by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I kept the TV on KPBS to
watch Pavarotti: A Voice for the Ages, thinking it would be the quite interesting documentary on the late
superstar tenor Luciano Pavarotti recently reviewed in Fanfare magazine, a “warts and all” portrait that featured
his former manager Hubert Breslin — who had helped build Pavarotti as an
attraction and raised him out of the ghetto of opera stardom into full-fledged
mass-market celebrity-hood, only to have a bitter falling-out with him. Alas,
what this show turned out to be was a hagiographical presentation of clips from
Pavarotti’s previous PBS appearances, complete with a few archival interview
clips from Pavarotti himself — including a surprisingly revealing comment that
he loved appearing on TV because it’s a close-up medium and therefore he didn’t
have to act with his body (which, given his sheer bulk, was always a challenge
and became increasingly difficult for him as, like Orson Welles, he became even
more bloated in his later years than he’d started out) but could communicate
character with his face. The show gave an interesting if rather incomplete
portrait of Pavarotti the artist, including several depictions of a real-life
singer-conductor couple who helped him and frequently appeared with him in the early
years — soprano Mirella Freni and her husband, conductor Leone Magiera (an
early Italian TV clip of Puccini’s La Bohème with them nearly a decade before they recorded it
together with Herbert von Karajan and the Vienna Philharmonic is fascinating —
especially for Pavarotti’s attractiveness; he was certainly big but not as huge
as he got later, and though hefty he wasn’t so large he wasn’t believable as a starving poet in a
Parisian garret) — but it surprisingly doesn’t mention a far more prominent soprano-conductor
couple who helped him even more, including getting him his recording contract
with British Decca (then known as London Records in the U.S.): Joan Sutherland
and Richard Bonynge.
But then the producers of this show seemed to be going out
of their way to minimize Pavarotti the bel-cantist; though his repertory reached at least as far back
in operatic history as Mozart’s Idomeneo (revived by the Met in the 1990’s especially for him) and much of his
early prominence came from recording scores like Donizetti’s Lucia di
Lammermoor and La Fille du
Regiment and Bellini’s La
Sonnambula and I Puritani with Sutherland and Bonynge (indeed, it was his
performance of the notoriously difficult aria “Pour mon âme” from Fille du
Regiment, with nine, count ’em, nine high C’s, that earned Pavarotti his early nickname
“King of the High C’s”), all the opera excerpts in this show were familiar “chestnuts” by Verdi or
Puccini. There was a well-sung “Celeste Aïda” from a Met gala tribute to
conductor James Levine (alas, shorn of the opening recitative); Pavarotti
rather tastelessly boomed out the final high note fortissimo instead of singing it softly as Verdi asked for,
but as with such other uncalled-for “Verdi” high notes as the high C at the end
of “Di quella pira” in Il Trovatore and the E-flat in alt at the end of “Sempre libera” in La Traviata, just about everybody sings it this way now. (Caruso sang the high note
softly in his first
recording of “Celeste Aïda” in 1902, left the entire phrase out of his second
recording — the 78 rpm master ran out of room — but thereafter sang it loud.)
The show was divided into three parts — each separated by the interminable,
pleading “pledge breaks” inflicted on PBS viewers by an increasingly
financially desperate network (one Republican Congressmember in the 1980’s said
he found the “pledge breaks” more offensive than out-and-out commercials, and
though he was using this as an excuse to vote to end all federal funding for
PBS I could still see his point) — the first showing Pavarotti the opera
singer, the second his collaborations with pop stars — including U2, Eric
Clapton and Sting — and the third dealing with the whole “Three Tenors”
phenomenon, in which the people considered the most important living tenors in
the world, Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, grouped together for
mega-concerts. The original Three Tenors concert took place in Rome in 1990 and
was planned in connection with the final match of the World Cup soccer (or, as
the rest of the world outside the U.S. and U.K. terms it, “football”)
tournament, and the second one took place in L.A. in 1994, also just before
that year’s World Cup final.
It’s indicative of what a phenomenon this became
and how it leapfrogged out of the classical-music ghetto that the album of the
1990 concert came out on British Decca/U.S. London and had a respectable
classical-style cover (it didn’t use the “Three Tenors” sobriquet and was simply billed as
“Carreras-Domingo-Pavarotti in Concert”), while the album and video of the 1994
concert came out on Atlantic and featured a swooping animated logo in which the
numeral “3” came dancing out of the sky before it settled down in front of the
screen along with the words “The” and “Tenors.” The Three Tenors concerts
featured both classical and popular music, and alas the pop selections were
pretty ghastly, including a version of the Neapolitan song “O sole mio” used as
an excuse for the tenors (especially Pavarotti) to ham it up, and the awful
song “My Way,” which began as a French song about a long-term married couple
now bored by each other, got changed into the bizarre peroration we know by
Paul Anka (who was hired by the song’s publisher to supply an English lyric —
an original, not a translation of the original French) and recorded by Frank
Sinatra, a horrifyingly bad record because it hooked the egomania that was by
far the least attractive part of Sinatra’s public persona. In the Three Tenors’ performances “My Way” has
you asking, “What are three guys with nice voices like yours doing with a song
like this?” I’m not saying it’s a
bad move for opera singers to record pop material, but not when the pop
material is so far removed from opera that they haven’t a clue what to do with
it; Caruso was able to do material like George M. Cohan’s “Over There” and make
it work, but the influence of African-American music on popular music worldwide
— manifested in the successive eras of ragtime, jazz, swing, rock and rap — has
carried pop music ever farther from opera and made it more difficult for opera
singers to find lighter material that can work for them. This is probably why
so many opera singers, tenors in particular, fall back on the so-called
“Neapolitan Song” genre, of
which “O sole mio” (the only song recorded by both of RCA Victor’s two most legendary artists, Enrico
Caruso and Elvis Presley) is the most famous example — these songs can be
beautiful if they’re treated with respect, as Pavarotti did in what is probably
his best singing on this program, Tosti’s “A vucchella,” with Leone Magiera
accompanying him on piano. There’s no hamming, no milking, no blatant playing
to the audience — just three minutes of finely honed, sweetly voiced romantic
singing that remind us what a great voice Pavarotti had even if he didn’t
always use it in the best of taste.
