Music History Monday: I Left My Nerve in San Francisco

We mark the final San Francisco performance – on the evening of Tuesday, April 17, 1906, 117 years ago today – of the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso (1874-1921).  That performance at the no longer extant Grand Opera House at No. 2 Mission Street (between 2nd and 3rd Streets) was not intended to have been Caruso’s last local appearance, but circumstances beyond his control assured that it was! Enrico Caruso (1874-1921) Caruso was born into a poor family in Naples, Italy, on February 24th, 1874.  He was the third of seven children (and not the nineteenth of twenty-one, as Caruso himself often claimed!).  Following in the professional footsteps of his father, Marcellino Caruso, who was a mechanic, young Enrico was apprenticed to a mechanical engineer at the age of 11.  He “discovered” his voice singing in a church choir, and as a teenager he made a few extra dinero singing on the streets and in the cafes of Naples. At the age of 18, Caruso had something of a revelation, when he used money he had earned as a singer to buy his first new pair of shoes.  Realizing his real professional potential, he began taking voice lessons, and his […]

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