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===== LUCIANO PAVAROTTI =====

Modena, Italy, October 12, 1935 — Modena, Italy, September 5, 2007

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Luciano Pavarotti
OPERA NEWS Archives
	
Luciano Pavarotti has died at the age of 71. The tenor, the image of opera to millions of people for more than forty years, died of pancreatic cancer, said his manager Terri Robson.

Pavarotti underwent cancer surgery in 2006 in New York, and was admitted to a Modena hospital last month with a high fever. It had become clear in recent days that the tenor's health was deteriorating rapidly, as Italian news outlets reported that Pavarotti had decamped to his home, and was surrounded by friends and family. Earlier this week the Italian government's ministry of culture announced that he was to be the inaugural recipient of a national prize in honor of his work promoting the country's culture.

“The Maestro fought a long, tough battle against the pancreatic cancer which eventually took his life,” Robson said in an email statement to The Associated Press. “In fitting with the approach that characterized his life and work, he remained positive until finally succumbing to the last stages of his illness.”

How would posterity remember Luciano Pavarotti, one wonders, if he had merely pursued a conventional opera career instead of crossing over big-time into the popular culture? As one of the greatest voices of his era, certainly — an instantly recognizable sound that came to dominate the music world during the last third of the twentieth century. Anyone who heard Pavarotti's opera debut in 1961, at age twenty-five as Rodolfo in La Bohème in a tiny opera house in Reggio Emilia, might have predicted what was to come. The performance was taped on the sly by the young bass who sang Colline, and the now legendary recording still circulates as a precious artifact in the underground. (The tenor's fee for this auspicious debut apparently amounted to around $50.) Already his liquid tenor is utterly distinctive, its heady appeal securely in place, and the urgent need to communicate fairly leaps out of the speakers.

Indeed, Pavarotti's rise to the top was rapid and decisive. He reached Covent Garden as early as 1963 and Glyndebourne a year later, soon making debuts at La Scala (1965), San Francisco (1967) and the Metropolitan Opera (1968) in such touchstone lyric roles as Rodolfo, Edgardo in Lucia and Alfredo in La Traviata. By then he had been taken under the wing of Joan Sutherland and Richard Bonynge, who introduced the young tenor to their record company, British Decca. Pavarotti remained faithful to the label, which made him a prolifically recorded and vigorously promoted artist until the end of his career.

Pavarotti's first solo disc was released in 1969. It was a collection of Donizetti and Verdi arias carefully chosen to introduce this youthful voice's most impressive qualities, which remained consistent and intact almost to the very end of his career. Conrad L. Osborne reviewed the record in High Fidelity magazine at the time, and his analysis is so astute and cogently observed that one can do no better than to quote him at length. "Pavarotti shows a meaty, wide-ranged lyric tenor, and a technique that is sufficiently complete to make him the most accomplished tenor to come out of Italy in a number of years…. This is especially evident when the voice moves from the middle into the upper range, where Pavarotti manages to avoid the sudden, gulped cover that most of his colleagues seem to consider a perfectly satisfactory solution of the classic problem. He does not overweight the voice, and he preserves a true open vowel formation, without letting it become spread and white, à la di Stefano. Intonation is excellent, the top is secure at least through the C, and the tone even takes on, from time to time, the kind of spin and movement that bespeaks real freedom — the true vocal vibrato…. Further, Pavarotti sings with a clean, well-knit line and with a relish for the words — not so much as dramatic meaning but as pure sound; the beauty of the Italian language is restored."

Osborne went on to point out the one serious flaw in Pavarotti's technical armory, his inability to achieve an authentic mezza voce. Instead, he generally resorts to a breathy, unsupported falsetto when one expects to hear the ravishing, elegantly spun true piano sound so effortlessly produced by classically trained voices of an earlier generation. It was a defect that he never managed to correct, but with so many assets unavailable to his tenor competitors, Pavarotti could afford this one blemish in his vocal technique. Most of his more casual admirers probably never even noticed it.

