Opera’s Golden Tenor

Don’t you know that the tenor is a being apart …? He is not a denizen of this world, he is a world in himself.

—Hector Berlioz

It was 1969. At the San Francisco Opera an Italian tenor named Luciano Pavarotti was singing the role of Rodolfo in La Bohème, Suddenly, midway through the third act, the entire theater seemed to rumble and shudder. Chandeliers began swaying. Members of the audience stood up in confusion; some bolted for the exits. “What is happening?” Pavarotti hissed to the prompter between phrases. “Terremoto—earthquake!” the prompter breathed back. Pavarotti gripped the hand of his Mimi, Soprano Dorothy Kirsten, a little more tightly, but kept on singing at full voice and never missed a beat. The earthquake drew to a peaceful conclusion and so did the performance.

Last week Pavarotti was back at the San Francisco Opera, starring in the season’s opening production, Amilcare Ponchielli’s La Gioconda. Once more there was drama and tumult. Profound tremors again swept through the house. But the intervening decade had made an enormous difference. This time Pavarotti himself was the earthquake.

No other tenor in modern times has hit the opera world with such seismic force. At 6 ft. and nearly 300 lbs., “Big P,” as Soprano Joan Sutherland calls him, is more than lifesize, as is everything about him—ins clarion high Cs, his fees of $8,000 per night for an opera and $20,000 for a recital, his Rabelaisian zest for food and fun. “He is not primo tenore, ” says San Francisco Opera General Director Kurt Herbert Adler. “He is primissimo tenore.”

Pavarotti is one of those magnetic performers, like Nureyev in dance and Olivier in theater, who not only please the cognoscenti but also wow the masses. His LPs reach well beyond the normal opera market, making him the bestselling classical vocalist on records today. At any given time over the past 18 months, at least four albums featuring him have been on the charts. The man in the street, who may care little about opera, knows Pavarotti as that bearded guy with the boyish grin and the funny accent on the TV commercial for American Express cards. Millions have seen Pavarotti’s live performances on public television: the 1978 solo recital from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, for instance, or this week’s La Gioconda, winch PBS transmitted from San Francisco across the U.S. and by satellite to Britain and Europe.

Little wonder, then, that San Francisco treated Pavarotti as the top attraction in La Gioconda, although the tenor role is not exactly the lead. Local hostesses vied for his exuberant presence at their parties. A dealer lent him a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud for ins seven-week stay. Between socializing and vocalizing, Pavarotti jetted to Los Angeles for one of his periodic jousts with Johnny Carson on the Tonight show. When he had free time, he took to the tennis court. A surprisingly graceful Gargantua, he is quick on his feet and gets about as much English on the tennis ball as he does into his conversation. “I gave him the toilet paper,” he said of one opponent, meaning that he took him to the cleaner’s.

As for La Gioconda, it unfolded a Mediterranean saga of a mysterious letter, bitter rivalries and ominous threats. And that was only backstage. Pavarotti, who is conscientious and meticulously punctual when he finally gets down to business, clashed at rehearsal with his costar, Soprano Renata Scotto, over her lateness and somebody’s fluffs (whether hers or his was part of the dispute). They even stopped in mid-aria to exchange words not found in the libretto. On the day of the gala opening, Scotto received a letter warning that a claque was planning to boo her. It was signed “Enzo Grimaldo,” the character played by Pavarotti. Scotto’s husband accused Pavarotti of sponsoring the claque and alerted Adler and the San Francisco police. At the first sign of trouble, he vowed, hiss wife would walk off the stage.

That night the claque never materialized. Neither, in a sense, did Scotto’s performance. Possibly unnerved by all the squabbling, she was not at her best vocally or dramatically. Pavarotti came through splendidly. Playing a 17th century nobleman who is enmeshed in a conflict with the Venetian Inquisition, he made bold entrances in full cry. His spacious second-act aria, Cielo e mar, which used to serve Caruso well, was traced in long, limpid lines that glowed with emotion. ins voice soared out of the big ensembles, seeming to carry the chorus into the air with him. At the curtain, Scotto took a single bow, then retired to her dressing room. Pavarotti came out with the other principals time after time, spreading his stevedore arms in an ardent embracing motion to the audience as they cheered and pelted him with roses.

