Luciano Pavarotti, the Italian singer whose ringing, pristine sound set a standard for operatic tenors of the postwar era, died Thursday at his home near Modena, in northern Italy. He was 71.
His death was announced by his manager, Terri Robson. The cause was pancreatic cancer. In July 2006 he underwent surgery for the cancer in New York, and he had made no public appearances since then. He was hospitalized again this summer and released on Aug. 25.
Like Enrico Caruso and Jenny Lind before him, Mr. Pavarotti extended his presence far beyond the limits of Italian opera. He became a titan of pop culture. Millions saw him on television and found in his expansive personality, childlike charm and generous figure a link to an art form with which many had only a glancing familiarity.
Early in his career and into the 1970s he devoted himself with single-mindedness to his serious opera and recital career, quickly establishing his rich sound as the great male operatic voice of his generation — the “King of the High Cs,” as his popular nickname had it.
By the 1980s he expanded his franchise exponentially with the Three Tenors projects, in which he shared the stage with Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, first in concerts associated with the World Cup and later in world tours. Most critics agreed that it was Mr. Pavarotti’s charisma that made the collaboration such a success. The Three Tenors phenomenon only broadened his already huge audience and sold millions of recordings and videos.
And in the early 1990s he began staging Pavarotti and Friends charity concerts, performing with rock stars like Elton John, Sting and Bono and making recordings from the shows.
Throughout these years, despite his busy and vocally demanding schedule, his voice remained in unusually good condition well into middle age.
Even so, as his stadium concerts and pop collaborations brought him fame well beyond what contemporary opera stars have come to expect, Mr. Pavarotti seemed increasingly willing to accept pedestrian musical standards. By the 1980s he found it difficult to learn new opera roles or even new song repertory for his recitals.
And although he planned to spend his final years performing in a grand worldwide farewell tour, he completed only about half the tour, which began in 2004. Physical ailments limited his movement on stage and regularly forced him to cancel performances. By 1995, when he was at the Metropolitan Opera singing one of his favorite roles, Tonio in Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment” high notes sometimes failed him, and there were controversies over downward transpositions of a notoriously dangerous and high-flying part.

Yet his wholly natural stage manner and his wonderful way with the Italian language were completely intact. Mr. Pavarotti remained a darling of Met audiences until his retirement from that company’s roster in 2004, an occasion celebrated with a string of “Tosca” performances. At the last of them, on March 13, 2004, he received a 15-minute standing ovation and 10 curtain calls. All told, he sang 379 performances at the Met, of which 357 were in fully staged opera productions.
In the late 1960s and ’70s, when Mr. Pavarotti was at his best, he possessed a sound remarkable for its ability to penetrate large spaces easily. Yet he was able to encase that powerful sound in elegant, brilliant colors. His recordings of the Donizetti repertory are still models of natural grace and pristine sound. The clear Italian diction and his understanding of the emotional power of words in music were exemplary.
Mr. Pavarotti was perhaps the mirror opposite of his great rival among tenors, Mr. Domingo. Five years Mr. Domingo’s senior, Mr. Pavarotti had the natural range of a tenor, exposing him to the stress and wear that ruin so many tenors’ careers before they have barely started. Mr. Pavarotti’s confidence and naturalness in the face of these dangers made his longevity all the more noteworthy.
Mr. Domingo, on the other hand, began his musical life as a baritone and later manufactured a tenor range above it through hard work and scrupulous intelligence. Mr. Pavarotti, although he could find the heart of a character, was not an intellectual presence. His ability to read music in the true sense of the word was in question. Mr. Domingo, in contrast, is an excellent pianist with an analytical mind and the ability to learn and retain scores by quiet reading.
Yet in the late 1980s, when both Mr. Pavarotti and Mr. Domingo were pursuing superstardom, it was Mr. Pavarotti who showed the dominant gift for soliciting adoration from large numbers of people. He joked on talk shows, rode horses on parade and played, improbably, a sex symbol in the movie “Yes, Giorgio.” In a series of concerts, some held in stadiums, Mr. Pavarotti entertained tens of thousands and earned six-figure fees. Presenters, who were able to tie a Pavarotti appearance to a subscription package of less glamorous concerts, found him valuable.
The most enduring symbol of Mr. Pavarotti’s Midas touch, as a concert attraction and a recording artist, was the popular and profitable Three Tenors act created with Mr. Domingo and Mr. Carreras. Some praised these concerts and recordings as popularizers of opera for mass audiences. But most classical music critics dismissed them as unworthy of the performers’ talents.

