Salvatore Cardillo (20 February 1874 – 5 February 1947) was an

Italian-American Italian Americans () are Americans who have full or partial Italians, Italian ancestry. The largest concentrations of Italian Americans are in the urban Northeastern United States, Northeast and industrial Midwestern United States, Midwestern ...

composer. Born in

Naples Naples ( ; ; ) is the Regions of Italy, regional capital of Campania and the third-largest city of Italy, after Rome and Milan, with a population of 908,082 within the city's administrative limits as of 2025, while its Metropolitan City of N ...

, he studied piano and composition in Italy before emigrating in 1903 to the United States as a university graduate. His career encompassed songwriting and movie music. He died in New York. Cardillo's richly scored and still popular 1911 romance '' Core 'ngrato'' (''Ungrateful Heart'') — also known by its lyric ''Catarì, Catarì, pecchè me dici sti parole amare'' — was written in America to a text in Neapolitan by Alessandro Sisca (Riccardo Cordiferro); it is in fact the only famous Neapolitan song by an

immigrant. The song's first exponent was the operatic tenor

Enrico Caruso Enrico Caruso (, , ; 25 February 1873 – 2 August 1921) 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 r ...

, but it is not clear whether he commissioned it. Franco Corelli,

Luciano Pavarotti Luciano Pavarotti (, , ; 12 October 19356 September 2007) was an Italian operatic tenor who during the late part of his career crossed over into popular music, eventually becoming one of the most acclaimed tenors of all time. He made numerou ...

, Giuseppe di Stefano,

José Carreras Josep Maria Carreras Coll (; born 5 December 1946), better known as José Carreras (, ), is a Catalan operatic tenor from Spain who is particularly known for his performances in the operas of Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini. Born in Barcelona, ...

and, more recently, Roberto Alagna and Jonas Kaufmann are among the tenors to have included ''Core 'ngrato'' in their repertories. The composer also wrote the songs ''Barcarola'', to a text by Edoardo San Giovanni, and ''Oi luna'' (''O Silvery Moon''), to a text by Riccardo Cordiferro. These were published in 1921 as "Two Neapolitan Songs" by G. Schirmer Inc. in New York.

Bibliography

*Sciorra, Joseph. “Diasporic Musings on Veracity and Uncertainties of ‘Core ‘ngrato’,” "Neapolitan Postcards: The Canzone Napoletana as Transnational Subject," Ed. Goffredo Plastino and Joseph Sciorra. (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2016), 115–150. *Frasca, Simona. “Italian Birds of Passage: The Diaspora of Neapolitan Musicians in New York,” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). *Laird, Ross, et al., eds (2001). ''Brunswick Records: A Discography of Recordings, 1916-1931''. Westport: Greenwood Press. *Lavery, David (2002). ''Investigating the Sopranos''. New York: Columbia University Press.. 1874 births 1947 deaths Italian male songwriters Italian songwriters Italian emigrants to the United States {{songwriter-stub