From Guardian Unlimited:Luciano Pavarotti
Operatic superstar blessed with a voice of pure gold
whose career was a triumph of marketing
Tom SutcliffeThursday September 6, 2007
The Italian tenor in full cry is what we mean when we say opera, which remains, in that sense, a man's world. The names of Caruso, Gigli, Pavarotti are code for operatic achievement, while the legendary divas they partnered only register with opera fans. Modern recording technology ensures that the spell-binding heroic expressiveness of great tenors can work its magic anywhere. Historic voices are for all time. Since the mechanisation of memory, we need no longer rely on the pallid words of critics or historians.
Luciano Pavarotti, who has died aged 71 of pancreatic cancer, grew up in the 1940s listening to the previous golden generation of tenor stars on record and radio. So the presence of the past underpinned his own recorded achievement as a singer. His family were enthusiastically musical and, aged four, he was apparently standing on the kitchen table singing the Duke of Mantua's La donna é mobile from Rigoletto as a party trick. He modelled himself on what he heard, and used recordings to take account of the competition, dead or alive, throughout his career.
Nature equipped him with one of the most individual, unmistakable and beautiful voices there has been. In his 50s, thanks to records and the increasing refinement of public address systems in the enormous, sometimes open-air concert venues where he performed, he became probably the richest opera singer in the history of music.
But his thriving career, in fact, coincided with the steady decline of Italian opera. The Pavarotti phenomenon was a triumph of marketing. His name was given to a men's perfume. His first wife, Adua Veroni (with whom he had three daughters, Lorenza, Cristina and Giuliana in the 1960s), launched Stage Door Opera Management in 1987, which became a leading Italian agency - though she confessed to "never being very fond of opera".
Pavarotti made his debut at the Teatro Municipale, Reggio Emilia, in northern Italy, on April 29 1961, in the part of Rodolfo in La Bohème, conducted by Francesco Molinari Pradelli. He became a superstar 11 years later, on February 17 1972, when he sang Tonio in Donizetti's delightful La Fille du Régiment at the New York Met. "I had to sing nine high Cs in a row before I won the public's attention," he said later.
After this Met triumph, Herbert Breslin took over his public relations and turned him into a television celebrity. A huge white handkerchief became his characteristic recital prop. Pavarotti and his warm knowing grin were soon familiar at every level of society. He was on the cover of Newsweek and Time magazines, and there were Pavarotti masterclasses on US television. He launched the Pavarotti Philadelphia international voice competition. His ease and potential on television was first demonstrated in 1963 to an audience of 15 million people on ITV's Sunday Night at the London Palladium, when he was standing in for Giuseppe di Stefano at Covent Garden. It was a role he frequently returned to at the Royal Opera House.
The operatic tenor is very much a 19th- and 20th-century phenomenon. The taste for Verdi and verismo that Pavarotti's remarkable gift helped sustain may not last forever. Until Bellini and Donizetti came along (some of whose high-lying bel canto tenor roles helped to reinforce Pavarotti's early fame), the opera world was dominated by castrati. These were adult males singing soprano in such heroic roles as Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, whose parents had (usually) collaborated with the Roman Catholic church in their castration, and who, in a few cases, garnered pop star-like fortunes. Even in the age of Verdi, however, there were no hysterical Italian fans rioting about tenors. But by the late 20th century the phenomenon of the three tenors, Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and José Carreras, helped opera compete a trifle longer with football as a vehicle of Italian social mobility.
Seldom in the history of opera would three such stars of the same voice have been seen together on stage, even for an impresario's gala. Carreras's illness clinched the gimmick. Each of the three earned so much money for a third less effort that the temptation was irresistible. If serious money can still be made singing songs a century old, perhaps opera cannot be written off yet - though Puccini, the last universally popular opera composer, died in 1926.
Pavarotti's voice will cast a shadow for years to come on new aspirants. Yet on stage he took no role composed later than 1926. That was not his fault. The flood of Italian music faltered and stopped. A few of the classless Italian and Neapolitan gems that served him as encores in recitals - like Volare and Un amore così grande - were postwar. But those thousands who filled his pockets and flocked to rain-sodden fields and unlovely arenas to hear him amplified through loudspeakers would not have been interested in songs from postwar operas - if there had been any popular Italian operas from the 1950s onwards, which there were not. His lavish and beautifully lyrical tenor needed appealing melodies.
