The Paradoxes of Pavarotti
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In England, where his international singing career began in the less politically correct 1960s, the press called him “Fat Lucy” and even “Lucky Luciano.” In his homeland Italy, headlines referred in Italian to “Big Luciano,” in homage to his fame in the English-speaking world. Yet the lyric tenor Luciano Pavarotti, who died of pancreatic cancer this week at age 71 in Modena, Italy, was a complex entity, impossible to sum up in a nickname or a headline.
First among the paradoxes of Pavarotti was that this native of the northern Italian city of Modena, the industrial fiefdom for car makers like Ferrari, Bugatti, and Maserati, sold millions of CDs of Southern Italian songs. Unlike past popular singers of this repertory, like the Naples-born Enrico Caruso (1873–1921) or the American Mario Lanza (1921–1959), of Sicilian origin, Pavarotti remained a Northerner through and through in a country where a popular saying goes that “anything south of Florence is Africa.” Yet to the outside world, Pavarotti managed to represent the caricature of a sunny Italian tenor, obsessed with vino, women, and pasta.
Of the three, his seductive force with women was perhaps the most extraordinary, despite heft which at times tipped the scales at 350 pounds. Charming, lively, and humorous, Pavarotti could convey the personal charm of a Latin lover onstage in frisky outings like Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” in which on a DVD from Deutsche Grammophon, he and the much-maligned American soprano Kathleen Battle make a convincing romantic duo. Opera is the art of transcending improbabilities through the magic of music, but Pavarotti added the special capacity to charm audiences out of preconceptions.
Another major paradox is the oft-cited accusation that Pavarotti could not read music, repeated in the bitter memoirs of the tenor’s ex-manager Herbert Breslin, “The King and I: The Uncensored Tale of Luciano Pavarotti’s Rise to Fame by His Manager, Friend and Sometime Adversary” (Broadway Books). Whatever Pavarotti’s skills in sight-reading —according to many accounts he was a slow reader at best — his innate musicality should not be in question after hundreds of recordings. In a 1998 interview with Libération, he expressed his curiosity for 20th century music like Janáček’s “From the House of the Dead,” and confessed that he “loves and has a feeling for” works by Arnold Schoenberg. Still, he admitted, his own voice was “made for the 19th century.”
In a range of demanding works from that era, Pavarotti would regularly rise to the occasion, especially when working with the finest conductors, a sure sign of musical command. Through convenience or commercial necessity, he agreed to record with unidiomatic podium mediocrities like Richard Bonynge, the husband of soprano Joan Sutherland who was contractually guaranteed to conduct all of her recordings, or the routine accompanist Leone Magiera. Yet on a legendary 1967 Deutsche Grammophon DVD of Verdi’s “Requiem” conducted by Herbert von Karajan, Pavarotti shines alongside superhuman colleagues like the soprano Leontyne Price, in what remains one of the best-filmed classical performances ever, directed with entomological attention by Henri-Georges Clouzot. Pavarotti’s Decca CD of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” with Karajan is also compelling in its uncommon spaciousness.
Another great conductor with whom Pavarotti shone was Bergamo-born Gianandrea Gavazzeni (1909–1996), a true connoisseur of the Italian repertory whose CDs of Mascagni’s “Cavalleria rusticana” (Decca) and “L’ amico Fritz” (EMI) are among Pavarotti’s best. Carlos Kleiber, one of the most demanding of modern conductors, left a DVD issued by various bootleg labels of a 1979 La Scala performance of Puccini’s “La Bohème” showing uncanny refinement and grace. In encounters with other gifted maestros such as the Rome-born Oliviero de Fabritiis (Boito’s “Mefistofele” on Decca); Hungary’s István Kertész (Rossini’s “Stabat mater” on Decca); and Claudio Abbado (Bellini’s “I Capuleti e I Montecchi” on Gala and an aria CD, “Pavarotti Premieres,” on SONY) the tenor is exemplary. His even tone, breath control, and thrusting energy make for exciting singing, even when maintaining an ardent tone seems the main focus of his performances, an approach also favored by his idol, the tenor Giuseppe di Stefano.
Not every encounter with a major conductor was thus blessed. Pavarotti’s work with the fiery maestro Georg Solti suffered from their discordant approaches. A new memoir by the flutist Donald Peck, “The Right Place, the Right Time!: Tales of Chicago Symphony Days” (Indiana University Press), expresses the horror that musicians felt on seeing Pavarotti sit down to calmly eat a banana during a recording take of Verdi’s “Otello” while others performed around him.
This outwardly phlegmatic approach no doubt masked real anxieties. Pavarotti achieved superstardom in 1972 at the Metropolitan Opera as “King of the High C’s” in Donizetti’s “Daughter of the Regiment,” yet in television performances, audiences could perceive the sheer terror in his eyes before he had to hit high notes, as, for example, at the end of Act I of “La Bohème.” Belying the jolly, glad-handing persona he portrayed in the 1982 screen flop “Yes, Giorgio,” Pavarotti showed signs of being a pensive, essentially solitary person, when he told the “Libération” journalist in 1978 that he adhered to no political party: “Everyone has the right to believe as he wishes. It’s like with philosophers; you cannot set Hegel and Fichte in opposition to Kant and Aristotle.”
Some fans will always think of Pavarotti as the merry fat man with heavily painted black eyebrows and a white napkin in hand, the semaphore symbols he adopted late in life for concerts. Yet the more we listen to his actual recorded legacy, the more there is to admire.
