 and two years later performed in Mexico City. In 1920, he was paid the then enormous sum of 10,000 American dollars a night to sing in Havana, Cuba.
The United States had entered World War I in 1917, sending troops to Europe. Caruso did extensive charity work during the conflict, raising money for war-related patriotic causes by giving concerts and participating enthusiastically in Liberty Bond drives. The tenor had shown himself to be a shrewd businessman since arriving in America. He put a sizable proportion of his earnings from record royalties and singing fees into a range of remunerative investments. Biographer Michael Scott writes that by the end of the war in 1918, Caruso's annual income tax bill amounted to $154,000.
Prior to World War One, Caruso had been romantically tied to an Italian soprano, Ada Giachetti, who was a few years older than he was. Though already married, Giachetti bore Caruso four sons during their liaison, which lasted from 1897 to 1908. Two survived infancy: Rodolfo Caruso (born 1898) and singer/actor Enrico Caruso, Jr. (1904). Ada had left her husband, manufacturer Gino Botti, and an existing son to cohabit with the tenor. Information provided in Scott's biography of Caruso suggests that she was his vocal coach as well as his lover. Statements by Enrico Caruso, Jr. in his book tend to substantiate this. Her relationship with Caruso broke down after 11 years and they separated. Giachetti's subsequent attempts to sue him for damages were dismissed by the courts.
Towards the end of the war, Caruso met and wooed a 25-year-old socialite, Dorothy Park Benjamin. She was the daughter of a wealthy New York patent lawyer. In spite of the disapproval of Dorothy's father, the couple wed on August 20, 1918. They had a daughter, Gloria Caruso (1919–1999). Dorothy lived until 1955 and wrote two books about Caruso, whom she had called "Rico" in private life. Published in 1928 and 1945, her books include many of Caruso's letters to his "Doro".
A fastidious dresser, Caruso took two baths a day and liked good Italian food and convivial company. He forged a particularly close bond with his Met and Covent Garden colleague Antonio Scotti—an amiable and stylish baritone from Naples. Caruso was superstitious and habitually carried good-luck charms with him when he sang. He played cards for relaxation and sketched friends, other singers and musicians. Dorothy Caruso said that by the time she knew him, her husband's favorite hobby was compiling scrapbooks. He also amassed a valuable collection of rare postage stamps, coins, watches and antique snuffboxes. Caruso was a heavy smoker of strong Egyptian cigarettes, too. This deleterious habit, combined with a lack of exercise and the punishing schedule of performances that Caruso willingly undertook season after season at the Met, may have contributed to the persistent ill-health which afflicted the last 12 months of his life.
Dorothy Caruso noted that her husband's health began a distinct downward spiral in late 1920 after returning from a lengthy North American tour. In his biography, Enrico Caruso, Jr. points to an on-stage injury suffered by Caruso as the possible trigger of his fatal illness. A falling pillar in ''Samson and Delilah'' on December 3 had hit him on the back, over the left kidney (and not on the chest as popularly reported). A few days before a performance of ''Pagliacci'' at the Met (Pierre Key says it was December 4, the day after the ''Samson and Delilah'' injury) he suffered a chill and developed a cough and a "dull pain in his side". It appeared to be a severe episode of bronchitis. Caruso's physician, Philip Horowitz, who usually treated him for migraine headaches with a kind of primitive TENS unit, diagnosed "intercostal neuralgia" and pronounced him fit to appear on stage, although the pain continued to hinder his voice production and movements.
During a performance of ''L'elisir d'amore'' by Donizetti at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on December 11, 1920, he suffered a throat haemorrhage and the performance was canceled at the end of Act 1. Following this incident, a clearly unwell Caruso gave only three more performances at the Met, the final one being as Eléazar in Halévy's ''La Juive'', on December 24, 1920. (Also appearing that night was the Australian coloratura soprano, Evelyn Scotney, who had sung with Caruso a number of times.) By Christmas day, the pain in his side was so excruciating that he was screaming. Dorothy summoned the hotel physician, who gave Caruso some morphine and codeine and called in another doctor, Evan M. Evans. Evans brought in three other doctors and Caruso was finally correctly diagnosed with purulent pleurisy and empyema.