Has any tenor ever used the text with more immaculate musical expressiveness? Verdi, Bellini, Donizetti and Puccini showed him off at his eloquent (and, as he aged, increasingly robust) best. He sang a little Richard Strauss - the Italian tenor in Der Rosenkavalier was perfect typecasting. He was sublime as both son and father in Mozart's Idomeneo, at different stages of his career. He learned a few extra parts until he turned 60 (Verdi's Don Carlo, Giordano's Andrea Chenier). But his repertoire was almost entirely a manageable range of roles that he had sung throughout his career.
Not for Pavarotti, therefore, the adventures of Domingo, equally successful and almost contemporary, who could study Tchaikovsky and Wagner minutely and turn out not quite idiomatic Russian and German. Pavarotti stuck to the tradition represented by well-recorded earlier giants like Caruso, Martinelli, Bjoerling, Bergonzi and Corelli - who, in turn, had stuck mainly to the Italian rep. He could apply his extraordinary ear, and polish and adjust his detailed approach so that the result was newly minted and fresh as a musical experience. He was an inspired perfectionist when it came to the fundamentals of his art: the ideal moulding of poetry to a heavenly line of music.
Let there be no mistake, Pavarotti really was a triumphantly fabulous artist. He never distorted the true colour and purity of the vowels that he was singing. His words were always limpidly clear, expressively registered and dramatic. Fans of Domingo would suggest that their man could act, whereas Pavarotti only sang. But acting is not something you do, it is something you are. Pavarotti acted not by demonstrating or showing off the characteristics of the part, but by defining its inward emotional essence in how he uttered the music and the text.
It was absolutely part of the authentic operatic tradition that he was never fluent at reading music. According to the Daily Telegraph's Rome correspondent in 1997, Pavarotti relied "on his ear and his own rudimentary form of annotation to learn a musical work". In the Corriere della Sera, he admitted he was not a musician: "I don't go in too deep. The musical score is one thing and the singing part is another. If you have the music in your head, and you sing it with your body, you'll be all right." He learned his songs by becoming familiar with the words, which he would print out in a notebook alongside signs showing the melody rising or falling. So much for the old operatic debate about whether words or music come first.
Pavarotti could make the music and words adhere to each other completely naturally. Both were in a sense laid on to his large frame in a way that made their delivery second nature. This wonderful quality of acting out the meaning, including the dramatic meaning, through the words as musically realised was fundamental to his genius as a performer. The natural beauty of the sound he commanded was, in the end, more significant than the fact that he could sing top notes far more effortlessly than the hard-working and supremely competent Domingo (who could never sing as high comfortably anyway).
Pavarotti was born in Modena, northern Italy. His father, Fernando, was a baker with a vast record collection who sang tenor in his spare time in the Corale Rossini, a local chorus; his mother worked in a tobacco factory. The boy was often looked after by his grandmother. It was a close family; even much later, Pavarotti cancelled performances at Covent Garden because of his father's illness. In fact, both his parents lived on into the 21st century. The young Luciano joined the Corale Rossini and sang alongside his father in his mid-teens. In 1955, aged 19, he was with them at the International Eisteddfod in Llangollen, where they won top prize. He attended a teachers' training college to become a PE teacher. But when he qualified, the family took a vote on allowing him to study singing, and agreed to his wish, no doubt partly because it was fulfilling his father's own dream.
He took lessons in Modena from the tenor Arrigo Pola before moving on to Ettore Campogalliani in Mantua, an experienced repetiteur and voice coach who absolutely understood the way in which Italian tenor singing ideally handles the passagio. This is the name for the part of the voice above top G where the tenor has to turn the vocal sound so that its natural resonance can glow and vibrate without forcing and without overstressing the weight of breath support behind the lyrical vibrato. The consistently elegant, expressively refulgent way that Pavarotti sang through the passagio was the secret of the remarkable longevity of his voice as an instrument.
