Let Me Clear My Throat by Elena Passarello

Author:Elena Passarello [Passarello, Elena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Writing, Music
ISBN: 9781936747450
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 13592069
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2012-10-09T00:00:00+00:00

Like Farinelli, Caruso’s virile tones led to unprecedented stardom. They also sparked mutterings about his body and what he did with it. His heavy vocal cords dangled an eighth of an inch farther down his throat, people said, and his mouth had a half-inch more girth than it needed. And have you heard that he could puff that gargantuan chest and use it to push a piano from one end of a room—with carpet!—to the next? Or that the Frisco earthquake happened hours after his Carmen, because he sang loose the earth around the opera house?

In Atlanta, Helen Keller visited him between performances; she put one hand at his throat and another right into his ominous “ah” mouth, as if he were the stone Bocca della Verità and she were a tourist telling it something true. Even Keller couldn’t stop talking about his steamroller voice, which she touched as it “swelled and surged in harmonious billows.” He had sung her the weepy aria of loss from Samson and Delilah (of course). According to the New York Times, “the voice of the tenor stirred her” to the point where the woman nearly fainted.

And oh my goodness have you heard how, in every opera house he visits, he catches the prettiest chorister, kisses her in the dark, and then kisses one of the homelier girls “for penance”? And did you know the woman singer we all thought was his wife that left him for a Lithuanian count wasn’t his wife at all? And did you read about him pinching a woman’s bottom in the Bronx Zoo monkey house and then blaming it on the monkey, whose name was Knocko?

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