Caruso's health deteriorated further during the new year. He experienced episodes of intense pain because of the infection and underwent seven surgical procedures to drain fluid from his chest and lungs. He returned to Naples to recuperate from the most serious of the operations, during which part of a rib had been removed. According to Dorothy Caruso, he seemed to be recovering, but allowed himself to be examined by an unhygienic local doctor and his condition worsened dramatically after that. The Bastianelli brothers, eminent medical practitioners with a clinic in Rome, recommended that his left kidney be removed. He was on his way to Rome to see them but, while staying overnight in the Vesuvio Hotel in Naples, he took an alarming turn for the worse and was given morphine to help him sleep.
Caruso died at the hotel a few minutes after 9:00 am local time, on August 2, 1921. He was 48. The Bastianellis attributed the likely cause of death to peritonitis arising from a burst subrenal abscess. The King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III, opened the Royal Basilica of the Church of San Francesco di Paola for Caruso's funeral, which was attended by thousands of people. His embalmed body was preserved in a glass sarcophagus at Del Pianto Cemetery in Naples for mourners to view. In 1929, Dorothy Caruso had his remains sealed permanently in an ornate stone tomb.
Note: At the time of his death, Caruso was preparing to perform the title role in Verdi's ''Otello'' in an intended Met production.
Caruso also had a repertory of more than 520 songs. They ranged from classical compositions to traditional Italian melodies and popular tunes of the day, including a few English-language titles such as George M. Cohan's "Over There" and Henry Geehl's "For You Alone".
Caruso's first recordings, cut on disc in three separate sessions in Milan during April, November and December 1902, were made with piano accompaniments for HMV/EMI's forerunner, the Gramophone & Typewriter Company. In April 1903, he made seven further recordings, also in Milan, for the Anglo-Italian Commerce Company (AICC). These were released on discs bearing the Zonophone seal. Three more Milan recordings for AICC followed in October. This time around, they were released by Pathé Records on cylinders as well as on discs. Then on February 1, 1904, Caruso began recording exclusively for the Victor Talking Machine Company in the United States. While most of Caruso's American recordings would be made in boxy studios in New York and nearby Camden, New Jersey, Victor also recorded him occasionally in Camden's Trinity Church, which could accommodate a larger band of musicians. (In 1904, however, Victor had elected to use Room 826 at Carnegie Hall, New York, as a makeshift recording venue for its initial bundle of Caruso discs.) Caruso's final recording session took place at Camden on September 16, 1920. The last classical items that the doomed tenor recorded consisted, fittingly enough, of the sacred pieces "Domine Deus" and "Crucifixus" from Rossini's ''Petite Messe Solennelle''.
Caruso's earliest American records of operatic arias and songs, like their 30 or so Milan-made predecessors, were accompanied by piano. From February 1906, however, so-called 'orchestral' accompaniments became the norm. The regular conductors of these instrumental-backed recording sessions were Walter B. Rogers and Joseph Pasternack. Beginning in 1932, RCA Victor in the USA and EMI in the UK, reissued several of the old discs with the existing accompaniment over-dubbed by a larger, more authentic sounding, electronically recorded orchestra. (Earlier experiments using this re-dubbing technique, carried out by Victor in 1927, had been considered unsatisfactory.) In 1950, RCA Victor reissued a number of the fuller-sounding Caruso recordings on 78-rpm discs made of smooth vinyl instead of brittle and gritty shellac, which was the traditional material used for "78s". Then, as vinyl long-playing discs (LPs) became popular, many of his recordings were electronically enhanced for release on the extended format. Some of these particular recordings, remastered by RCA Victor on the alternative 45-rpm format, were re-released in the early 1950s as companions to the same selections sung in the "Red Seal" series by movie tenor Mario Lanza. In 1951, Lanza had starred in a popular and profitable Hollywood biopic, ''The Great Caruso'', which took numerous liberties with the facts of Caruso's life.