But the truth is he was a natural - born into an ideal situation, where there was ample sensitivity and musical intelligence around him about his chosen art. Of course, such an impeccable technique could not be acquired through lessons. The beautiful and natural sound that Pavarotti started out with simply needed to be polished and strengthened.
In 1961, still only 25, Pavarotti won the Achille Peri competition, and married Adua Veroni after an engagement of eight years. The reward for winning the competition was to make his debut in Reggio Emilia. Over the next 30 months, he sang at provincial opera houses in Italy, the Netherlands, Austria and Ireland. He was Rodolfo, the Duke in Rigoletto, Alfredo in La Traviata, Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor and Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly. In Dublin, he was spotted by a Covent Garden talent scout and engaged as understudy to di Stefano for the role of Rodolfo.
In fact, Pavarotti did the whole run of performances - except for one sung by di Stefano. His Royal Opera House debut, on September 21 1963, was heard by the Guardian's Philip Hope-Wallace: Pavarotti "made a good impression ... he seemed modest, sang with musicianly feeling and uses a pretty, clear, lyrical voice to some effect". His Scala Milan debut (in the same role, conducted by Herbert von Karajan) was still two years away. Then the pace of his career quickened. He sang Edgardo in Lucia in Amsterdam; in July 1964, he was Idamante at Glyndebourne (opposite Richard Lewis's Idomeneo for 12 performances), later declaring, "What I learned there was to sing piano" - from Jani Strasser, the legendary head of music, who taught him the role.
At 28, Pavarotti's style was impeccable, the ease and beauty with which the text was realised were utterly irresistible, the perfection of support and focus at the top were a model. Listening today to the recording of that August's Prom performance (it is still available on CD), the contrast with Richard Lewis's muddy Anglo-Italian demonstrates exactly what was going to make Pavarotti a world-beater. The conductor John Pritchard recorded Idomeneo again 19 years later in Vienna, with Pavarotti in the title role.
In February 1965 he made his US debut in Miami, as Edgardo to Joan Sutherland's Lucia, conducted by her husband Richard Bonynge, a team with whom he would make a large number of important recordings. He returned to Covent Garden with Sutherland for La Sonnambula (as Elvino), and toured Australia with the Sutherland-Williamson company in L'Elisir d'Amore (Nemorino became a signature role for him), Traviata, Lucia and Sonnambula. In 1966 Abbado conducted him in I Capuleti e i Montecchi at La Scala. He had performed the Duke in Rigoletto with Tullio Serafin at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo during the earliest stages of his career, and now he repeated the role with Gianandrea Gavazzeni. Later, in 1969, at La Scala, he also sang Des Grieux in Massenet's Manon (in Italian).
But what mattered most in 1966 was his legendary appearance with Sutherland at Covent Garden in La Fille du Régiment in June. The point was that he sang the high Cs in full voice, though Donizetti had expected them to be sung in head voice. Full voice means without any adjustment towards falsetto or even modified falsetto, the sound when the soft palette is pressed down. Head voice would have meant not going into the passagio and sustaining that sort of modified shout, which is how tenors make their top notes exciting. But Pavarotti had a relaxed natural vibrato right through, so there was no need for him to mix in any kind of lightness or lack of body at the very top: his singing was all of a piece. This ability was a sort of piratical feat, and Decca (Pavarotti's recording company) used the title King of the High Cs on a record he made. The success and fame of this achievement for a time helpfully focused his work on the bel canto repertoire in which Bonynge and Sutherland were contemporary pioneers, with roles like Arturo in Bellini's I Puritani and Fernando in Donizetti's La Favorita.
Considering the length of his career, and the flair with which he recognised work that was right for his gifts, the fact that Pavarotti stayed with a particular corner of the repertoire at such an important developmental stage may well have strengthened further his extraordinary technique. A period devoted to lighter, more lyrical roles was the foundation for a carefully calculated expansion of his repertoire. Roles he later undertook included Riccardo in Un Ballo in Maschera, Ernani, Rodolfo in Luisa Miller, Manrico in Il Trovatore, Cavaradossi in Tosca, Calaf in Turandot (which gave him his World Cup aria, Nessun Dorma), Idomeneo and Enzo in La Gioconda. After the success of his high Cs at the Met and the engagement of Breslin, he started to extend the number and scale of recitals that he undertook, starting with one in Liberty, Missouri, in February 1973.
