The Greatest Tenor Voice We'll Never Hear Again

[PeterRS]

Tomorrow the great Luciano Pavarotti would have been 90 years old, had pancreatic cancer not ended his life in 2017. As one major conductor claimed, Pavarotti's was a voice you might chance to come along once in a century. At the start of his career he was hailed as a new superstar of the opera world. Every opera house wanted him. But two men changed all that. As a new book points out Backstage With Pavarotti And Other Egos: Disasters On The High Cs, his manager, a New York agent named Herbert Breslin, was one of the most loathed men in the music business. One conductor called him "the biggest barracuda in the fish tank." But he was street smart and knew how to make stars. He knew he had to get Pavarotti out of the opera houses where seating capacities were limited to 2,000 - 3,000 and consequently singers' and agents' fees were low. Besides, an opera required about 3 weeks rehearsal. On the other hand, a recital often paid the same but required only two days work.

But Pavarotti's huge income came largely from another man, a Hungarian who had been a survivor of the Nazi's Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp. Tibor Rudas loved opera. He had been a member of the boys chorus at the Hungarian State Opera before the war. By the early 1980s he was entertainment director for a number of US casinos, working regularly with artists like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Dolly Parton. But he wanted an involvement in opera and he wanted only the best. Over three years he tried to get Breslin to agree to his putting Pavarotti into his Atlantic City casino theatre. The answer was always no. But Rudas never gave up. When the fee he offered reached a staggerfing US$100,000 for one night's work, Breslin caved in. Instead of the theatre, an 8,000 seat marquee was erected in the grounds. And in April 1983 Luciano Pavarotti began his journey to being the wealthiest mega-world opera star the world had ever seen.

While the cognoscenti of the opera word scoffed, Pavarotti, Rudas and Breslin laughed al the way to the bank. With an annual income now in the many millions, Pavarotti sang less opera, appeared more on TV and concentrated on his arena concerts seating from 10,000 to 20,000. The audiences adored him. Then at the World Cup in Rome in 1990, the other two great tenors Domingo and Carreras joined him for a concert that changed all their lives. The Three Tenors became an entertainment sensation of the 1990s. For the 1998 concert at the Paris World Cup, their fees started at US$5 million - each. They even appeared in Beijing's Forbidden City at the start of the century as part of Beijing's bid to host the summer Olympics in 2008.

But by then, the always overweight Pavarotti had started to have big health problems. Even after operations, his hips and knees were giving out. In 2005 he started a worldwide Farewell Tour. But he only made it as far as Asia. The final three concerts he ever sang before a paying public were in Shanghai, Beijing and Taiwan. That Taiwan concert before a crowd of 20,000 on 14 December 2005 was his last.

None of us will ever again hear the likes of the amazingly bright and radiant Italianate quality of that voice, coupled with his extraordinary clear high notes and his massive on-stage charisma. I feel we are all so lucky to have heard him in our lifetimes. I don't know where his soul rests, but I wish it a very Happy Birthday on Sunday.

Pavarotti was known as the King of the High Cs, a result of his performance of this Donizetti opera at the Metropolitan Opera in 1973. This short pirate video made backstage captures the moment when he earned this nickname (visual quality is poor). And below is the poster for his last ever performance (No, he did not thereafter sing at the opening of the Winter Olympics in Turin 6 weeks later - both sound and vision of that "performance" were precorded more than a week in advance since he was ill. At the event, he mimed).