In the 1970s, Thomas G. Stockham of the University of Utah utilised an early digital reprocessing technique called "Soundstream" to remaster Caruso's Victor recordings for RCA, but the results were not entirely successful. Nonetheless, these early digitised efforts were issued in part on LP, beginning in 1976. Twice they were issued complete by RCA on compact disc (in 1990 and then in 2004). Other complete sets of Caruso's restored recordings have been issued on CD by the Pearl label and, more recently, in 2000–2004 by Naxos. The 12-disc Naxos set was remastered by the renowned American audio-restoration engineer Ward Marston. Pearl also released in 1993 a CD set devoted to RCA's electrically over-dubbed versions of Caruso's original acoustic discs. RCA has similarly issued three CD sets of Caruso material with modern, digitally recorded orchestral accompaniments added. Caruso's records are now available, too, as digital downloads. His best-selling downloads at iTunes have been the familiar Italian songs "Santa Lucia" and "O Sole Mio".
Note: Caruso died before the introduction of higher fidelity, electrical recording technology (in 1925). All of his recordings were made using the acoustic process, which required the recording artist to sing into a metal horn or funnel which relayed sound directly to a master disc via a stylus. This process captured only a limited range of the overtones and nuances present in the singing voice. Caruso's 12-inch acoustic recordings were limited to a maximum duration of about 4:30 minutes. Therefore, some of the arias, duets and ensemble pieces that he recorded had to be edited in order to fit this time constraint.
::''Over There'' ::Caruso singing the popular World War I song by George M. Cohan.
Category:1873 births Category:1921 deaths Category:People from Naples Category:1906 San Francisco earthquake Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:Italian opera singers Category:Italian tenors Category:Operatic tenors Category:1906 San Francisco Earthquake survivors Category:Deaths from peritonitis Category:Victor Records artists
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Coordinates | 51°28′24″N5°32′48″N |
---|---|
name | Scott Joplin |
background | non_vocal_instrumentalist |
birth name | Scott Joplin |
born | c. 1867 northeastern Texas |
died | April 1, 1917 (aged 49)New York City |
instrument | Piano, Violin, Banjo |
genre | Ragtime, march, waltz, and song |
occupation | Composermusician, and pianist |
years active | 1895–1917 |
notable instruments | }} |
He was born into a musical African-American family of laborers in eastern Texas, and developed his musical knowledge with the help of local teachers. During the late 1880s he travelled around the American South as an itinerant musician, and went to Chicago for the World's Fair of 1893 which played a major part in making ragtime a national craze by 1897.
Publication of his "Maple Leaf Rag" in 1899 brought him fame and had a profound influence on subsequent writers of ragtime. It also brought the composer a steady income for life with royalties of one cent per sale, equivalent to }} cents per sale in current value. During his lifetime, Joplin did not reach this level of success again and frequently had financial problems, which contributed to the loss of his first opera, ''A Guest of Honor''. He continued to write ragtime compositions, and moved to New York in 1907. He attempted to go beyond the limitations of the musical form which made him famous, without much monetary success. His second opera, ''Treemonisha'', was not received well at its partially staged performance in 1915. He died from complications of tertiary syphilis in 1917.
Joplin's music was rediscovered and returned to popularity in the early 1970s with the release of a million-selling album of Joplin's rags recorded by Joshua Rifkin, followed by the Academy Award–winning movie ''The Sting'' which featured several of his compositions, such as "The Entertainer". The opera ''Treemonisha'' was finally produced in full to wide acclaim in 1972. In 1976, Joplin was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
At some point in the early 1880s, Giles Joplin left the family for another woman, leaving Florence to provide for her children through domestic work. Biographer Susan Curtis speculated that his mother's support of Joplin's musical education was an important causal factor in this separation; his father argued that it took the boy away from practical employment which would have supplemented the family income.
According to a family friend, the young Joplin was serious and ambitious. While in elementary school, he spent his after-school hours studying music and learning to play piano. While a few local teachers aided him, he received most of his serious music education from Julius Weiss, a German-Jewish music professor who had immigrated to the U.S. Weiss had studied music at a university in Germany and was listed in town records as a "Professor of music." Impressed by Joplin's talent, and realizing his family's dire straits, Weiss taught him free of charge. He tutored the 11-year-old Joplin until he was 16, during which time he introduced him to folk and classical music, including opera, sometimes playing the classics for him along with describing the great composers. Weiss supported the young composer's ambitions and helped his mother acquire a used piano from another student. Joplin, according to his wife Lottie, never forgot Weiss, and in his later years, when he achieved fame as a composer, sent his former teacher "gifts of money when he was old and ill," until Weiss died.
