Frances Alda (31 May 1879– 18 September 1952) was a New Zealand-born, Australian-raised operatic soprano. She achieved fame during the first three decades of the 20th century due to her outstanding singing voice, fine technique and colourful personality, as well as her frequent onstage partnerships at the New York Metropolitan Opera with Enrico Caruso.

Alda was born Fanny Jane Davis in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1879. Her father David, wanted her mother, Leonore (née Simonsen), to settle down. But Leonore, a promising singer from a musical family, had other ideas and in 1880, divorced her husband to resume her singing career. Young Fanny spent her early years travelling with her mother on her operatic tours. After false starts in Australasia, she took Fanny and her younger brother to San Francisco in 1883. Leonore Davis remarried but died of peritonitis in December 1884. After her mother's death, Alda was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. She sang in productions of Gilbert and Sullivan in Melbourne before leaving Australia for Europe at the age of 22 in order to undertake additional study and pursue an international singing career like her future soprano rival Nellie Melba. After receiving lessons in Paris from the renowned teacher Mathilde Marchesi, who gave her her stage name, Alda made her debut at the Opéra-Comique in 1904 in Massenet's Manon. She appeared at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden in 1906, and at La Scala, Milan, during the 1906-1908 seasons. In 1910, she married the La Scala impresario Giulio Gatti-Casazza.

Enrico Caruso (Italian pronunciation: [enˈriːko kaˈruːzo]) (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" from Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci was the first sound recording to sell a million copies.

Caruso's 25-year career, stretching from 1895 to 1920, included 863 appearances at the New York Metropolitan Opera before he died from an infection at the age of 48. His fame has lasted to the present day despite the limited marketing and promotional vehicles available during Caruso's era. (He was, nonetheless, a client of Edward Bernays, during the latter's tenure as a press agent in the United States.) Publicity in Caruso's time relied on newspapers, particularly wire services, along with magazines, photography and relatively instantaneous communication via the telephone and the telegraph, to spread a message and raise a performer's profile.

Frank La Forge (Rockford, Illinois, October 22, 1879 – New York, New York, May 5, 1953) was an American pianist and composer and arranger of art songs.

La Forge was a boy soprano, famous in his hometown of Rockford, Illinois. He first studied piano with his older sister, and went to Vienna in 1900 to study with Theodor Leschetizky. In the following years he toured Europe, Russia, and the United States as an accompanist to Marcella Sembrich. He moved to New York City in 1920, where he became a music teacher, coach, and accompanist. He died at the piano, performing at a Musician's Club dinner.

La Forge accompanied many important opera singers, including Marcella Sembrich, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Lily Pons, Johanna Gadski and Lucrezia Bori. He taught a number of important American singers, including Marian Anderson, Lawrence Tibbett, Marie Powers, and Richard Crooks. In performance he usually accompanied entirely from memory, considered an unusual feat for an accompanist. His biography in Pathways of Song claimed that he had 'a repertoire of over five thousand memorized accompaniments embracing all schools'.