With his unmistakeable muscular tenor, Pavarotti was classical music’s superstar. Almost single-handedly, he took opera to the Anglo masses, after FIFA (and BBC TV) adopted his stirring Nessum Dorma aria, from Puccini’s Turandot, for Italia 90, the football World Cup tournament.
Pavarotti’s recordings, followed by those of the Three Tenors (viz Pavarotti and his two only slightly less stellar contemporaries, Domingo and Carreras), helped power a (short-lived) upsurge in the popularity of opera, an art form usually seen as far too exclusive. For a few years in the early 1990s, Pavarotti was a bona fide pop star.
Which might have tempted some opera buffs to sneer. But, unlike the army of opera-lite singers, both male and female, who have since attempted to supply the same market, Pavarotti was the real deal – he’d already spent an entire career as a kosher opera singer, a top draw in the top opera houses of the world. He’d been equally at home on the set of La Scala or the Metropolitan Opera House as he had been playing to classic-lite sell-out audiences at the Royal Albert Hall or Hyde Park.
Pavarotti’s talent dwarfed that of the successor generation whose popopera careers have been built on his success - modern pretenders who appear from nowhere at regular intervals, all fine voices and talented performers, but irredeemably lightweight when heard in a blind test alongside the real thing. Why anyone would listen to such singers when they could listen to Pavarotti, singing the same repertoire, immeasurably more convincingly, is a mystery. Well, no, it’s not really: it’s testament to the power of marketing.
Pavarotti recorded many complete operas in a long career stretching from the 1950s to well beyond the 1990s. The best known is his transcendent performance as Rodolfo, alongside the great soprano Mirella Freni in Puccini’s La Boheme. It’s highly recommended as a first disc for grown-ups tempted to try some opera, although absolute beginners might be better served by any of the three outstanding compilation discs which made Pavarotti such a crossover success - Essential Pavarotti, Essential Pavarotti 2, and Tutto Pavarotti.
Though, inevitably, his voice had developed some rough edges, Pavarotti was still the benchmark tenor as he started saying farewell. And still the biggest star in the operatic firmament. By a mile.
May he rest in peace.
Gerry Smith
Thursday 6 September 2007
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