Joplin played music at church gatherings and for non-religious entertainments such as African-American dances. Although it is likely he played well-known dances of the era, "waltzes, polkas, and schottisches", it is possible he played his own compositions; biographer Curtis describes an eye-witness, Zenobia Campbell, recalling him playing his own compositions; "He did not have to play anybody else's music. He made up his own, and it was beautiful; he just got his music out of the air."
By the early 1890s, Ragtime had become popular among African-Americans in the cities of St. Louis and Chicago. In 1893 large numbers of African-American musicians, including Joplin, made their way to Chicago to perform for the visitors at the World's Fair. They found work in the cafés, saloons and brothels that lined the fair and the city's seedy and corrupt "Tenderloin" district. While in Chicago, Joplin formed his first band and began arranging music for the group to perform. Although the World's Fair was "not congenial to African Americans," he still found that his music, as well as that of other black performers, was popular with visitors. The exposition was attended by 27 million Americans and had a profound effect on many areas of American cultural life, including ragtime. Although specific information is sparse, numerous sources have credited the Chicago World Fair with spreading the popularity of ragtime. By 1897 ragtime had become a national craze in American cities, and was described by the ''St. Louis Dispatch'' as "a veritable call of the wild, which mightily stirred the pulses of city bred people."
In the 1890s, the town had a population of approximately 14,000 and was the center of commerce and transport for the region. The town's saloons and brothels of the red-light district on Main St, nicknamed "Battle Row", provided employment for musicians, and it is likely that Joplin worked in this area. The town was attractive for other reasons; race-relations between Whites and Blacks in Sedalia were relatively good, especially when compared to other similar communities in Missouri in this period, there is no record of public lynchings in the area 1890s, there were several prominent black citizens who held minor positions in the Republican Party, and the George R. Smith College, one of the nation's first colleges for the education of blacks, opened in 1894. In addition, Sedalia was described by a black resident of the town at the time as the "musical town of the West", because music was a major leisure-time activity.
There is little precise evidence known about Joplin's activities at this time, although he performed as a solo musician at dances and at the major black clubs in Sedalia, the "Black 400" club, and the "Maple Leaf Club". He performed in the Queen City Cornet Band, and his own six-piece dance orchestra. A tour with his own singing group, the Texas Medley Quartet, gave him his first opportunity to publish his own compositions and it is known that he went to Syracuse, New York and Texas. Two businessmen from New York published Joplin's first two works, the songs "Please Say You Will", and "A Picture of her Face" in 1895. Joplin's visit to Temple, Texas enabled him to have three pieces published there in 1896, including the "Crush Collision March" which commemorated a planned train crash on the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad on September 15 which he may have witnessed. The March was described by one of Joplin's biographers as a "special... early essay in ragtime", While in Sedalia he was teaching piano to students who included Arthur Marshall, composer and pianist Brun Campbell, and Scott Hayden, all of whom became ragtime composers in their own right. In turn, Joplin enrolled at the George R. Smith College where he apparently studied "advanced harmony and composition". The College records were destroyed in a fire in 1925, and biographer Edward A. Berlin notes that it was unlikely that a small college for African-Americans would be able to provide such a course.
In 1899, Joplin married Belle, the sister-in-law of collaborator Scott Hayden. Although there were hundreds of rags in print by the time of the "Maple Leaf Rag's" publication, Joplin was not far behind. His first published rag was "Original Rags" (March 1899) had been completed in 1897, the same year as the first ragtime work in print, the "Mississippi Rag" by William Krell. The "Maple Leaf Rag" was likely to have been known in Sedalia before its publication in 1899; Brun Campbell claimed to have seen the manuscript of the work in around 1898. The exact circumstances which lead to the Maple Leaf Rag's publication are unknown, and there are various different versions of the event which contradict each other. After several unsuccessful approaches to publishers, Joplin signed a contract with John Stillwell Stark, a retailer of musical instruments who later became his most important publisher, on August 10, 1899 for a 1% royalty on all sales of the rag, with a minimum sales price of 25c. It is possible that the rag was named after the Maple Leaf Club, although there is no direct evidence to prove the link, and there were many other possible sources for the name in and around Sedalia at the time.