His dressing room afterward was besieged by well-wishers, including visitors from as far away as his home town of Modena in north-central Italy. Sometimes Pavarotti will make the supreme sacrifice, receiving fans for hours even when he knows the last restaurant in town is closing. In San Francisco, he knew that a giant steak awaited him at the postperformance ball, so he volubly welcomed everyone in sight. Especially the women. A true Italian male, he makes it a point of honor to kiss every female in the same room with him. Cheerful propositions are the staple of ins small talk (“Just kidding,” he reassures husbands and boyfriends, then adds quickly to the women: “See you later”).

After holding court in his dressing room, Pavarotti pressed into the crowded corridor followed by the members of a documentary-film crew, one of whom held a white umbrella aloft to diffuse a floodlight. As the tenor made ins progress toward the exit under the effulgent parasol, bestowing more blessings and kisses, breaking into nimble dance steps and mugging for the camera, he looked like a cross between an Oriental potentate and the late Zero Mostel. Before heading off in his Rolls-Royce, he rated his performance that night: “8.5 on a scale of ten, and, remember, I never give myself ten.”

Others do. The Pavarotti voice inspires some opera buffs to evoke the pre-World War I Golden Age, and others to proclaim a new one. “It’s a phenomenal instrument, one of those freaks of nature that come very rarely in a hundred years,” says Conductor Richard Bonynge. Clear and penetrating, it has a brilliant, metallic timbre and yet remains warm, with a gorgeous romantic sheen. Pavarotti supports it with a taut, energizing column of air that keeps the tone uniform from top to bottom; ins notes have been described as a set of “perfectly matched pearls.”

His range is high, encompassing top Bs, Cs and even Ds with an unforced, open-throated quality that Italians call lasciarsi andare—letting it pour forth. Many tenors blessed with such an instrument would be content to let it pour forth at top volume, and subtlety be damned. Pavarotti has instinctive taste and musicality, not to mention a keen sense of timing. He shades his phrasing and dynamics in order to bring the composer’s lines to life and let them breathe.

To George Cehanovsky, 87, a former baritone at the Metropolitan who has heard most of the great voices of this century, Pavarotti combines the pastosa (soft) beauty of Beniamino Gigli with the effortless high notes of Giacomo Lauri-Volpi. Others hear echoes of Jussi Bjoerling’s silvery refinement. Pavarotti inmself cites a more recent predecessor as a model: Giuseppe di Stefano, who at his best had a burnished, flowing style.

“But voice alone isn’t what ensures a singer’s immortality,” says Rosa Ponselle, whose own niche in the soprano pantheon seems secure. “There’s a certain something that makes its way across the footlights, sometimes even through the electrical circuits in a recording machine. Pavarotti has it.” Ponselle believes it is this ineffable communicative power, and not matters of timbre and style, that forges the link between Pavarotti and his forerunners, especially Caruso. Says Ponselle: “Probably the biggest similarity between Pavarotti and Caruso is the way each could envelop an audience, the way each could make every person feel that he or she was being sung to individually.”

With Pavarotti this is a conscious intention. He senses his voice traveling along a separate thread to each member of the audience, and he depends desperately on the response that returns along that thread. “Applause is our oxygen.” he says, and the more vociferous, even hysterical, the better. He feels that his voice blossoms before a ‘hot” audience. When he began giving concerts and recitals, however, the intimacy with the audience and the absence of operatic costumes caused him to lose concentration. Now he sings to an imaginary listener, whom he pictures in the center of the balcony, in order to keep his chin up and throat straight. “It could never be an actual member of the audience,” he says. “It would be disastrous if he blew his nose, or yawned, or began to beat time.”

Stage presence is one thing, acting another. Pavarotti is often an indifferent actor, though in a broad role like the bumpkin in Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment he can be an effective comedian. His chief asset, especially in romantic roles, is his height, which offsets his distinctly un-dashing waistline. “I never look at how wide they are, but how tall,” says Soprano Beverly Sills. “It is a relief to be able to put your head on a tenor’s shoulder.” What carries Pavarotti through is his patent sincerity and gut-level identification with his characters. “I can see myself as Rodolfo in Bohème,” he says. “Rodolfo is a figure of genuine emotion. This is the real thing, so real that when Mimi enters I feel I want to take care of this woman.”

