PAVAROTTI: MUSIC IN THE ROUND Critics say he has sold out to commercialism; his fans show they don’t care

Press, 2 September 1986, Page 21

PAVAROTTI: MUSIC IN THE ROUND Critics say he has sold out to commercialism; his fans show they don’t care

GILLIAN WIDDICOMBE

of the London

“Observer” examines the life and high notes of the great Italian tenor, Luciano Pavarotti.

Like all fans when the “beloved” appears, men, women, and children flocked to Wembley Arena, London to sigh, scream, swoon and queue for autographs. It made no difference that this particular beloved was an Italian tenor, 50 years old, large as a dining table, clasping a white handkerchief and mopping his brow.

He sang for about 50 minutes, including encores, to an audience of 8000 which had paid $42 to $l2B for a.ticket. To quote one of Luciano Pavarotti’s favourite phrases: "You must be joking.” Some opera buffs regard Pavarotti’s white handerchief as a farewell to serious work, a surrender to popularisation. What a shame that this, one of the greatest voices of the twentieth century, should follow the low road like John McCormack. Others suppose that Pavarotti has put himself outside so much wine and pasta that opera houses can no longer put him inside a stage costume.

Why is he no longer appearing with the Royal Opera? Perhaps he has not forgiven London for the hostility which followed his cancellation of five performances of “Tosca” in 1983. He said he was sick; the newspapers said he had hopped off for a romantic holiday with a young singer called Madelyn. It seemed a good idea to ask him in person, so I went to see him at home — a sedate mansion ferociously guarded by dogs and fences, on the outskirts of Modena. Unfortunately, Pavarotti had been on a diet for a week, and was not pleased with life. But the famous ebullience emerged when he began to talk about his work.

Pavarotti says that he likes to do these vast, popular concerts because he wants to do something for the world of opera, and enable people who would normally never go to the opera house to hear him. As he says: “A performance in the theatre takes 15 or 20 days rehearsal, and is given for an audience of 2000 people. To sing for 20,000 people takes 10 performances.” Cynics consider .. Pavarotti’s work in the last 15 years to have been heavily influenced by the work of an American publicist, Herbert Breslin, whose claim to fame is that he made Pavarotti the highest paid singer in the world. Breslin encouraged Pavarotti to appear on television chat shows and advertise American ’Express cards. The big, bouncy Italian became known as the “King of the High Cs.” He was photographed on horses, in swimming pools, gloating over gargantuan plates of food; he loomed large in “Newsweek” and “Playboy.” As Breslin says, in a book called “Pavarotti, my own story” but mostly written by acolytes and friends, “Luciano goes after the top dollar.” It is a pity about Pavarotti’s hostility towards London, because his early work in Britain was crucial to his career. Having won a singing competition in Reggio Emilia, he began to do the rounds as a beefy, natural

Italian tenor. The Royal Opera’s casting manager, Joan Ingpen, was looking for a cover for Giuseppe di Stefano, who was inclined to cancel.

In Dublin, she discovered “this large young man, very inept on the stage, singing a bit to the gallery and hanging on to his top notes — but my God, what vocal material.” Di Stefano did cancel. Pavarotti stepped into Rodolfo’s shoes in “La Boheme,” and on to a popular television show from the Palladium.

That was 1963. It took longer to make the big time in the United States, and even in Italy.

He was much helped by Herbert von Karajan, who got him into La Scala and used him (when Bergonzi cancelled) for a television film of Verdi’s Requiem to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Toscanini’s death. It was not until 1970 that another television film of Verdi’s Requiem — performed in St Paul’s Cathedral, and conducted by Leonard Bernstein — introduced another great tenor. Franco Corelli cancelled, and in came Placido Domingo.

Until Domingo arrived, the Italian repertory was wide open for Pavarotti. Corelli and Mario del Monaco were both coming to the end of their careers. Del Monaco had a very dramatic voice, but he enjoyed battling it out in a way that hardly allowed him to think or sing quietly. Corelli was more refined vocally, and could do some beautiful things; but only an Italian would

call him a cultivated singer — and only Italian cities like Palermo would name streets after either of them.

Di Stefano was Maria Callas’s favourite partner, and his enunciation was a model even for the young Pavarotti; but his cancellations were a nuisance. Carlo Bergonzi was the most musical of these post-war Italian tenors, but his dramatic capabilities were limited to semaphoric positions. Glyndeboume spotted Pavarotti’s potential and swept him off to Sussex the next summer to sing Idamante in Mozart’s “Idomeneo.” Sussex obviously

suited the 29-year-old Italian, whose eye for the girls earned him the name “Passion Flower” while his voice was disciplined by assiduous coaching. Then he was introduced to Joan Sutherland and her conductor husband, Richard Bonynge, who engaged him for a four-month tour of Australia.

