Missing Pavarotti
NewsWatching the television rerun of Ron Howard’s Pavarotti’s biopic reminded me how rare it is for a huge personality to survive on a livingroom screen. A couple of clips from Jonas Kaufmann’s Christmas shows demonstrate the diminution to best effect. Kaufmann on stage can project to great distances. Close-up on screen he is no more exceptional than the common run of seasonal entertainment.
Pavarotti, near or far, transfixes. I remember him touching, across a crowded room at the Savoy Hotel, the personal space of every person who had turned out to witness his London comeback. He had been banned from Covent Garden in the 1980s after claiming to be ‘indisposed’ when he was displayed in all the papers on a Hawaiian beach with an anonymous admirer. John Tooley, Covent Garden’s old-Guards administrator, huffed and puffed about contract violation. Luciano said he’d never sing at Covent Garden again.
And here he was once more, under new opera management, larger than life – much larger – happy to be back and with a look of wonderment on his face at every question he didn’t want to answer. The wonderment just grew when he opened his mouth to sing: is that really me?
The critical wisdom of the day was that he couldn’t act. Just watch that face: every expression in the Shakespeare manual, tragic and comic and then some. So long since he’s gone, almost 15 years, and the greatness shines through every frame.
I wouldn’t idealize him ( look at Placido Domingo, another tenor with “a huge personality” from the same generation), but his genuine comunicativeness, his power to touch so many people with his voice is something to marvel at and is very rare nowadays. Jonas Kaufmann can’t fill up the screen as Pavarotti did because as a festive “popular” singer he seems too embarrassed with himself most of the time and has to fake spontaneity in a way that aggravates the cringe.
Complete and utter rubbish. You’re loving in a fantasy!
My thanks to the BBC for screening this excellent film.
I certainly miss him enormously, and that film brought it all back for he really was one in a million and in such hard times. My Italian teacher from my East End of London school is still alive at a 100, and is from and in Modena. The last time I went was 2016, I went to Luciano’s home, now a museum, and I know the Cathedral so well where Luciano”s funeral took place. Okay, not the greatest of operatic actors but then that was the case with so many of them – a different era until the lijes of producers lije Jonathan Miller and Nicholas Hytner came along. Yes, his facial expressions said it all.
Nothing fake there and expressions of utter sincerity. Then how those expressions were translated into both his speech, even in is his idiomatic and enthusiastic way of speaking English.
But most of all through his singing voice, built on a bed of solid vocal technique and a commitment to the words where you could hear those expressions so clearly. It wasn’t all voice! His artistry was second to none, and I am grateful to be one of a generation as a music student to have seen and him live in the theatre. Same with some of our own British singers, except they didn’t go mega-global as Pavarotti did – Janet Baker, Heather Harper, Josephine Veasey, Neil Howlett, Alexander Young, Josephine Barstow, Sarah Walker et al…
His voice is the best that I have heard, his singing went right to your heart. So moving!
As well as his voice there was great sincerity and desire to study his art.
A very enjoyable reminiscence. Thank you so much. Pavarotti was a kind, genuine man, it seems, and in his interactions with the public generally open and ‘real.’ How different from some of the sylized male singers since then. I particularly liked your accurate comparison with Jonas Kaufmann.
Sadly as a pro musician who worked with him he was anything but a kind genuine man. But what a great singer with a fabulous voice.
He was very good, but in a pretty limited repertoire, so let’s keep it all in perspective. Domingo took on some of the great Wagnerian roles, for example, which Pav could not or would not do.
I always wonder how Lohengrin and Walter would have sounded with Pavarotti’s voice….
It is a strange assertion that someone has a limited repertoire because it does not contain German roles, although he sang all the Puccini, Verdi, Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, and other iconic Italian roles.
Could we not just celebrate the uniqueness of Pavarotti’s accomplishment without such petty carping? And explicitly bringing in a comparison with Domingo because he has sung German roles? It is really unfortunate because Domingo’s legacy for future generation of singers is something else other than his excursion into Wagnerian role. Is it a minus point against Pavarotti, again in comparison with Domingo, that he could in no way sing baritone parts? By the way I have not come across any critic that thinks Domingo has a real baritone voice.
Another incomparably great singer that has left a legacy that does not contain German repertoire is Callas. She sang Isolde for a very very short time at the very beginning of her career and never touched it or any other German repertoire again. So what!
Fritz Wunderlich definitely has a very limited repertoire since he life was cruelly cut short. But we celebrate what he has accomplished in his short time.
Not so psq. She sang the Walkure Brunnhilde and Kundry.
