On 11 April 1902, in a room of the Grand Hotel et de Milan, a twenty-nine-year-old English technician sets a horn on a tripod and asks a Neapolitan tenor to stand in front of it. The technician is Fred Gaisberg and he works for the Gramophone Company. The tenor is twenty-nine, has just sung Franchetti’s Germania at La Scala, and is called Enrico Caruso. In three hours he records ten arias, accompanied on the piano. He has asked for a hundred pounds, paid in advance, and London has telegraphed Gaisberg to refuse because the sum was exorbitant. Gaisberg recorded anyway.
Those ten sides can be heard today by anyone, they are in the public domain, and it is worth approaching them knowing what you are about to hear, because on first contact the risk is of hearing only the hiss.
How it worked. There was no microphone. The voice entered a horn, moved a diaphragm, and the diaphragm moved a stylus that cut a groove into a wax disc. All the energy came from the singer’s breath: no amplification, no correction. This produces three consequences that you hear at once. The first is that the accompaniment is a piano and not an orchestra, because an orchestra inside the horn turned to mush. The second is that the bandwidth is very narrow, so the deep lows and the brilliant highs are missing, and every voice comes out with a nasal colour that is not the real one. The third is that the piece had to fit within the barely two minutes of the disc, so tempos are often faster than normal and cuts are the order of the day.
With all this against it, what comes through is impressive. The first thing you hear is not power, it is compactness: the sound has no holes, does not change nature as it moves from one zone of the voice to another, and in the high register it does not stiffen. The second is the diction. Every consonant is in its place and every word is understood, which is anything but obvious today in a theatre with acoustics ten times better.
The third thing is what makes these records a document and not a keepsake: the relationship with time. Caruso does not sing inside a grid. He stretches, anticipates, leans on the note that interests him and runs over the passing ones, and the piano chases him. It is a rhythmic freedom that would be corrected in rehearsal today, and that in 1902 was simply the way one sang. Whoever wants to know what Verdi and Puccini meant when they wrote those phrases has here the closest testimony that exists, recorded by a singer who had worked with Puccini while he was alive.
There is also the systematic use of portamento, that is, sliding from one note to the next instead of the clean leap. To contemporary taste it sounds excessive, almost mannered, and it is the point where the distance is measured most. It was not one singer’s quirk: it was the expressive norm of the era, and within thirty years it would be swept away.
The sequel we know. Those records sell all over the world and do two things at once: they make Caruso the first global star of music, and they make the gramophone a serious household appliance instead of a fairground toy. Before 1902 the record was a curiosity. After, it is the way people hear music. A hundred pounds, considered exorbitant, is probably the best investment in the history of the record industry.
How to listen. Not with headphones at high volume hunting for quality, which is not there. Better at medium volume, accepting the hiss the way one accepts the grain of a photograph from 1902, and concentrating on one thing at a time: first the words, then the way he takes breath, then where he decides to slow down. Within three listens the recording stops being old and starts being a man in a hotel room singing into a horn, while an Englishman who has disobeyed his own office holds the wax steady for him.