. Pavarotti was a godsend for Sutherland. He was tall for a tenor, and responded to Bonynge’s training in bel canto style. Pavarotti perfected his technique during this period. As Bonynge says: “Every time I turned round, there he’d be with his hands on my wife’s tummy trying to figure out how she supported her voice, how she breathed.”

Pavarotti says: “I think that was the period when my voice became my friend. The control, not the phrasing. To see Joan

Sutherland singing, on the same day, a morning rehearsal of ‘La Somnambula’ in full voice, and an evening performance of ‘La Traviata.’ I said: ‘lf she can do that, so can I.’ The phrasing you are born with. If you hear the first recording of me in ‘La Boheme,’ it’s very unpretentious, in voice and sound, but you hear that my phrasing (whether you like it or not) is the same as I have now.”

Pavarotti developed a passion for horses in Sussex, and still waxes lyrical about the relationship between singing an aria and jumping with horses. “First, the course is the same for everybody, and you have to approach the aria staying with the conductor. The top notes are the crucial point and you have to jump everything considering that you are going to reach that point at a certain moment, at your best. But you’re not too go too slowly. You have perhaps 10 points, like 10 jumps, where you must be entirely under control.” The public often imagines that a voice is like a flower that comes into bud, blooms, and fades; that is how the careers of opera singers seem to go. Pavarotti thinks it is more like the fruit that matures, stays ripe for a long time if carefully managed, but will eventually rot or wither. Christopher Raeburn, the Decca producer who has made most of Pavarotti’s records, thinks that 20 years ago the voice was “slightly lighter than it is now, but not much.”

Whereas Domingo, like many tenors Including Bergonzi, started as a baritone, Pavarotti was a true tenor. It was always a clear, ringing sound, the tone never nasal or smoky. Some critics described his singing as rousing or forthright, but in the roles that suited him best, such as Nemorino in “L’elisir d’amore,” Rodolfo in “La Boheme,” and later the Duke of Mantua in “Rigoletto,” he received only praise for his effortless style and line. Raeburn says that, far from the voice fading, the recent recording of "Ballo in maschera,” conducted by Sir Georg Solti, contains some of the finest dolce piano Pavarotti has ever sung. Having got to the top, what should the tenor do? Jose Carreras started to darken his voice so that he could sing heavier roles, but the result has often seemed forced, monotonous. Jon Vickers has excelled in a distinctive repertoire — Peter Grimes’ Tristan, Saint-Saens’s Samson, Berlioz’s Aeneas — that suits both his heavy voice and his personal moral code. Placido Domingo has been the best allrounder, gradually abandoning lyric roles such as Nemorino and the Duke of Mantua, and extending to Verdi’s Otello and Wagner’s Lohengrin. Pavarotti has never forgotten the advice given to him by Tito Schipa, who turned up unexpectedly at a performance of “Boheme" in Lucca early in the 19605. “You have a beautiful voice,” said Schipa. “You should sing just as you ARE singing and don’t listen to anybody. Don’t

push your voice to sound like someone else.” The danger of this advice is that the familiar roles become stale, the voice lazy. However, Pavarotti still feels at home in roles that first made him famous. “I want to finish my career still singing Nemorino,” he says. “ ‘L’elisir d’amore’ is such a beautiful opera, and Nemorino such an incredible personality. A crazy country boy, like I always was.” He also clings to the insouciant Duke in “Rigoletto,” and Riccardo, the romantic hero of “Ballo in maschera.”

The slow development of Pavarotti’s repertoire has also been due to the fact that he learns slowly. Sometimes those who work with him feel that he is so concerned that the voice should be sitting right that he is too cautious about shading it to make it more expressive. A colleague says: “He has very definite preconceived ideas and he doesn’t like to budge once something is studied and learnt. Most of the parts he was doing 10 or 12 years ago; it’s still the same performance.”

Pavarotti’s most recent adventure was in the opposite direction: back to Mozart, this time for the title role in “Idomeneo.” Mozart wrote Idomeneo for the most celebrated tenor of his time, Anton Raaff. When it was

announced that Pavarotti would sing this at the Metropolitan Opera in 1982, New York opera buffs expected a repeat of the struggle between Mozart and an ageing singer not unlike the struggle in Munich 200 years earlier.

