Talent versus hype
The Three Tenors’ fame was not made simply through the quality of their musicianship
We often take our musical icons for granted without considering the true basis of their greatness. Tom Service explores the fine line between talent and hype
Are they born or are they made? With the BBC’S Icons series a few weeks ago, seeking out the greatest human of the 20th century (Alan Turing was the public’s choice), we got to thinking on The Listening Service about the names in the classical music world that have an ‘iconic’ aura. Did they attain this through sheer talent, or instead through the circumstances of when and how they lived?
The question isn’t as heretical as it seems. Take an unquestioned embodiment of classical music fame, someone whose voice and image came to represent an entire genre: Maria Callas. Her performances changed the way entire repertoires were seen and sung; but without the power of the recording industry to promote her in the 1950s and ’60s, and the insatiable interest of the world’s media in her on- and o -stage lives, Callas the singer could never have become Callas the allconquering phenomenon.
In instrumental music, Jacqueline du Pré was catapulted to world fame thanks to her media exposure, her incendiary recordings and performances of Elgar’s Cello Concerto, and her life in the public eye with her husband Daniel Barenboim in the 1960s. The tragedy of her early death became part of her iconic story: like pop musicians who die too young – or like Mozart, Schubert and Mendelssohn – Du Pré’s was a talent that burned too brightly and was extinguished too soon.
And consider the cases of Nigel Kennedy and Luciano Pavarotti. There
was nothing new about recording Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, but that haircut and that bad-boy pseudo-pop-star persona conspired to create a millionsselling phenomenon in 1989. And Pavarotti’s performance of ‘Nessun Dorma’, along with the other two of the Three Tenors, took place at the
1990 World Cup in Italy. The Three Tenors’ global fame was made not simply through the quality of their musicianship, but also by the millions watching who then bought that CD.
One may suspect that in today’s digitally fractured era icons can’t be created in the same way. Yet at a certain royal wedding last year, the true star of the show wasn’t the couple themselves but the cello playing of Sheku Kannehmason, whose performances for the watching millions turned him into an overnight international sensation. Icons are indeed still being made.
And there’s something else that defines what all of these icons do, without which none of the media industry around them could work. It’s the unqiue intensity of their voices, and the individuality of their playing: the reason they escape the orbit of the conventional and attain the iconosphere is their searing ability to be completely, indelibly themselves. Our icons are exemplars of a life lesson we all need to hear: they should inspire us to be our own icons.
Tom Service explores how music works in The Listening Service on Sundays at 5pm