With his extra measure of Ponselle’s “certain something,” Pavarotti occupies a unique position among the tenors of today. Placido Domingo, 38, his nearest rival, has a superbly smooth, rich voice and a wider range of roles—he sings the weighty Othello as well as bel canto parts—but he sometimes loses impact because of a veiled timbre and somewhat muted personality. Jon Vickers, 52, can match Pavarotti’s intensity and puts more serious thought behind his performing, but his is an entirely different kind of voice: rugged, heroic, best suited to dramatic works such as Otello, Les Troyens and Peter Grimes. Nicolai Gedda, an elegant, unfailingly attractive singer, is a supremely versatile stylist, at home in several languages; at 54, however, he is understandably not a powerhouse. Perhaps the challenge ultimately will come from a younger singer like Jose Carreras, 32, though to date he has shown neither the strength nor the subtlety of Pavarotti.

Any kind of professional singing is a dicey venture, requiring as it does that the performer stake his prosperity, career and identity on barely more than an inch of exquisitely fragile larynx. But the pressure on tenors is perhaps the most harrowing of all. The reason is that the tenor voice is an unnatural one, especially in the rarefied range above the staff—the four or five notes from G to high C or D. For a male singer to reach such heights while retaining all the power and virility of his lower range—and, preferably, subordinating the sheer physical feat to an artistic purpose—is a rare and exhilarating achievement. This is the heroic madness of the tenor. He girds himself like a gladiator for an awesome exertion. Then, striving upward, he reaches for triumph, knowing that at the same time he is cruelly exposing himself to the most humiliating failure. No performance recovers from a broken high C.

For Pavarotti, reaching a top note brings on a mystical feeling such as a champion high-jumper might experience. “That second when you clear the bar in mid-air you lose consciousness,” he says. “It is something physical, animal, beyond control. A moment later you are back on the ground and in full control.” The haunting, universal fear that some day he will jump and miss—”that I shall open my mouth and no sound will come out” —gives Pavarotti the whim-whams before every performance. In 1972 he made a transatlantic call to Beverly Sills about their upcoming appearance in I Puritani, arguing that their last-act duet, with its punishing high D-flats for tenor, should be transposed downward. Sills assured him he could hit the notes. “Only if you castrate me,” he said. Last year, minutes before Pavarotti’s TV recital, Metropolitan Assistant Conductor Gildo Di Nunzio found inm slumped in his dressing room “seeming so alone and terrified. He didn’t think he could do it, he wished he could cancel. I wouldn’t have been in those shoes for anything.”

Who can blame tenors for trying to ward off their demons with all the vanities for which they are so notorious—the fads, phobias, neuroses, magic charms and eccentric sexual regimens? (Dressing-room lore abounds with theories on whether singers should eschew sex before a performance and, if so, for how long. Most tenors seem to feel that two or three days of abstinence builds their strength. Several leading men in the 1940s, the story goes, were sabotaged by a shapely U.S. soprano who seduced them just before the curtain.) The only supernatural aid Pavarotti enlists to get himself onstage is a bent nail in his pocket, a traditional talisman of Italian singers. Fans, aware of this quirk, send inm nails by the dozens, sometimes silver or gold, dangling from chains or fasinoned into pins. But Pavarotti will use only an authentic nail from the scenery backstage.

Tensions and insecurities may have something to do with Pavarotti’s gourmandizing too, quite beyond his sensual gusto and need to replenish himself. After a hard evening onstage, he has been known to put away a lobster dinner followed by a steak dinner and an entire basket of rolls, and then to dive for leftovers on his companion’s plate. Lambrusco, the slightly fizzy red wine of his native region, does not travel well, according to his palate. When on tour, Pavarotti orders bottles of Mouton-Cadet 1975, say, mixes them with bottles of Perrier water and—ecco!—instant Lambrusco. Wherever he goes he has access to an expert chef: himself. At major stopovers he likes to take a hotel suite-cum-kitchen, install a big round table and recruit a passel of local friends to sample his creations like Spaghetti Pavarotti. (Recipe for his sauce: half a tube of Italian tomato paste dissolved in olive oil, then mixed with grated Parmesan cheese and finely chopped parsley and garlic.) Nobody knows Pavarotti’s precise poundage. He keeps his own scales and his own counsel. When asked how much he weighs, he replies: “Less than before.”