Pavarotti confounded all. As Raeburn says of the subsequent recording: “It’s quite different from a normal Italian bashing his way through Mozart. The arias are very good, and the recitatives are magnificent. People often talk about the prewar recordings of Ezio Pinza singing ‘Don Giovanni’, but if you really listen to them today, stylistically they’re very curious. Pavarotti is a much more disciplined Mozart singer.” Just as Neptune implacably pursues Idomeneo, so Idomeneo brings us implacably to the diet — or lack of it. Pavarotti would love to sing Idomeneo again, but he is now too heavy to throw himself about in Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s production. Not that he was particularly slim when it was first staged: when he first saw how he looked as Idomeneo on television, Pavarotti had a fit. “You sheet!” he cried. “You make me look like fat Italian Pig”

His grotesque appearance obviously distresses him. Photographs must be carefully orchestrated, otherwise the photographer will either be fed to the dogs or go home with no pictures. Television cameras are restricted to close-ups; facial expressions may even be recorded separately and edited into the performance. For the new production of "Aida” at La Scala last December, Luca Ronconi draped

Pavarotti in a costume with dramatic shoulders, and surrounded him with huge stone boulders. Radames just stood there like a monolith.

If he cares so much, why not do something about it? They say that Pavarotti knows the calorific value of every food in the civilised world, and that his hints on dieting include long pauses between courses. But it is hard to diet if you’re giving performances, and Pavarotti says it is impossible for him to take, say, a year off from singing. “The voice would deteriorate, and afterwards I would have to make a new debut. At my age, after 25 years in the profession? You must be joking!” To make things worse, fans send gifts such as home-made pecan cookies and a life-sized woman’s leg made of chocolate.

Many well-meaning people have tried to encourage a diet, but they all receive the same answer: “If you want me to sing well, I must be happy. And if you want me to be happy, I must eat well.” In the 19705, cautionary advice was further disarmed by Pavarotti’s habit of wearing a shirt too big for him, so that he could put a finger inside the collar and say: “Look how much weight I’ve lost.” Popular concerts, in which he can gather the plums from roles he cannot sing on stage, are one

of the several ways of solving the physical problem. Those who think they can diminish his artistic reputation should remember that most of the great singers have done popular tours. Caruso toured in a private train, Jenny Lind was presented by Barnum’s circus for two years before returning to opera for her most important work. What is new is the use of a very large auditorium and amplification. At first Pavarotti took his chances on existing amplification systems, but catastrophe struck in Miami. An aide desperately shouting, ‘Up, down, more ...’ sent the system, or the engineers, into a feed-back situation. The amplification had to be turned off. A distraught telephone call summoned James Lock, the sound engineer who mixes Pavarotti’s records for Decca. "The problem is not how to mike Pavarotti,” Lock says, “it's how to neutralise the hall’s acoustics if they’re bad, to get as much clarity as possible. The equipment is rather pricey, but it’s reliable and it’s almost as good as we use in the recording studio, with computers and the latest technology. It’s not like a pop show when you just set everything to the maximum level, the louder the better. We try to get some taste into It”

Pavarotti’s wife says that her husband’s reputation as an insatiable lover is a joke. His manager, Herbert Breslin, is probably the first to say that all publicity is good publicity. The trouble is that tenors have taken over from the castrato the role of the most glamorous of all singers. Tenor roles are usually far more romantic and unreal than bass or baritone ones. As Tooley says: “To make something out of these roles you need to go into another world, and maybe you don’t quite come back to reality. The most fire and brimstone I’ve had from any singer has been from Jon Vickers, a fascinating singer who has handled his career with extraordinary integrity, but has also chased me across the road in full costume and make-up, and complained that a conductor whom we engaged at his request did not know how to conduct.*, "Luciano has built up a certain eccentricity about his behaviour — getting fat was part of his ebullient approach to life — and it has affected the way the public perceives him, perhaps diminishing his standing as a serious singer. Domingo has done chat shows and popular records, but has retained his support in spite of the disappointments of last season.”

People are beginning to wonder when Pavarotti will retire. In 1983, he cracked on a high note at the end of “Lucia di Lammermoor” at La Scala, and has not been allowed to forget it. As Raeburn says: “The -trouble is that so much of the tenor repertory depends on a high B flat, C, or sometimes a D, that if one day it’s less good, or there’s an unfortunate crack, the public reacts as though it’s seeing Christians gobbled up in the Coliseum. Half the excitement is waiting for an accident, and the public is sometimes very unforgiving.” Pavarotti says nothing about retiring, but some of those close to him think that another five years will be enough. Then he will teach. .

Still the same 12 years later

Gathering the opera plums

Chased across the street