There have been many claims about the sales of the "Maple Leaf Rag", for example that Joplin was the first musician to sell 1 million copies of a piece of instrumental music. Joplin's first biographer, Rudi Blesh wrote that during its first six months the piece sold 75,000 copies, and became "the first great instrumental sheet music hit in America". However, research by Joplin's later biographer Edward A. Berlin demonstrated that this was not the case; the initial print-run of 400 took one year to sell, and under the terms of Joplin's contract with a 1% royalty would have given Joplin an income of $4 (or approximately $}} at current prices). Later sales were steady and would have given Joplin an income which would have covered his expenses; in 1909 estimated sales would have given him an income of $600 annually (approximately $}} in current prices).
The "Maple Leaf Rag" did serve as a model for the hundreds of rags to come from future composers, especially in the development of classic ragtime. After the publication of the "Maple Leaf Rag", Joplin was soon being described as "King of rag time writers", not least by himself on the covers of his own work, such as "The Easy Winners" and "Elite Syncopations".
After the Joplins' move to St. Louis in early 1900, they had a baby daughter who died only a few months after birth. Joplin's relationship with his wife was difficult as she had no interest in music; they eventually separated and then divorced. About this time, Joplin collaborated with Scott Hayden in the composition of four rags. It was in St. Louis that Joplin produced some of his best-known works, including "The Entertainer", "March Majestic", and the short theatrical work "The Ragtime Dance".
In June 1904, Joplin married Freddie Alexander of Little Rock, Arkansas, the young woman to whom he had dedicated "The Chrysanthemum" (1904). She died on September 10, 1904 of complications resulting from a cold, ten weeks after their wedding. Joplin's first work copyrighted after Freddie's death, "Bethena" (1905), was described by one biographer as "an enchantingly beautiful piece that is among the greatest of ragtime waltzes".
During this time, Joplin created an opera company of 30 people and produced his first opera ''A Guest of Honor'' for a national tour. It is not certain how many productions were staged, or even if this was an all-black show or a racially mixed production (which would have been unusual for 1903). During the tour, either in Springfield, Illinois, or Pittsburg, Kansas, someone associated with the company stole the box office receipts. Joplin could not meet the company's payroll or pay for it's lodgings at a theatrical boarding house. It is believed the score for ''A Guest of Honor'' was lost and perhaps destroyed because of non-payment of the company's boarding house bill.
In 1914, Joplin and Lottie self-published his "Magnetic Rag" using the name the "Scott Joplin Music Company" which had been formed the previous December. Biographer Vera Brodsky Lawrence speculates that Joplin was aware of his advancing deterioration due to syphilis and was "consciously racing against time." In her sleeve notes on the 1992 Deutsche Grammophon release of ''Treemonisha'' she notes that he "plunged feverishly into the task of orchestrating his opera, day and night, with his friend Sam Patterson standing by to copy out the parts, page by page, as each page of the full score was completed."
By 1916, Joplin was suffering from tertiary syphilis and a resulting descent into madness. In January 1917, he was admitted to Manhattan State Hospital, a mental institution. He died there on April 1, 1917 of dementia. After Joplin's death at the age of just 49, from advanced syphilis, he was buried in a pauper's grave that remained unmarked for 57 years. His grave at Saint Michaels Cemetery, in East Elmhurst, was finally honored in 1974.
When Joplin was learning the piano, serious musical circles condemned ragtime because of its association with the vulgar and inane songs "cranked out by the tune-smiths of Tin Pan Alley." As a composer Joplin refined ragtime, elevating it above the low and unrefined form played by the "wandering honky-tonk pianists... playing mere dance music" of popular imagination. This new art form, the classic rag, combined Afro-American folk music's syncopation and nineteenth-century European romanticism, with its harmonic schemes and its march-like tempos. In the words of one critic, "ragtime was basically... an Afro-American version of the polka, or its analog, the Sousa-style march." With this as a foundation, Joplin intended his compositions to be played exactly as he wrote them – without improvisation. Joplin wrote his rags as "classical" music in miniature form in order to raise ragtime above its "cheap bordello" origins and produced work which opera historian Elise Kirk described as "...more tuneful, contrapuntal, infectious, and harmonically colorful than any others of his era."