Ailments and Accusations
Mr. Pavarotti had his uncomfortable moments in recent years. His proclivity for gaining weight became a topic of public discussion. He was caught lip-synching a recorded aria at a concert in Modena, his hometown. He was booed off the stage at La Scala during 1992 appearance. No one characterized his lapses as sinister; they were attributed, rather, to a happy-go-lucky style, a large ego and a certain carelessness.
His frequent withdrawals from prominent events at opera houses like the Met and Covent Garden in London, often from productions created with him in mind, caused administrative consternation in many places. A series of cancellations at Lyric Opera of Chicago — 26 out of 41 scheduled dates — moved Lyric’s general director in 1989, Ardis Krainik, to declare Mr. Pavarotti persona non grata at her company.
A similar banishment nearly happened at the Met in 2002. He was scheduled to sing two performances of “Tosca” — one a gala concert with prices as high as $1,875 a ticket, which led to reports that the performances may be a farewell. Mr. Pavarotti arrived in New York only a few days before the first, barely in time for the dress rehearsal. On the day of the first performance, though, he had developed a cold and withdrew. That was on a Wednesday.
From then until the second scheduled performance, on Saturday, everyone, from the Met’s managers to casual opera fans, debated the probability of his appearing. The New York Post ran the headline “Fat Man Won’t Sing.” The demand to see the performance was so great, however, that the Met set up 3,000 seats for a closed-circuit broadcast on the Lincoln Center Plaza. Still, at the last minute, Mr. Pavarotti stayed in bed.
Luciano Pavarotti was born in Modena, Italy, on Oct. 12, 1935. His father was a baker and an amateur tenor; his mother worked at a cigar factory. As a child he listened to opera recordings, singing along with tenor stars of a previous era, like Beniamino Gigli and Tito Schipa. He professed an early weakness for the movies of Mario Lanza, whose image he would imitate before a mirror.
As a teenager he followed studies that led to a teaching position; during these student days he met his future wife. He taught for two years before deciding to become a singer. His first teachers were Arrigo Pola and Ettore Campogalliani, and his first breakthrough came in 1961, when he won an international competition at the Teatro Reggio Emilia. He made his debut as Rodolfo in Puccini’s “Bohème” later that year.
In 1963 Mr. Pavarotti’s international career began: first as Edgardo in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities, and then in Vienna and Zurich. His Covent Garden debut also came in 1963, when he substituted for and Giuseppe di Stefano in “La Bohème.” His reputation in Britain grew even more the next year, when he sang at the Glyndebourne Festival, taking the part of Idamante in Mozart’s “Idomeneo.”
A turning point in Mr. Pavarotti’s career was his association with the soprano Joan Sutherland. In 1965 he joined the Sutherland-Williamson company on an Australian tour during which he sang Edgardo to Ms. Sutherland’s Lucia. He credited Ms. Sutherland’s advice, encouragement and example as a major factor in the development of his technique.
Further career milestones came in 1967, with Mr. Pavarotti’s first appearances at La Scala in Milan and his participation in a performance of the Verdi Requiem under Herbert von Karajan. He came to the Metropolitan Opera a year later, singing with Mirella Freni, a childhood friend, in “La Bohème.”
A series of recordings with London Records had also begun, and these excursions through the Italian repertory remain some of Mr. Pavarotti’s lasting contributions to his generation. The recordings included “L’Elisir d’Amore,” “La Favorita,” “Lucia di Lammermoor” and “La Fille du Régiment” by Donizetti; “Madama Butterfly,” “La Bohème,” “Tosca” and “Turandot” by Puccini; “Rigoletto,” “Il Trovatore,” “La Traviata” and the Requiem by Verdi; and scattered operas by Bellini, Rossini and Mascagni. There were also solo albums of arias and songs.
In 1981 Mr. Pavarotti established a voice competition in Philadelphia and was active in its operation. Young, talented singers from around the world were auditioned in preliminary rounds before the final selections. High among the prizes for winners was an appearance in a staged opera in Philadelphia in which Mr. Pavarotti would also appear.
He also gave master classes, many of which were shown on public television in the United States. Mr. Pavarotti’s forays into teaching became stage appearances in themselves, having more to do with the teacher than the students.

