Remembering Pavarotti

REMEMBERING PAVAROTTI
A Farewell to the Life of Our Dreams 
   By Paul Hertelendy, artssf.com. Week of Sept.  6-13, 2007. Vol. 10, No. 9
   The death of tenor Luciano Pavarotti, 71,  on Aug. 6 deprives us of arguably the greatest lyric tenor since at least World War One.
    He sparked a dual devotion---not just among the operaficionados, but also in a far broader public drawn to his teddy-bear charisma, comparable to figures like Babe Ruth.
     He was a late bloomer who never got to the San Francisco Opera till he was 32, well before his Met debut. Singing “La Bohème” that year at the SFO, he was a notable Rodolfo, but not a great Rodolfo. It was not till he reached 35 (an age when some tenors are already losing it) that the full bloom of his glorious voice evolved, along with that distinctive sonic texture that made him immediately identifiable on recordings.
     I interviewed him in 1967, shortly before his SFO debut, when he was not svelte, but not chubby yet either. And he was quite modest, still short of his stardom. He reminisced about his soccer career as a stalwart on a championship amateur team back in Modena, Italy and lamented the popularity of rock concerts , which drew “25 times” as many as came to his medium in that Mediterranean cradle of opera.
    Our last interview was in 1994, when he made his final Bay Area appearance in a jam-packed San Jose Arena concert. By then, weighing close to 300 pounds, he admitted sheepishly that he never felt as good singing as right after one of his (many) major reducing programs. Just as with Babe Ruth, keeping the weight down was a yo-yo adventure, the one opera in which he never succeeded for long. He was like a walking billboard for ingesting pasta, and lots of it. In his lighter periods, he was an adequate actor; in the others, he looked awkward enough that he told one stage director in rehearsal, “If you want me to sit down in this scene, I sit down. But then I do not get up again the rest of the scene!” 
    Puccini, Verdi, Donizetti, Bellini were all on his home turf with the Made-in-Italy label. He could float a celestial tone like no one else, prompting the SFO General Director Kurt Herbert Adler to dub him the “primissimo” tenor when he was featured on the cover of Time Magazine (words that prompted one rival tenor to cancel out of San Francisco). He also got a special San Francisco welcome in “La Bohème” on Oct. 1, 1969, when an earthquake hit during act three, on the phrase “Farewell to the life of our dreams,” as recounted by music critic Arthur Bloomfield. Pavarotti and soprano Dorothy Kirsten continued coolly, without  panic, drawing applause from the shaken audience.
    Pavarotti came back to San Francisco for many more seasons and many more roles, unlike his legendary predecessor Enrico Caruso, who in the wake of the disastrous 1906 quake vowed never to return. A comparison between the two singers is difficult, as the recording quality of Caruso’s era was so marginal (he died in 1921 at 48). But Pavarotti stood two or three inches taller---a significant advantage on stage, where not all sopranos are tiny---and he sang two decades longer on a broader arena, radiating his tones on disc, video, Christmas concerts, and stadium concerts. He starred in that Three Tenors package that swept the world in the 1990s, drawing, finally, audiences as big as rock concerts.
    All of this leaves a benchmark  against which the great tenors of the future will be measured.
    But we return again and again to the charming teddy-bear persona of the concert stage, with him holding a giant white handkerchief in hand, sometimes as a prop, sometimes just to wipe his bearded face as he grinned to his audiences, who were firmly in his lap. In some ways he was The Man, in others the vulnerable youth who attracted motherly hugs.
   He made us laugh, he made us weep, and he roused us with his cabalettas  that brought down the curtain. His “Nessun dorma” (No One Sleeps) from “Turandot” became a signature signoff. Just two Italian operas got the best of him vocally: Verdi’s “Aida” and “Otello” (eliciting the comment  “killer operas.”).
   But there are dozens of  others by which we recall him fondly and earnestly, from “Luisa Miller” to “Lucia,” from “Trovatore” to “Turandot.”
   Now he is gone, and it is farewell to the life of our dreams. But the memory will linger on as long as discs are played.
   Luciano Pavarotti, Tenor. Modena, Italy, 1935-2007.
   ©Paul Hertelendy 2007
    Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.