Better in limited repertoire and leave something strong in the roles he has performed, than counting the roles (like Domingo does), leaving more bad things behind than the good ones he has done in the past… I will always choose Pavarotti in the repertoire he has sung, because he was the best in them.
If we would have more singers today thinking like Pav, then there still would be a chance for opera to survive…
so what, Carlos Kleiber had a small repertoire but whatever he conducted is peerless
We miss Pavarotti and there is no one atm who gets close to his singing
Domingo was on paper a better musician with being a fine pianist and a conductor. That did not make him a better singer just because he sang Wagner! Pavarotti knew what and who he. was. He didn’t need to spread his bread wih butter thinly, or need to sing Wagner with a true Italian sound and broken German, or sing baritone!
Pavarotti’s repertoire was fundamentally Italian bel canto , Donizetti , Bellini , Early Verdi with a dash of verismo. He sang a little French repertoire , but mainly in Italian translation. Wagner was just not for his voice. His voice rang out in the theatre , but it was a compact , lyric tenor, not a baritone tinged, Wagner tenor. There was no reason for him to consider that repertoire really.
“He sang a little French repertoire , but mainly in Italian translation.”
And yet, his recording of the big tenor aria from Gounod’s Faust [in French] is for my money one of Pavarotti’s greatest aria performances.
The sad thing about today’s operatic scene is that if Pavarotti were an up and coming singer now, he would have no career due to his weight.
Pavarotti was a normal weight at his debut at 26. Your comment is ridiculous and I’ll informed
Don‘t think that‘s true.
An exceptional talent like him would still make it. And in the years early in his carreer he was also less overweight.
There are tenors today who are „heavy“ as well and have stellar careers.
Of course he would be the same as we go to opera for singing and not the awful productions especially the so called German Regietheater – people had enough of this ego trips and if it continues theatres will struggle even more as none of any journalists nowadays (due to lack of knowledge) writes about it – they are responsible for the exodus
Not the case at all
Saw him sing the Duke at La Scala in 1967 : great new handsome lyric tenor who absolutely looked the part
He got fat once he became rich and famous
But the voice was still there 30 years on
Funny, I was just having a conversation about this, this very morning. He was larger-than-life, perhaps the last classical music celebrity to capture the imagination of the wider public, and his voice was like a narcotic.
His Christmas album has been part of my holiday playlist for nearly 40 years. It got me thinking about this Christmas special that aired in the U.S., back in the glory days of PBS, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s (a staple, alongside the Baryshnikov-Kirkland “Nutcracker”). I have not seen it now for many years. I am looking forward to revisiting it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxzbXyBCTE
Yes, Pavarotti singing O Holy Night and Gesu Bambino! CD comes out every Christmas!
Peerless
Wonderful documentary on a man whose voice is the only one that can bring tears to my eyes.
Same here.
could be a naughty boy with the ladies
At least he did not hide it behind a hypocritical pathetic facade, feigning respect for his wife.
He had a lot of respect for his wife when he dumped her for a much younger gold-digging woman!
Precisely, she was his assistant. My point is, he was not a coward, going with his assistant behind his wife’s back, while publicly professing respect and love for the wife he was shamelessly betraying.
Both Pavarotti and Callas sang with exemplary diction, there are others of course. Perhaps the instantaneous reaction to the text drives the spontaneous dramatic expression in the music.
I enjoyed the documentary last night. LP was a great singer and had a big personality. However there is no need at all to compare him with Kaufmann. Why do you persist in doing it. They are very different. Both great. And let’s get one thing straight. Kaufmann is charming, handsome and a singer of great versatility. You make him sound vacuous and insincere, which is untrue. You should get to know him better! LP had a voice of brilliance but only used in a narrow repertoire. Why? I have no idea. But please get off keep slagging off Kaufmann at every opportunity. You too Mr Lebrecht.
Kaufmann is fabulous and the only German accepted in Italian repertoire but his success is also based on no one else around
Kaufmann has an amazing
command of different languages
He was also banned from Lyric Opera of Chicago in the mid to late 80s for cancelling 45 out of 80 performances. But certainly no operatic performer comes close to matching his vocal artistry today (notwithstanding his mediocre acting in most operas other than L’Elisir in which he was basically playing himself).
Sometimes I think that it is good that Pavarotti is not alive now.
Otherwise he would be also attacked by corrupted metoo liars with false accusations.
Good that he doesnt see how shamefull metoo feminazis kill opera and culture.
I hope your wife, daughter or girlfriend soon meet a swine who grope them in exchange for professional favors.
I don’t have a wife or a girlfried as I am a woman.
Hope your male friends and relatives will be falesly accused in harassment without police investigaion and court process.