An Outsize Personality
In his later years Mr. Pavarotti became as much an attraction as an opera singer. Hardly a week passed in the 1990s when his name did not surface in at least two gossip columns. He could be found unveiling postage stamps depicting old opera stars or singing in Red Square in Moscow. His outsize personality remained a strong drawing card, and even his lifelong battle with his circumference guaranteed headlines: a Pavarotti diet or a Pavarotti binge provided high-octane fuel for reporters.
In 1997 Mr. Pavarotti joined Sting for the opening of the Pavarotti Music Center in war-torn Mostar, Bosnia, and Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney on a CD tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales. In 2005 he was granted Freedom of the City of London for his fund-raising concerts for the Red Cross. He also was lauded by the Kennedy Center Honors in 2001, and he holds two spots in the Guinness Book of World Records: one for the greatest number of curtain calls (165), the other, held jointly with Mr. Domingo and Mr. Carreras, for the best-selling classical album of all time, the first Three Tenors album (“Carreras, Domingo, Pavarotti: The Three Tenors in Concert”). But for all that, he knew where his true appeal was centered.
“I’m not a politician, I’m a musician,” he told the BBC Music Magazine in an April 1998 article about his efforts for Bosnia. “I care about giving people a place where they can go to enjoy themselves and to begin to live again. To the man you have to give the spirit, and when you give him the spirit, you have done everything.”
Mr. Pavarotti’s health became an issue in the late 1990s. His mobility onstage was sometimes severely limited because of leg problems, and at a 1997 “Turandot” performance at the Met, extras onstage surrounded him and helped him up and down steps. In January 1998, at a Met gala with two other singers, Mr. Pavarotti became lost in a trio from “Luisa Miller” despite having the music in front of him. He complained of dizziness and withdrew. Rumors flew alleging on one side a serious health problem and, on the other, a smoke screen for his unpreparedness.
The latter was not a new accusation during the 1990s. In a 1997 review for The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini accused Mr. Pavarotti of “shamelessly coasting” through a recital, using music instead of his memory, and still losing his place. Words were always a problem, and he cheerfully admitted to using cue cards as reminders.

A Box-Office Powerhouse
It was a tribute to Mr. Pavarotti’s box-office power that when, in 1997, he announced he could not or would not learn his part for a new “Forza del Destino” at the Met, the house substituted “Un Ballo in Maschera,” a piece he was ready to sing.
Around that time Mr. Pavarotti left his wife of more than three decades, Adua, to live with his 26-year-old assistant, Nicoletta Mantovani, and filing for divorce, which was finalized in October 2002. He married Ms. Mantovani in 2003. She survives him, as do three daughters from his marriage to the former Adua Veroni: Lorenza, Christina and Giuliana; and a daughter with Ms. Mantovani, Alice.
Mr. Pavarotti had a home in Manhattan but also maintained ties to his hometown, living when time permitted in a villa in Santa Maria del Mugnano, outside Modena.
He published two autobiographies, both written with William Wright: “Pavarotti: My Own Story” in 1981 and “Pavarotti: My World” in 1995.
In interviews Mr. Pavarotti could turn on a disarming charm, and if he invariably dismissed concerns about his pop projects, technical problems and even his health, he made a strong case for what his fame could do for opera itself.
“I remember when I began singing, in 1961,” he told Opera News in 1998, “one person said, ‘run quick, because opera is going to have at maximum 10 years of life.’ At the time it was really going down. But then, I was lucky enough to make the first ‘Live From the Met’ telecast. And the day after, people stopped me on the street. So I realized the importance of bringing opera to the masses. I think there were people who didn’t know what opera was before. And they say ‘Bohème,’ and of course ‘Bohème’ is so good.’ ”
About his own drawing power, his analysis was simple and on the mark.
“I think an important quality that I have is that if you turn on the radio and hear somebody sing, you know it’s me.” he said. “You don’t confuse my voice with another voice.”
Da The New York Times, 6 Settembre 2007

A Master of Italian Operatic Artistry

In the old days of the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts, a popular feature on the “Texaco Opera Quiz,” as the intermission show used to be called, involved playing recordings of several artists singing the same well-known aria and asking the panelists to identify the singers. It was surprising how often even opera experts would confuse one great artist with another.
But no one ever mistook the voice of Luciano Pavarotti. There was the warm, enveloping sound: a classic Italian tenor voice, yes, but touched with a bit of husky baritonal darkness, which made Mr. Pavarotti’s flights into his gleaming upper range seem all the more miraculous.
And it wasn’t just the sound that was so recognizable. In Mr. Pavarotti’s artistry, language and voice were one. He had an idiomatic way of binding the rounded vowels and sputtering consonants of his native Italian to the tones and colorings of his voice. This practice is central to the Italian vocal heritage, and Mr. Pavarotti was one of its exemplars.