Most great singers have one defining moment, a spectacular performance that thrusts them solidly into the limelight, and Pavarotti's big career breakthrough came with Donizetti's La Fille du Régiment at the Metropolitan Opera in 1972. He had already sung the role of Tonio at Covent Garden with Joan Sutherland in the same production as far back as 1966, but nothing special had come of it. Perhaps the delirious reaction at the Met had something to do with that audience's traditional adoration of sheer glorious sound above all other qualities in a singer, a phenomenon that made such vocal prodigies as Caruso, Ponselle, Flagstad and Tebaldi more beloved at the Met than anywhere else in the world. It might also be that by 1972, Pavarotti had just entered into his absolute vocal prime, when nailing those famous nine high Cs in Tonio's Act I aria seemed the easiest thing in the world for him. The ingenuous country-bumpkin aspects of the role also presented him with the opportunity to capitalize on a stage personality that his fans would find increasingly irresistible, that of the oversized but vulnerable hero who in this case cavorted about the stage like an adorable toy soldier.

So the full package contained the choicest and freshest goods, handsomely wrapped, ready for marketing and eagerly accepted by the public. Pavarotti had plenty of competition thirty-five years ago, especially among an older generation that still had much to offer — Richard Tucker, Franco Corelli, Nicolai Gedda, Alfredo Kraus, Carlo Bergonzi and Jon Vickers, among others, not to mention such established younger tenors as Plácido Domingo and José Carreras. At first it seemed as though Pavarotti would simply add one more welcome voice to the mix, but soon it became clear that this singer had wider career ambitions than merely carving out his own special niche in the standard Italian–French lyric repertory.

The catalyst appeared in the person of Herbert Breslin, a shrewd classical artists' manager and publicity agent who had started handling Pavarotti's professional affairs in 1967. That huge Met success with La Fille du Régiment five years later indicated to Breslin that his client possessed a potential beyond anyone's wildest dreams, and it was just waiting to be tapped. Breslin subsequently became Pavarotti's principal enabler for the remainder of the tenor's best vocal years, a love–hate relationship that resulted in an amazing upward spiral of fame, celebrity projects and crossover events in the world's operas houses, recital stages, arenas, or any large public space in which a concert could be held. It all led to an unprecedented career that made everyone connected with it very rich, and Breslin wrote a whole book telling his side of the story, The King and I. Even if much is inevitably left out, few "tell-all" tales in the ever-so-polite world of classical music have been related quite so frankly.

The media explosion began innocently enough, surely ignited by the first-ever "Live from the Met" telecast, La Bohème with Pavarotti and Renata Scotto in 1977. That high-culture event turned out to be a bigger success than anyone had expected, one that presumably attracted a larger audience than any previously televised live opera. A few evenings later, both Domingo and Pavarotti attended a performance of Tosca at the Met. A few fans noticed Domingo entering the auditorium and gave him a polite round of applause as he went down the aisle; many more recognized Pavarotti, fresh from his Bohème telecast, and he received an ovation. The lessons learned from that public-relations incident were not lost on either tenor.

Perhaps at that very moment, the seeds for the Three Tenors phenomenon were planted, although at the time no one could have suspected it. For Pavarotti, the path to that 1990 mega-event was paved with an increasing number of sold-out stadium recitals, a gradual but carefully planned expansion of his opera repertory, a flood of new recordings, the establishment of his own international voice competition, a series of televised master classes, a Mario Lanza-styled Hollywood movie about a famous opera singer titled Yes, Giorgio, and guest appearances on national TV shows, all of it greatly increasing his visibility beyond the regular operagoing public.

The career momentum never waned, and the reasons why were not difficult to fathom. Even when Pavarotti went out to sing on automatic pilot, his voice seldom sounded less than golden, while his boyish charm and a stream of ad-libbed one-liners never seemed to fail him. The one serious miscalculation was Yes, Giorgio, a major box-office flop in 1981, partly because of the stale script and partly because the star turned in such an unexpectedly stiff onscreen performance. If nothing else, though, the movie's finale featured Pavarotti singing "Nessun dorma," from Puccini's Turandot, an aria that was soon to become his signature piece.

