Luisa Tetrazzini was an Italian dramatic coloratura soprano of great international fame. Tetrazzini "had a scintillating voice with a brilliant timbre and a range and agility well beyond the norm...". She enjoyed a highly successful operatic and concert career in Europe and America from the 1890s through to the 1920s. Her voice lives on in recordings made from 1904–1920. She wrote a memoir, My Life of Song, in 1921 and a treatise, How to Sing, in 1923. After retirement, she taught voice in her homes in Milan and Rome until her death.

Enrico Caruso was an Italian operatic first lyric tenor then dramatic tenor. He sang to great acclaim at the major opera houses of Europe and the Americas, appearing in a wide variety of roles that ranged from the lyric to the dramatic. One of the first major singing talents to be commercially recorded, Caruso made 247 commercially released recordings from 1902 to 1920, which made him an internationally popular entertainment star.