Pavarotti performed in so many provincial centres all over the world that his recognisability, popularity and fame registered everywhere. Sales of his records were enormous, even if recitals reduced his availability for work in important opera houses. The range of roles he sang regularly or frequently on stage was much more limited than his recorded legacy suggests. Recitals and, eventually, epic amplified solo performances in arenas accommodating thousands of listeners, were a major factor in his working career.
Photographs from the 1960s show that Pavarotti was not thin - though he was a handsome, if usually unaristocratic, figure on stage. By the early 1970s, he was significantly overweight. But his father, too, cut a bulky shape, which was clearly in the genes. Reporters interviewing Pavarotti always referred to this. When asked his weight, he would reply, "Less than before," and when challenged what exactly that was would respond, "More than now". He wrote his autobiography, My Own Story (1981), and took part in a movie, Yes, Giorgio (1982).
After 1983, with Breslin's encouragement, he teamed up with Tibor Rudas, the promoter of Frank Sinatra and Neil Diamond concerts. He sang to 7,500 people in a heated tent in Atlantic City. The fee for similar occasions would be $100,000 and a percentage of the ticket sales. In 1984, he sang to 20,000 at Madison Square Garden, New York.
During the 1980s, he sang only half as many opera performances each year as Domingo, and the latter's repertoire of roles was twice as large. But Pavarotti made enormous amounts of money, in part by turning himself into a painter, which had long been a hobby. A print of one of his paintings fetched $2,500, though he was sued by the author of a how-to-draw book, who claimed he had copied her examples.
Ventures that were not artistic successes included directing opera (a Favorita at La Fenice in Venice, after which he explained, "It was not much fun. I was too nervous.") and singing the title role in Otello in Chicago with Georg Solti conducting. The performances and public rehearsals, in Chicago and later Carnegie Hall, were recorded and edited on to a CD but the result was unimpressive. His Radames, in Aida at Covent Garden in the 1980s, was also unconvincing, with his enormous frame covered up in a tent-like frock.
His involvement with various younger singers, some of whom had won prizes at his competition, only occasionally led them towards successful careers. Some of these proteges were very close to him, as were some of his secretaries. He had sung at almost every opera house of note, during a longer than 40-year career. Finally, though, the voice was not quite living up to expectations.
His first marriage came to an end when, in his 60s, he took up with his former personal assistant Nicoletta Mantovani, a woman 35 years his junior - their wedding, in 2003, was celebrated with a banquet for 600 guests, including Sting, Bono and Donatella Versace. They had a daughter, Alice.
He began to cancel performances that looked as if they should have been final appearances, and announced that he would retire on his 70th birthday in 2005. His schedule of 40 mainly concert performances in 2003 was rumoured to earn him $35m. He did 34 Three Tenors concerts around the world between 1990 and 2003. But his medical condition began to interfere with his plans, and after starting a farewell world tour in 2005 he discovered he had pancreatic cancer.
An operation was declared successful and Pavarotti announced he would return to the stage in 2007 after convalescing. This summer he had been working on a recording of sacred songs to be released in 2008, and teaching a select group of students. His last performance of a staged opera was at the Met on March 14 2004. In February 2006 he opened the Winter Olympics in Turin, singing Nessun Dorma transposed to a more suitable pitch for a tenor of his years.
Pavarotti's kind of astounding international celebrity made it difficult to stop. According to Decca, he was the most popular artist in the history of the classical recording industry. Perhaps, he was even more famous than Caruso. He was probably the last great lyric tenor in a noble line: his kind of music - by Puccini, Verdi and other Italian operatic greats - is increasingly distant from contemporary taste. When he was born, Mascagni and Giordano were still alive and writing: they have had no Italian operatic heirs. Pavarotti possessed a voice of pure gold that matured in strength and depth of colour as he aged, without losing its innate ravishing beauty, precision and expressiveness. He was a unique phenomenon.
· Luciano Pavarotti, tenor, born October 12 1935; died September 6 2007