It has been speculated that Joplin's achievements were influenced by his classically trained German music teacher Julius Weiss, who may have brought a polka rhythmic sensibility from the old country to the 11-year old. As Curtis put it "The educated German could open up the door to a world of learning and music of which young Joplin was largely unaware."
Joplin's first, and most significant hit the "Maple Leaf Rag" was described as the "archetype" of the classic rag, influencing subsequent rag composers for at least 12 years after its initial publication thanks to its rhythmic patterns, melody lines, and harmony, although with the exception of Joseph Lamb they generally failed to enlarge upon it.
Joplin wrote both the score and the libretto for the opera, which largely follows the form of European opera with many conventional arias, ensembles and choruses. In addition the themes of superstition and mysticism which are evident in ''Treemonisha'' are common in the operatic tradition, and certain aspects of the plot echo devices in the work of the German composer Richard Wagner (of which Joplin was aware); a sacred tree under which Treemonisha is found recalls the tree from which Siegmund takes his enchanted sword in ''Die Walküre'', and the retelling of the heroine's origins echos aspects of the opera ''Siegfried''. In addition, African-American folk tales also influence the story, with the wasp nest incident being similar to the story of Br'er Rabbit and the briar patch.
''Treemonisha'' is not a ragtime opera because Joplin employed the styles of ragtime and other black music sparingly, using them to convey "racial character", and to celebrate the music of his childhood at the end of the 19th century. The opera has been seen as a valuable record of rural black music from 1870s–1890s re-created by a "skilled and sensitive participant".
Berlin speculates about parallels between the plot and Joplin's own life. He notes that Lottie Joplin (the composer's third wife) saw a connection between the character Treemonisha's wish to lead her people out of ignorance, and a similar desire in the composer. In addition, it has been speculated that Treemonisha represents Freddie, Joplin's second wife, because the date of the opera's setting was likely to have been the month of her birth.
At the time of the opera's publication in 1911, the ''American Musician and Art Journal'' praised it as "an entirely new form of operatic art". Later critics have also praised the opera as occupying a special place in American history, with its heroine "a startlingly early voice for modern civil rights causes, notably the importance of education and knowledge to African American advancement." Curtis's conclusion is similar: "In the end, ''Treemonisha'' offered a celebration of literacy, learning, hard work, and community solidarity as the best formula for advancing the race." Berlin describes it as a "fine opera, certainly more interesting than most operas then being written in the United States", but later states that Joplin's own libretto showed the composer "was not a competent dramatist" with the book not up to the same quality as the music.
Joplin's skills as a pianist were described in glowing terms by a Sedalia newspaper in 1898, and fellow ragtime composers Arthur Marshall and Joe Jordan both said that he played the instrument well. However, the son of publisher John Stark stated that Joplin was a rather mediocre pianist and that he composed on paper, rather than at the piano. Artie Matthews recalled the "delight" the St. Louis players took in outplaying Joplin.
While Joplin never made an audio recording, his playing is preserved on seven piano rolls for use in mechanical player pianos. All seven were made in 1916. Of these, the six released under the Connorized label show evidence of significant editing, probably by William Axtmann, the staff arranger at Connorized. Berlin theorizes that by the time Joplin reached St. Louis he may have been experiencing discoordination of the fingers, tremors and an inability to speak clearly, symptoms of syphilis, the disease that took his life in 1917. The second roll recording of "Maple Leaf Rag" on the UniRecord label from June 1916 was described by biographer Blesh as "... shocking... disorganized and completely distressing to hear." While there is disagreement among piano-roll experts about the accuracy of the reproduction of a player's performance, Berlin notes that the "Maple Leaf Rag" roll was "painfully bad" and likely to be the truest record of Joplin's playing at the time. The roll, however, does not reflect his abilities earlier in life.
Joshua Rifkin, a leading Joplin recording artist, wrote that "a pervasive sense of lyricism infuses his work, and even at his most high-spirited, he cannot repress a hint of melancholy or adversity... He had little in common with the fast and flashy school of ragtime that grew up after him." Joplin historian Bill Ryerson adds that "In the hands of authentic practitioners like Joplin, ragtime was a disciplined form capable of astonishing variety and subtlety... Joplin did for the rag what Chopin did for the mazurka. His style ranged from tones of torment to stunning serenades that incorporated the bolero and the tango."