For intelligence, discipline, breadth of repertory, musicianship, interpretive depth and virile vocalism, Mr. Pavarotti was outclassed by his Three Tenors sidekick and chief rival, Plácido Domingo. But for sheer Italianate tenorial beauty, Mr. Pavarotti was hard to top. That was certainly the position of his former manager, Herbert Breslin, who combined his own promotional savvy with his chief client’s vocal greatness to produce the moneymaking phenomenon that was Mr. Pavarotti’s career. Call it Pavarotti Inc.
“Nobody in the tenor world has Luciano’s sound, that Italian sound,” Mr. Breslin told Manuela Hoelterhoff for her wonderful 1998 book “Cinderella & Company.” “Domingo,” he added, “would have to go pray in 17 churches in Guadalajara to find that sound.”
However partisan that zinger may have been, there was some truth to it. To hear Mr. Pavarotti at his best in a role like Riccardo in Verdi’s “Ballo in Maschera” — spinning lyrical phrases with bel-canto elegance, then stunning you with visceral vocal outbursts — was to hear Italian operatic artistry at its finest.
In a career quirk, a French role became the vehicle of Mr. Pavarotti’s breakthrough to the big time in the early 1970s: Tonio in Donizetti’s “Fille du Régiment,” written for the Opéra-Comique in Paris. Mr. Pavarotti’s French may have sounded like French-tinged Italian, but it didn’t matter. The opera has a showpiece aria in which, over a breezy oom-pah-pah accompaniment, Tonio must dispatch nine very exposed high Cs. Other great tenors, like Alfredo Kraus, had excelled in the role. But no one ever tossed off those high Cs with the ease, pinging tone and utter glee of Mr. Pavarotti in those years. He was quickly promoted as the King of the High Cs, and so began his 30-year conquest of the public.
By natural endowment Mr. Pavarotti was essentially a lyric tenor, ideally suited to lighter roles in Donizetti, Bellini and Verdi requiring lyrical grace and agile passagework. Yet his voice, like everything about him, was uncommonly large. With that big throbbing sound, he was tempted into weightier repertory requiring dramatic power and heft, like Calaf in Puccini’s “Turandot.” Some opera purists maintain that Mr. Pavarotti erred by straying from the lyric terrain. Don’t tell that to anyone lucky enough to have heard him sing “Nessun dorma” in his prime, not just as a signature aria for televised stadium concerts, but in the context of a full production of “Turandot.” Wow!
Mr. Pavarotti, who was 19 when he finally began serious studies in voice, could barely read music. In itself this need not have been a problem. Enrico Caruso also had only rudimentary knowledge of music theory, and that didn’t hurt him any. But this deficiency clearly set Mr. Pavarotti apart from Mr. Domingo, who grew up preparing orchestrations for his parents’ zarzuela company.
Still, in singing, knowledge is not enough. Musical instinct is crucial, and Mr. Pavarotti had powerful instincts. He was never as interesting a singer as Mr. Domingo, but at his best he could be inspired and, in his way, profound. Moreover, he genuinely liked performing and pleasing people, which made up for his limited capabilities as an actor.
During the first half of his career he worked hard to compensate for his late start and minimal knowledge. Though he sang only 26 roles on stage, some involved risky ventures into less familiar repertory, like Fernando in Donizetti’s “Favorita,” filled with taxing spans of ornate vocal lines.
Yet ultimately, for all that Mr. Pavarotti gave to opera, it’s hard to avoid feeling that he never completely fulfilled his potential, that he squandered some of his awesome talent by letting his enablers turn him from a hard working artist into an overindulged and sometimes clownish superstar.
In the disappointing last decade of his career he coasted on his talent and popularity. His old friend and colleague Joan Sutherland dropped hints in interviews that he should retire. For me, the low point came in 1997, seven years before his last Met appearances, when he sang a recital on the Met stage as a pension-fund benefit, a program of songs by Schubert, Scarlatti and others, with a few hit arias. He was shockingly unprepared, glued to his music stand even during staples like Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” He tried to sing a selection of lighter Italian songs by Tosti from memory. But his pianist had to feed him the first word or two of nearly every line, as one could hear from Row L. What did this performance say to aspiring singers about the prerogatives of fame and fortune?
But this is a day to remember the glory of Luciano Pavarotti, like the Met’s 1996 production of Giordano’s “Andrea Chénier,” mounted for him. He hardly cut the figure of a dashing revolutionary poet in late-18th-century France. And if he was no longer the King of High Cs, he dispatched some kingly high B flats and a high B that was at least princely. Still, there was revolutionary ardor in the melting warmth, power and urgency of his singing. And there was that sound.
Da The New York Times, 6 Settembre 2007

Pavarotti aveva una voce bellissima. Non la arricchì con l'esperienza, ma gli servì per conquistare Red Ronnie e Bono e per avvicinare all'opera anche il grande pubblico