No decision needed, right? No innocent presumtion, right?
False non-proof statements of metoo feminazi are enought to accuse anyone in harassment.
Sounds like you have a lot of unaddressed anger issues, wow.
EU person: have not you heard, even a woman could have a wife?
did pavorotti make a out a proper will.
why was their problems with his daughters and second wife when he died.
Growing up, Pavarotti was – for me – the human incarnation of the art form. Just one note from my father’s vinyl collection was enough to transport me to other worlds beyond our drab, North-Eastern mining village. He was peerlessly musical in his phrasing, in his sense of pitch, and as a virtuoso exponent of bel canto. Added to that, the quality that makes a star a star – a unique, immediately identifiable sound. As for the remarks above from non-singers on singing, Pavarotti’s strength was his ability to know what suited him and what didn’t, and that his singing emerged directly from his Italian culture. Indeed, the mistake singers make today is that they try to be all things to all people. It is a mistake. The musculature and positioning to sing German repertoire is entirely different to Italian repertoire, for example, without going into details of vowel elongation, voiced consonants, diphthongs, glottal stops or legato. Yet, singers today will follow a run of Verdi with a run of Strauss or Wagner, followed by a role in Russian or english. The British school is famous for producing wonderfully polished jacks of all trades who regularly sing in six languages while rarely mastering the real art of bel canto. But that shouldn’t be a surprise. Bel canto is a natural extension of the spoken Italian language, a culture and tradition all unto itself. Pavarotti – like Bruson and co. – demonstrated that. His true quality was in specialisation, as opposed to generalisation. We desperately need a return to that pedagogy. The greatest experiences I have had as a consumer of opera come from hearing specialisation; Hvorostovsky in Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, Kaufmann as Siegmund, Volle as Hans Sachs, Domingo-of-old in Zarzuela, Degout as Pelleas, Luxon as Owen Wingrave. Today, Domingo embodies the exact opposite of that virtue, confusing quality and quantity, and leaves a trail of vocal destruction in his wake as a result. We need more masters, like Pavarotti, to safeguard the future of his beautiful art form.
There is surely no doubt whatever – Pavarotti’s voice was unique, an utterly thrilling experience and one of the greatest of all time especially at the start of his career. But – and there are many buts – that Ron Howard movie was a travesty – a two dimensional portrait when what we should have been given was a picture of a great artist, warts and all. It was purely a puff piece.
Pavarotti was a far more rounded (sic) character than Howard portrayed. Once Tibor Rudas had persuaded his manager Herbert Breslin that he should appear in arenas at $100,000 a pop – and that was just for starters – his operatic career began to go downhill relatively quickly. About that time I saw his near disastrous Radames in the ROH’s equally disastrous Ponnelle Aida with Mehta, a very flat Ricciarelli and no Grand March. It’s only redeeming feature was the debut of the excellent Paata Burchuladze. He barely got through Celeste Aida and, like the entire production, was met at the end with the worst choruses of “boos” and “rubbish” I had ever heard at the Garden. He then cancelled the next performance.
Determined to take on Domingo, his Otello concert performances marking Solti’s farewell at Chicago were a near embarrassment and it took a great deal of editing to get even a reasonable account on to CD. The fact was he just had not been able to learn the role. With respect to Sam McIlroy and his comment above, this was no star aware of his ability to sing what suited him. Otello was merely a vanity project. Same with Don Carlos with which he opened the La Scala season a year or so later. He had only barely learned the role in time and then cracked on a high note incurring the wrath of the claque.
Long before then he had ceased to be believable in any character on stage. By his mid-60s he merely sang without attempting to act. Extra chairs had to be placed on stage so he could take breathers from the ‘exertion’.
He also had some lousy artistic ideas for his arena concerts which made him vast sums. In the ghastly Docklands arena in 1988 he insisted on opening with the two quiet tenor arias from Don Giovanni – this as thousands of latecomers were still streaming in making his voice near inaudible. For his final farewell tour, he insisted on opening with 7 songs sung to piano accompaniment, an extraordinary decision in such settings also coping with vast numbers of latecomers. For these he also needed a front curtain – in arenas? – because he could no longer walk from the back of the stage to the front. He remained throughout perched on a stool.
The way he treated the Met audience for what were billed as his farewell performances showed him by that time to be little more than a spoiled brat.
Nevertheless, he had been a superlative tenor with huge charisma and clearly a well-honed wit and sense of fun. That his final ever public appearance at the Turin Winter Olympics was mimed having earlier been recorded in a studio was a desperately sad end to what in its earlier years had been a scintillating career before the lure of mega fees and easy arena concerts corrupted both it and the man.