How much did he weigh before? “More than now.” Hence reports of his fluctuations spread through the opera world like a runaway Dow Jones average: up 25, down 80, up 60. But he realizes that if he remains too heavy he could undermine his robust health. Which is why he periodically submits to the dread ordeal of a diet. He is currently forbidden to drink wine, and his most opulent meal is zuchini, rice and 250 grams (about half a pound) of meat or fish cooked with a few drops of oil. More tragic than any scene he plays onstage is the sight of a dieting Pavarotti at a dinner party, surrounded by gorging guests as he disconsolately sips soda water or diet cola.

Such moments of depression are rare, but they are an occupational hazard. Feasting or dieting, fussed over or not, a barnstorming opera singer spends long hours of isolation in hotels, studying, resting (Pavarotti sleeps ten to twelve hours before a performance) or simply killing time. Pavarotti’s wife Adua joins him on tour for a few weeks each year, and friends consider her spirited, sensible ministrations a tremendous boost for him. Says one of them: “At least she doesn’t stand in the wings with holy water like the wives of some Italian tenors.” But Pavarotti manages only a handful of flying visits home to Modena. He misses family life. He is perplexed by his remoteness from his fast growing daughters—Lorenza, 17, Christina, 15, and Giuliana, 12—and he tends to worry about them and to compensate with strictness when he is there.

His attachment to north-central Italy is deep. On his sacrosanct summer holiday, he invariably returns to his vacation house in Pesaro, 150 km from Modena (see box). He cherishes a sense of himself as a sound, simple man of the region: he keeps up ties with relatives and friends there, and he concentrated investments from his considerable income (probably close to $1 million a year) in the area. Among his holdings: a record store in Bologna and an office building near Modena.

It was in Modena (pop. 180,000), an industrial city noted for its hardworking, stubborn citizenry, its good food and its dedication to opera, that Pavarotti was born nearly 44 years ago. He remembers himself as a lively, gossipy scamp, always in trouble. At school his energies went into sports; soccer became a passion. At home he chimed in with the likes of Gigli, Tito Scinpa, Bjoerling and Di Stefano on the records collected by his father, a baker and gifted amateur tenor. He recalls: “In my teens I used to go to Mario Lanza movies and then come home and imitate him in front of the mirror.”

By that time he had joined his father in the church choir and a local opera chorus, and had begun performing impromptu serenades on summer evenings outside the family’s apartment house, accompanying himself on the guitar. But music still seemed no more than an avocation. At 18, he enrolled in a teacher-training course. Two years later, just as he was settling into the routine of instructing eight-year-olds in public school, music began to look like a vocation after all. He and his father accompanied the local chorus to an international music festival in Llangollen, Wales, where—to their delirious amazement —they won first prize. Encouraged by Adua, whom he had met and become engaged to during teacher training, Luciano decided to give singing a try. (Another Modena youngster, a childhood friend of Pavarotti’s, had already made the same decision: Soprano Mirella Freni.)

Deciding that “teaching was too hard on my vocal cords,” he took a job selling insurance, then set about painstakingly acquiring a vocal technique from teachers in the area. At 25, having won a vocal competition in nearby Reggio Emilia, he was awarded an engagement in a local production of La Bohème. Within the span of three weeks, he married Adua and sang his first Rodolfo. His debut led to other bookings in Italy and, eventually, at minor houses all over Europe. La Scala offered him a job as a house stand-by for all its tenor roles, but he turned it down: “I thought to myself, when I sing at La Scala I want to come in through the principals’ entrance.”

In 1963, when he was 27, he got a job as stand-by for Giuseppe di Stefano in a Covent Garden production of La Bohème and sang several performances. Conductor Richard Bonynge heard him and was “bowled over.” Eventually, Pavarotti found himself singing with Bonynge’s wife, Joan Sutherland, in a Miami production of Lucia di Lammermoor. To Sutherland’s skeptical eye, this strapping unknown looked like “a big schoolboy.” But to her ear? “Well, it was absolutely phenomenal — the fabulous resonance, the shading, such range, such security.” The Bonynges signed him up for a 14-week tour of Australia.

Those 14 weeks were a watershed that gave Pavarotti invaluable experience and exposure. In Sutherland he found a vital influence as well as a partnership that remains one of the most potent in opera. Says he: “I used to listen to her and think, how is it possible that this woman’s notes never seem to end? How does she produce this endless chain of sound? I gradually realized it was her breathing. ” Says Bonynge: “He was always getting hold of Joan around the middle and feeling her muscles. He wanted to figure out how her diaphragm worked. Especially in her placement of high notes, he was able to understand what she did and transfer her way of doing it to himself.”