La natura gli aveva elargito in sovrabbondanza il dono che artisti colti e intellettualmente curiosi, eleganti e austeri, gli invidiarono e vorrebbero avere in ugual misura, mentre lo possiedono soltanto in parte, qua e là esile e fragile, ma corretto dalla métis, dalla sagacia dell'arte consumata.
Di cantanti che abbiano raggiunto le vette, si è detto volentieri, e non a torto, che avevano, malgrado tutto "una brutta voce". Luciano Pavarotti l'aveva bellissima, ferma, tutta illuminata, ricca di armonici e potente corposa nel volume e di colore aureo, soltanto annebbiata alla fine di ogni capoverso musicale da una sorta di ansito, che talvolta poteva essere vissuto dall'ascoltatore come un fattore espressivo e drammatico. Forse il giudizio sulla qualità del suo canto può concludersi qui, senza che altro si aggiunga. Da qui in poi, e proprio sospinta e motivata da tanta bellezza, dovrebbe cominciare una considerazione inevitabilmente riduttiva, che ci concediamo con affetto e gratitudine per quest'uomo,chiedendo scusa alla sua memoria se diamo l'impressione di scivolare in una sorta di "pars destruens".

A Pavarotti non fu necessaria la métis: chiunque avrebbe coltivato l'illusione dell'indistruttibilità, trovandosi a disporre, per circa quarant'anni, di mezzi vocali ancora quasi intatti (magari soltanto in apparenza, ma nella sfera dell'arte è l'apparenza ciò che più conta). Fu questo un privilegio e un doloroso limite: la ricchezza acquisita al principio, non alla fine. No, non è in discussione la sovente denunciata "ignoranza" musicale di Luciano. A parte i lodevoli sforzi da lui impegnati per superare le lacune originarie, non è musicalmente ignorante chi abbia sin dagli esordi, in misura quasi totale, il dominio dell'intonazione: ciò che non si può sempre dire di cantanti molto più colti, usciti da studi severi. No, stiamo dicendo che sull'arte di Pavarotti sembra non essersi posata la Storia: la natura quasi non scalfì il metallo del suo dono, ma esso non si rese più prezioso con il tempo. Com'era, rimase. Ciò avvenne, forse, perché Pavarotti, tanto affascinato dall'aura drammatica (perché il suo aureo cantare era sempre un po' "piangen-te"?), in realtà non sapeva muoversi nello spazio teatrale. Fu un cattivo attore: sempre frontale sul palcoscenico, sempre con la medesima espressione sul volto. A gran parte del pubblico piacque proprio perché era così. Fu un "ingénu" che non acquisì meriti con le proprie opere, ma all'inverso indusse il viperino milieu
della musica a domandarsi se esso avesse meritato l'esistenza, talora musicalmente imbarazzante, di Luciano Pavarotti. Osiamo dire che egli fu, perciò, un artista assai più pagano che cristiano. I suoi limiti sono connessi con la sua origine da una scuola alquanto invecchiata, quella di Poli, di Campogalliani; i cantanti giovani che non riusciranno a prendere per sé il suo spazio, siano essi italiani (quali? Quanti?) o slavi o asiatici o indios, hanno origine dallo sfacelo della scuola, di ogni scuola.
Se Luciano fu ciò che fu senza averne merito, essi hanno in sé, così come la cultura in fase odierna, immensi demeriti. Si diceva: italiani? Ma via, non fingiamo: di italiani non ve ne sono più. Pavarotti era l'ultimo dei nostri, ad abitare "in the House of Fame", l'ultimo valutabile a quel grado. Ora è finita, e domandarsi quale sia la sua eredità è ipocrita e macabro. Ecco dunque come la benevolmente minacciata "pars destruens" si rovescia in apprezzamento.
Luciano fu coraggioso con il suo entrare nell'agone delle nefaste contaminazioni stilistiche e di genere, ma in direzione inversa e temeraria: egli fu l'unico o fra i rarissimi a rovesciare la consuetudine per cui la risciacquatura cosiddetta "popolare" e in realtà stucchevolmente ripetitiva entra nel "classico" e mette i piedi sulla tavola. Pavarotti mostrò come sia possibile conquistare i Red Ronnie e i Bono, e forse, chissà, civilizzarli.
Questa è intelligenza e amore per un si-gnificato alto dell'arte. Anche l'uso pubblico della sua fortuna fu coraggioso: l'attrazione per il Kitsch è lecita agli artisti, come scrisse Benvenuto Cellini. Per severi funzionari dello Stato, farsi fotografare in pose da clown è, invece, ridicolo.
Da Il Sole 24 Ore, 9 Settembre 2007