Joplin biographer Susan Curtis expands on those observations: :"When Scott Joplin syncopated his way into the hearts of millions of Americans at the turn of the century, he helped revolutionize American music and culture. His ragged rhythms and lilting melodies made people want to tap their feet, slap their thighs, or dance with happy abandon. As Americans embraced his music, they participated in a dramatic transformation of American popular culture – their Victorian restraint gave way to modern exuberance. And whether in the elegant parlors of comfortable, respectable American homes or in the honky tonks and cafes of America's sporting districts, ragtime music accompanied a reorientation of cultural values in America in the twentieth century. The excellence and appeal of his compositions earned for Joplin the generally accepted title "King of Ragtime".
Composer and actor Max Morath found it striking that the vast majority of Joplin's work did not enjoy the popularity of the "Maple Leaf Rag", because while the compositions were "of increasing lyrical beauty and delicate syncopation" they remained "obscure" and "unheralded" during his lifetime. Joplin apparently realized that his music was ahead of its time: As music historian Ian Whitcomb mentions that Joplin "opined that 'Maple Leaf Rag' would make him 'King of Ragtime Composers' but he also knew that he would not be a pop hero in his own lifetime. 'When I'm dead twenty-five years, people are going to recognize me,' he told a friend." Just over thirty years later he was recognized, and later historian Rudi Blesh would write a large book about ragtime, which he dedicated to the memory of Scott Joplin.
Although he was penniless and disappointed at the end of his life, Joplin set the standard for ragtime compositions and played a key role in the development of ragtime music. And as a pioneer composer and performer, he helped pave the way for young black artists to reach American audiences of both races. After his death, jazz historian Floyd Levin noted: "those few who realized his greatness bowed their heads in sorrow. This was the passing of the king of all ragtime writers, the man who gave America a genuine native music."
In the 1960s, a small-scale reawakening of interest in classic ragtime was underway among some American music scholars such as Trebor Tichenor, William Bolcom, William Albright and Rudi Blesh. In 1968, Bolcom and Albright interested Joshua Rifkin, a young musicologist, in the body of Joplin's work. Together, they hosted an occasional ragtime-and-early-jazz evening on WBAI radio.
In November 1970, Rifkin released a recording called ''Scott Joplin: Piano Rags'' on the classical label Nonesuch. It sold 100,000 copies in its first year and eventually became Nonesuch's first million-selling record. The ''Billboard'' "Best-Selling Classical LPs" chart for September 28, 1974 has the record at number 5, with the follow-up "Volume 2" at number 4, and a combined set of both volumes at number 3. Separately both volumes had been on the chart for 64 weeks. In the top 7 spots on that chart, 6 of the entries were recordings of Joplin's work, three of which were Rifkin's. Record stores found themselves for the first time putting ragtime in the classical music section. The album was nominated in 1971 for two Grammy Award categories: Best Album Notes and Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without orchestra). Rifkin was also under consideration for a third Grammy for a recording not related to Joplin, but at the ceremony on March 14, 1972, Rifkin did not win in any category. He did a tour in 1974, which included appearances on BBC Television and a sell-out concert at London's Royal Festival Hall. In 1979 Alan Rich in the ''New York Magazine'' wrote that by giving artists like Rifkin the opportunity to put Joplin's music on disk Nonesuch Records "created, almost alone, the Scott Joplin revival."
In January 1971, Harold C. Schonberg, music critic at the New York Times, having just heard the Rifkin album, wrote a featured Sunday edition article entitled "Scholars, Get Busy on Scott Joplin!" Schonberg's call to action has been described as the catalyst for classical music scholars, the sort of people Joplin had battled all his life, to conclude that Joplin was a genius. Vera Brodsky Lawrence of the New York Public Library published a two-volume set of Joplin works in June 1971, entitled ''The Collected Works of Scott Joplin'', stimulating a wider interest in the performance of Joplin's music that included a recording called ''Joplin: The Red Back Book'' by Gunther Schuller, a french horn player and music professor.