To offset the impression that Pavarotti was rapidly becoming more of a media entertainer than a serious singer, there were new opera roles to challenge him. As a young beginner in 1964, the tenor had sung Idamante in Mozart's Idomeneo at Glyndebourne, and in 1982 he took on the title role in the Met's first-ever production of the opera. His performance was a critical and popular success and earned Pavarotti a degree of musical respect that many connoisseurs had not previously accorded him.

Unfortunately, there were also a few bad mistakes, one of the biggest being a concert version of Otello with the Chicago Symphony, conducted by Georg Solti and recorded live by Decca. It was the only time Pavarotti ever sang the complete role, which stretched his lyric tenor farther than it could comfortably manage to go. Worse, the performances were a sorry spectacle, complete with a hastily constructed onstage prompter's box and a table of refreshments laid out for the visibly nervous tenor, who spent his non-singing moments with his head buried underneath a large hot towel. Few great singers had ever made themselves look so ridiculous, and operagoers who truly treasured this once-in-a-lifetime voice despaired. "There is nothing left for us to do except to be clowns," Pavarotti had once idly remarked to Beverly Sills in San Francisco while facing a crowd of screaming fans demanding a third encore, and by the late 1980s there was a real danger that he would indeed elect to play the clown.

Then, in 1990, the Three Tenors burst upon the world. The first gathering of José Carreras, Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti was mainly planned as a lark to celebrate the World Cup soccer finals in Rome and to salute Carreras, who had recently made a miraculous recovery from leukemia. The proceeds went to charity, but after the concert was released on disc and became the biggest bestselling classical record of all time, the tenors took steps to ensure that their future reunions would net them a seven-figure dollar fee apiece, plus the all-important royalties from the record sales that they had waived the first time around. But more than the financial arrangements had changed. A rehearing of that first Three Tenors concert reveals an exuberant spontaneity and innocent enjoyment missing from the cynically calculated sequels, in which three electronically amplified, million-dollar superstars give depressingly mechanical renditions of overexposed easy-listening favorites.

Even by the most charitable standards, the final phase of Pavarotti's career was a sad spectacle, as his opera appearances become more infrequent and the crossover projects increasingly tacky. Life-long efforts to control his considerable girth seemed to be abandoned, heavy applications of black hair dye and makeup only added to the sorry sight, and serious health problems impeded his mobility, as well as leading to canceled or postponed projects and contracted appearances. The most humiliating of all was the clumsily mismanaged 2004 Met farewell as Cavaradossi in Tosca ("The Fat Man Won't Sing," ran a headline in The New York Post), as the audience watched a great opera career stumble to its end. Although the famous voice could still be recognized as the same amazing instrument described by Osborne on that first recital disc released thirty-five years earlier, it was now a shadow of its former glory.

However unhappily Pavarotti ended his singing career, history will surely remember him kindly, not only for the glorious voice in its prime but for a performing spirit that, despite missteps and poor judgments, was always generously bestowed by a cheerful, outgoing personality with an infectious musical appeal that few could resist. It's been said that the Three Tenors introduced a new audience to opera, but it's more likely that this cash cow remained strictly a crossover pop act and was accepted as such. Pavarotti by himself, on the other hand, even when he lent himself to trash, was the real thing — with that voice how could he be otherwise? One can easily believe that innumerable receptive ears never before exposed to an operatically trained voice were attracted, intrigued and very likely wanted to hear more from a singer whose song seemed to be for everyone. In that respect alone, Pavarotti's unique contribution to opera history was incalculable. As for the sheer glory of his inimitable sound, there are hundreds of opera CDs, DVDs and archival videos to celebrate that precious gift, not to mention an infectious love of communicating in song that places Pavarotti securely among the immortals.

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