Luciano Pavarotti

He died today of pancreatic cancer. While a good deal of his later years were held up to some ridicule - he stayed on the stage longer than he should have - what struck me most about him was two things. First, was his voice in his prime. Pavarotti was the voice that most of my generation thought of as the tenor. He had a wonderful voice but more importantly he had an exubarnce that drew you into his music. In Rigoletto one of the famous arias is Questa o quella - I remember watching him judge a vocal competition where one student chose the aria and the maestro carefully explained not only the music and the moment but the phrasing. He brought the young student many steps ahead in a few short phrases but he also brought the TV viewers to understand just what the Duke of Mantua was trying to convey in that short but important aria. He was clearly the Italian tenor of his age.

But second was his contribution to music. Indeed, the two other tenors of the age, Francisco Carreras and Plácido Domingo have made significant contributions to music. Their three tenors performances were wonderful and fun. Domingo has offered a wide range of both key roles in opera and a number of contributions to music that were a lot less quixotic than Pavarotti including some innovative leadership in Washington, LA and Mexico City. In later years Pavorotti got a reputation for canceling out of performances. José Carreras, the Spanish tenor, has a wonderful voice that was made even more compelling by his remarkable fight against leukemia. Both Carreras and Domingo seem, from a distance of a fan, to be a lot less endowed with the diva like qualities that Pavarotti seemed to exhibit. Neither of the other two were so easily the subject of characture. Frankly, I liked their voices better than Pavarotti. But his star power brought a lot of people to recognize that opera was not the enterprise of stuffed shirts.