After Australia, Pavarotti was ready for a string of major debuts: La Scala in 1965, San Francisco in 1967, the Metropolitan in 1968. Although his Met engagement, like most of the others, was in his lucky opera, La Bohème, he caught Hong Kong flu and had to withdraw halfway through the second performance. It took him three years to overcome that anticlimactic beginning at the house. But when he did, in a production of The Daughter of the Regiment with Sutherland, he set New York on its critical ear with a spectacular series of nine high Cs in a single aria. With no little help from the publicity mills, Pavarotti the supertenor was on his way.

A monumental ego is built into a performing temperament like Pavarotti’s—it has to be. Yet his associates agree that he has succumbed to no more than a mild case of “tenoritis.” Last month, while recording Rossini’s William Tell in London, he flared up over the balance between his voice and the orchestra. “Why do 1 sound as if I’m singing in another room?” he shouted after hearing a playback. When the producer defended the balance, Pavarotti slammed his score shut and stomped out of the studio. But the next day he was back to try again. “Luciano is not temperamental,” says one recording executive. “But he has a tendency to push things to see what he can gain. If he fails, he will back down.”

Vocally, Pavarotti in recent years has skillfully negotiated the most treacherous shoals that face a tenor. Early in his career he was a classic tenore lirico, ideally suited to lighter lyric roles like Rodolfo, and florid bel canto roles like Nemorino in L’Elisir d’Amore. With age, however, a tenor’s voice takes on a heavier tone and darker coloration. By the time he is in his 40s, a tenore lirico is usually ready for roles in the intermediate spin to (pushed) range, like Cavaradossi in Tosca, and maybe even in the forceful, baritonal tenore drammatico category, like the title role of Otello. But he must use extreme care, lest he damage the muscles of ins vocal mechanism. Many a promising Rodolfo who was too eager to tackle roles beyond his vocal weight is today running a restaurant or sitting at a desk on the fringes of the music business.

Pavarotti has been proceeding judiciously, with a Masked Ball here, a Turandot there and, of course, the San Francisco La Gioconda. There are some roles he will sing in the relaxed conditions of the recording studio but not onstage, as in William Tell, which he describes as a “scassavoce”—a voice buster. If he does not show to advantage in a new role he may shelve it for a while, as he seems to be doing with Manrico in Il Trovatore.

The consensus of his colleagues is that he has paced himself well. Says Eugene Kohn, a former accompanist and coach of Pavarotti’s: “There was fear that he would lose the bloom of sound and the top notes. But if the repertoire stays too light, you don’t give the voice free rein. I recently heard him in Luisa Miller in London, and ins voice was fantastically enriched for having sung heavier parts.” Pavarotti is preparing the formidable role of Radames in Aida for San Francisco in 1981. Lohengrin may even be down the road some day. “I continue to take risks,” he says. “I could spend the rest of my career singing Rodolfo, but it’s not in my nature.”

For years Pavarotti has kept up a murderous schedule. He thrives on the love and adulation that pour over the footlights in waves. Doubtless, too, as one colleague observes, “greed is an element in it.” But in 1975, the plane in which Pavarotti was returning from the U.S. crashed during its landing at the Milan airport and broke in two. Pavarotti and the rest of the passengers were, as he saw it, miraculously spared. Whether as a result of the crash or not, Pavarotti seems to have made some kind of peace with mortality.

His friend Terry McEwen, a top executive of London Records and general director-designate of the San Francisco Opera, senses a new maturity and security: “He knows the public loves him for himself, not only for his voice. If he lost his voice tomorrow, they would still love him. He could go on performing, he could be a different kind of star.” That is a mind-boggling thought for the operatic mind. Could Pavarotti’s ultimate destiny be to replace Johnny Carson?

The question need not be faced for years. Says Joan Ingpen, artistic administration director of the Metropolitan: “I will bet that he will still be singing in his 50s and 60s.” And, she might add, still kissing girls and eating pasta and giving tennis opponents the toilet paper. He may not shift out of high gear, but he obviously intends to go for distance. “A voice gives you a certain mileage, like a car,” says San Francisco’s Adler. “If you are a good driver, it can go for 100,000 miles.” Clearly, Pavarotti is a good driver. ·