Marvin Hamlisch lightly adapted Joplin's music for the 1973 film ''The Sting'', for which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Song Score and Adaptation on April 2, 1974. His version of "The Entertainer" reached number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the American Top 40 music chart on May 18, 1974, prompting ''The New York Times'' to write, "the whole nation has begun to take notice". Thanks to the film and its score, Joplin's work became appreciated in both the popular and classical music world, becoming (in the words of music magazine ''Record World''), the "classical phenomenon of the decade".
On October 22, 1971, excerpts from ''Treemonisha'' were presented in concert form at Lincoln Center with musical performances by Bolcom, Rifkin and Mary Lou Williams supporting a group of singers. Finally, on January 28, 1972, T.J. Anderson's orchestration of ''Treemonisha'' was staged for two consecutive nights, sponsored by the Afro-American Music Workshop of Morehouse College in Atlanta, with singers accompanied by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Robert Shaw, and choreography by Katherine Dunham. Schonberg remarked in February 1972 that the "Scott Joplin Renaissance" was in full swing and still growing. In May 1975, ''Treemonisha'' was staged in a full opera production by the Houston Grand Opera. The company toured briefly, then settled into an eight-week run in New York on Broadway at the Palace Theater in October and November. This appearance was directed by Gunther Schuller, and soprano Carmen Balthrop alternated with Kathleen Battle as the title character. An "original Broadway cast" recording was produced. Because of the lack of national exposure given to the brief Morehouse College staging of the opera in 1972, many Joplin scholars wrote that the Houston Grand Opera's 1975 show was the first full production.1974 saw the Royal Ballet, under director Kenneth MacMillan, create ''Elite Syncopations'' a ballet based on tunes by Joplin and other composers of the era. That year also brought the premiere by the Los Angeles Ballet of ''Red Back Book'', choreographed by John Clifford to Joplin rags from the collection of the same name, including both solo piano performances and arrangements for full orchestra.
1970: Joplin was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame by the National Academy of Popular Music.
1976: Joplin was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his special contribution to American music.
1977: Motown Productions produced ''Scott Joplin'', a biographical film starring Billy Dee Williams as Joplin, released by Universal Pictures.
1983: the United States Postal Service issued a stamp of the composer as part of its Black Heritage commemorative series.
1989: Joplin received a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
2002: a collection of Scott Joplin's own performances recorded on piano rolls in the 1900s was included by the National Recording Preservation Board in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. The board annually selects songs that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
Category:1860s births Category:1917 deaths Category:20th-century classical composers Category:African American classical composers Category:African American pianists Category:American classical musicians Category:American composers Category:Deaths from syphilis Category:Music of St. Louis, Missouri Category:People from St. Louis, Missouri Category:People from Sedalia, Missouri Category:People from Texarkana, Texas Category:Ragtime composers Category:Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees Category:Texas classical music
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Coordinates | 51°28′24″N5°32′48″N |
---|---|
name | Benjamin Francis Leftwich |
birth date | September 04, 1989 |
origin | York, England |
instrument | vocals, guitar, piano |
genre | Alternative |
occupation | Singer, songwriter |
years active | 2006–present |
label | Dirty Hit |
website | |
background | solo_singer }} |
Benjamin Francis Leftwich (Born 4 September 1989) is an English singer-songwriter from York.
Leftwich began playing at the age of ten and grew up listening to The Rolling Stones and Nina Simone; later discovering Nick Drake, Bob Dylan, and Elliott Smith.
He cites Arcade Fire, Ryan Adams, and Bruce Springsteen as inspirations.
His debut album, the Ian Grimble-produced ''Last Smoke Before The Snowstorm'', was released in July 2011. ''The Fly'' called it "a majestic debut" ""whilst ''The Sunday Times'' cited Leftwich as "a serious new talent". ''The Skinny'' described it as "occasionally a bit O.C. soundtrack...[but] enjoyable throughout", while the ''Sunday Express'' called it "lovely" but "increasingly repetitive over the course of 10 tracks". Hazel Sheffield, writing in ''The Guardian'', gave it a 3/5 rating, as did David Pollock, writing for ''The Scotsman'', who drew comparisons to Damien Rice and José González, but also stated "sadly there are also heavy hints of Chris Martin at his most mawkish".
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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