Sources for Tenor of Love
The inspiration for this book was from Lucio Dalla's
beautiful and haunting song "Caruso".
While the characters in this novel are real historical persons,
and basic facts are honored, this book is literary fiction and not biography.
To echo Emily Dickinson, if it tells the truth, it tells it slant.
The letters within the text are not actual documents
although Caruso's letters to Dorothy in the novel are based on letters in
Dorothy Caruso's biography of her husband, Enrico Caruso, His Life and Death, published by Simon and Schuster in 1945.
I have also used in the dialogue some of her direct quotations of Caruso, including some of his jokes, his marriage proposal, and his dying words.
Another major source for this novel is Enrico Caruso, My Father and My Family, by Enrico Caruso Jr. and Andrew Farkas, published
by Amadeus Press in 1990.
In reading these books I became very interested in
the women in Caruso's life and their influence on him. In his memoir, Enrico
Caruso Jr. laments the exclusion of his mother and his aunt from the official
story: "Most books about Enrico Caruso devote a negligible amount of space
to the two women around whom the better part of his adult life revolved. These
were the Giachetti sisters: Ada and Rina."
Also of great use to me have been two picture books: Caruso, His Life in Pictures, by Francis Robinson, Bramhall House, U.S.A., 1957;
and Caruso, an Illustrated Life,
by Howard S. Greenfield, Collins and Brown, Great Britain, 1991.
Other sources include: Dante, La Vita Nuova ; The Letters of the Younger Pliny, translated by Betty Radice; and Rainer Maria Rilke's
poem, "Der Schwan," or
"The Swan.".
I have translated a line from Fitzgerald's Rubyiat of
Omar Khayyam into Italian, and
quoted from one of the quatrains as an epigraph. I have also quoted phrases
from the poetry of D'Annunizio and translated them from the Italian.
Operatic sources include the following libretti: Bizet's Carmen, Gluck's Euridice ed Orfeo, Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci,
Puccini's La Bohème, Tosca,
Turandot, Rossini's La
Cenerentola, and Verdi's Aida, as well as the video, Pavarotti at Julliard.
The following Web sites may be of particular interest: