When I met Jose Carreras in the late summer of 2002, after his concert in Teatro de Falla in Cadiz, my overwhelming impression was of his unearthly serenity. I wondered what brought such peace to his eyes knowing how horrifying his public battle with acute leukemia in the year 1987 was.
Jose Carreras’s early life
Jose Maria Carreras was born on December 5, 1946 in Barcelona. He was the youngest of three children in the household of Joseph Carreras-Soler, a school teacher and Antonia Coll-Saigi, a hairdresser.
Due to the dire economic condition in Spain the whole family had emigrated to Argentina in 1951 but returned to Spain within the same year.
Young Jose Maria loved to sing and he often sang to the customers in his mother’s hairdressing salon.
Pinkerton in Madame Butterfly
Jose Carreras gave his first vocal public performance at the age of eight on Spanish National Radio, singing La Donna e Mobile (from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto), the canzone famous as a showcase for tenors.
He was only eleven when he was on stage of Barcelona’s Gran Teatro del Liceo singing the boy soprano role of the narrator in Manuel de Falla’s El Retablo de Maese Pedro.
Jose Carreras made his debut as Pinkerton in Madame Butterfly at the New York City Opera in 1972. After his debut performance, the Ovation magazine described his voice as "a honeyed lyric tenor, richly colored, clear and true and possessing a sensual beauty that is quite extraordinary."
Genarro - Carreras’s first adult role
Carreras has described Juan Ruax as his artistic father, but he commenced his studies with Francisco Puig. It was Ruax, however, who had enormous influence over him and encouraged him to audition for what was to become his first tenor role at the Gran Teatro del Liceo, Flavio in Vicenzo Bellini’s Norma.
The way he sang as Flavio was noticed by the great soprano in the title role Monserrat Caballe, who asked that Carreras sing Gennaro in Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia. Genarro was his first principal adult role.
Career of the great tenor
Jose Carreras has had an astonishing career: by the age of 28 he had sung the tenor lead in 24 different operas in Europe and North America, making his debut at the world’s four great opera houses – La Scala di Milano (1975) as Riccardo in Giuseppe Verdi’s Ballo in Maschera, Vienna Staatsoper (1974) as the Duke of Mantua in Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, London’s Royal Opera House (1974) as Alfredo in G.Verdi’s La Traviata and the New York Metropolitan Opera (1974) as Cavaradossi in Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca.
Personal life
In 1971 Carreras had married Mercedes Perez. From this marriage their two children were born; son Alberto (1972) and daughter Julia was born six years later.
In 1992 Carreras divorced Perez and he remarried in 2006 in a secret ceremony. His bride was Jutta Jager, who was his mistress when he was still married to Mercedes.
Diagnosed with acute leukemia
In 1987 at the height of his success, Carreras was diagnosed with acute leukemia. He was treated at the Fred Hutchinson Clinic in Seattle, Washington.
The story goes that the two women, Mercedes and Jutta, took turns to sit by his hospital bed while Carreras, like Don José in Carmen - one of his most famous roles - was, presumably, torn between them.
After his recovery, one of the first people he went to see was the great Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan. Their long artistic collaboration has produced some of Carreras' finest performances and recordings.
Jose Carreras International Leukemia Foundation
Thanks to the extraordinary work of the team of doctors who took care of Carreras in the hospitals in Barcelona and Seattle Jose Carreras recovered in 1987.
He was always grateful to his fans all over the world, saying that affection and solidarity that he received from them were fundamental to his recovery.
Not long after his recovery, Carreras was determined to find a way to give back to medical science all that he had been given.
In July 1988 The Jose Carreras International Leukemia Foundation was established.
In the same year the first charity concert on 21 July at the Arc del Triomf in Barcelona marked his creation and he continued with numerous charity concerts and recitals worldwide. A very significant number of companies, artists and individuals supported his Foundation by generously donating. The support comes from a number of Jose Carreras' support associations worldwide in a way of organizing various activities in aid of the Foundation.
But the most important sources of income for the Foundation is personal participation of Jose Carreras and his professional activity, making a remarkable contribution to the achievement of the Foundation’s goals. His extraordinary dedication and work motivates companies, organizations, associations and private individuals to contribute.
The Three Tenors
Mario Dardi, an Italian manager and producer, came up with the idea for the Three Tenors with an aim to create a group of tenors for a concert and donate a proportion to the Jose Carreras’ Foundation. When presented with this idea Jose Carreras, along with Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo, agreed to perform as the Three Tenors. The concert took place in Rome 1990, the day before the FIFA World Cup and was watched by over 800 million viewers. When a recording of the concert was released, it became the biggest selling classical album in history. Because of such enormous popularity of the concert and the album itself, they performed again at the FIFA World Cup in Los Angeles (1994), Paris (1998) and Yokohama (2002).
The Three Tenors regularly performed classic and operatic arias and had great success due to not only their incredible voices but also their absolutely likable personalities.
Concert in Teatro de Falla in Cadiz, 2002
Teatro de Falla, a striking architectural piece, stands in the middle of Plaza de Falla. It was built in 1871 by architect Garcia del Alamo and it is Europe’s oldest theatre.
In 2002 Jose Carreras gave a concert in Teatro de Falla, which was an opportunity of a lifetime, not only to attend the concert but to be in position to meet him in person and ask him several questions which later that same year I had published in the form of an article in a local magazine in Sydney.
Sources:
- jcarreras.com- Most comprehensive website on Jose Carreras
- Carreras, J., Singing from the Soul – An Autobiography, 1991, London: Souvenir Press.
Branka Cubrilo - Branka Cubrilo is a novelist, short story writer and a journalist. Her novels and short stories are published worldwide.
