The long goodbye
As Pavarotti celebrates his 70th birthday, a life- long fan reviews his 50-year career and begs him, please, to quit now
Luciano Pavarotti blew out 70 candles on his birthday cake yesterday. As his millions of fans wish him many happy returns, he can congratulate himself on a career as one of the greatest tenors of operatic history, with a fame rivalled only by that of Enrico Caruso.
But it’s time to say goodbye to his glory. He gave up the stage last year, and his live appearances now only require him to croon a few arias into a microphone. He has embarked on what is billed as a farewell world tour, which will conclude in New York later in 2006. Still, with opera stars like Big Lucy, you never know. They find giving up very hard, a sort of death. And so there are farewells, further farewells, very last farewells and positively final farewells, as well as the odd return by public demand. Pavarotti may be bidding his public an official adieu, but that doesn’t mean we’ve heard the last of him.
I wish it did. I don’t enjoy listening to him now — the voice is in marked decline and his singing has inevitably coarsened with age. I’d go farther than that, and remark that one of the ironies of his career is that the pinnacle of his fame, in the wake of Nessun dorma and the 1990 World Cup Three Tenors jamboree, came when he was well past his prime.
I was lucky enough to hear him in the 1960s and
’ 70s in La Boheme, Lucia di Lammermoor, La Fille du regiment, Luisa Miller and La Favorita, and the pirate recordings of those performances confirm my memories of a focus and clarity of projection, a ringing splendour of tone that remain matchless in my experience. What the arena crowds were cheering in the 1990s was merely a cleverly engineered facsimile of that miracle, combined with a calculated exploitation of a star personality — the pasta-stuffed girth, the dazzling smile, the bushy eyebrows, the white hanky, the way with the ladies.
There were moments, yes, when he could still sing wonderfully — at a last recital at Covent Garden in 1997, he shed the years and sang some simple Tosti numbers with all his old genius. But to those of us who remember, so much else that he’s uttered has seemed comparatively inflexible and effortful.
“ Genius” is a big word, which should be used carefully. Connoisseurs will never rate Pavarotti as the most elegant or subtle interpreter among tenors — they look to Carlo Bergonzi for that. Nor did he have a voice as romantically beautiful as the young Jose Carreras. Marvellous as his technique of vocal production was, I wonder whether he ever commanded quite the flexibility of the phenomenal Juan Diego Florez. And for sheer versatility, musicianship, consistent excellence and shining nobility of soul, he can’t hold a candle to his great rival Placido Domingo, who at 64 is still a force to be reckoned with.
But Pavarotti had charm, and therein lay his genius. You didn’t need to be a connoisseur to get the point. He crossed over without even thinking about it — like Caruso, like Kathleen Ferrier or Bryn Terfel, there was an instantly distinctive timbre to his voice, as well as a sheer joy in the physical act of singing that made audiences love him whether he was performing a Verdi aria or some trashy pop ballad. That’s why his magic worked in demotic stadiums as well as it did in aristocratic opera houses.
He says that he wants to teach once he has stopped performing, but although there will doubtless be plenty of takers queuing up to discover his secrets, I wonder how much he is usefully capable of passing on. I imagine he is one of those singers whose technique is largely instinctive, or at least that he can’t cogently analyse in words how he produces the sound. His supreme gifts aren’t things that can be learnt or imitated — Pavarotti’s singing was not the result of nurture so much as a freak of nature, an inexplicable phenomenon at which one can only marvel.