The pop songs include “Miss Sarajevo” by U2
— a typical piece of Bonoesque irony inspired by a news item that women in
war-torn Sarajevo were hosting a beauty contest, for which Pavarotti’s
contribution was a section melodically different from the rest and sung in
Italian (which, like everything else in this frustrating program, was not subtitled — opera mavens will know the texts of
the well-known arias like Verdi’s “La donna è mobile” and “Celeste Aïda” and
Puccini’s “Che gelida manina” and “Nessun dorma” — a piece Pavarotti so
extensively publicized that Puccini’s opera Turandot, which it’s from, emerged from the shadows of the
established repertory to a level of popularity comparable to Puccini’s “Big
Three,” Bohème, Tosca and Madama
Butterfly — but it would have been nice to know what Pavarotti was singing
about on the less familiar pieces) — and a “Hail Mary” duet with Clapton in
which, as Charles pointed out later, it was a good thing Clapton sang the song
before Pavarotti did because we wouldn’t have been able to understand the
English words from the hash Pavarotti made of them. (This, as Charles pointed
out, was probably the reason Pavarotti never sang an opera role in English;
though in the reviews of the world premiere production of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa in 1958 the singer praised for the best English
diction was, ironically, tenor Nicolai Gedda — the only one whose native
language was not English — Pavarotti was no
Gedda in terms of the precision of his diction in any language.) The third clip featuring Pavarotti with
a pop singer was his duet on César Franck’s “Panis Angelicus” with Sting — and
Sting proved as clueless how to “speak” Pavarotti’s musical language as
Pavarotti had been to “speak” Clapton’s. Pavarotti’s 1970’s Christmas special
from Montréal gave us a precious clip of him singing this solo (he also
recorded it and it was on the compilation Pavarotti’s Greatest Hits) and that’s the version that should have been presented here. The statement that
most rankled me was made, not by anyone in the program itself, but by the KPBS
announcer promoting it, who called Pavarotti “the greatest tenor of the 20th
century” — huh? What about Caruso,
Melchior, Björling or his contemporary (and fellow “Three Tenors” tenor)
Domingo? In a review of a bootleg CD of an early (1973) Pavarotti recital in
New York, Bill White wrote in the March-April 2014 Fanfare, “Plàcido Domingo is by all odds probably the best
operatic tenor of the last 50 years, but the best tenor voice in that same span
in all probability belongs to Luciano Pavarotti” — which probably sums up the
difference between them: Pavarotti’s voice was more charismatic, instantly
recognizable and overwhelming, but Domingo used his with more intelligence and
also dared a considerably wider range of repertoire (including Wagner).
There
were odd lacunae on this show, like so many
domestic scenes of Naples you’d have thought Pavarotti was born there (he
wasn’t — he was born in Modena, in the Po Valley in southern Italy, a smallish
town whose other main claim to fame was that Enzo Ferrari established his car
factory there) — but on the other hand Pavarotti: A Voice for the Ages is a good hour-long program featuring some of
Pavarotti’s loveliest singing, but it still whets my curiosity for the mysterious
biographical documentary Hubert Breslin worked on that probably explores the
darker side of Pavarotti’s life, including his weird superstitions (he thought
that in order to have good luck before a performance he had to find a bent nail
backstage, so Pavarotti’s organization — unbeknownst, of course, to him —
included a staff member whose job it was to leave bent nails around backstage
wherever he was to perform so he’d find one and be reassured that his
appearance would go well), his heavy-duty womanizing (an aspect of his
character actually worked into the script for Yes, Giorgio, the flop movie he made for MGM in 1982 in which
he plays a world-class tenor who loses his voice, is nursed back to both
physical and vocal health by a woman doctor, and starts an ongoing relationship
with her even though he has a wife and kids back in Italy — and we were
supposed to think of this as a happy ending!) and his huge intake of food. Most
opera singers try to avoid a big meal in the last hours before a performance
because they don’t want to be distracted by indigestion; Pavarotti would often
be snacking practically until the moment the curtain went up, and one friend
remembers receiving a phone call from him at 3 a.m. while the great tenor was
on tour. Thinking it was some sort of dire emergency, the friend rushed to
Pavarotti’s room — whereupon Pavarotti told him that the reason he’d summoned
him at that hour was he’d just got a new sausage that was so good he wanted his
friend to have the opportunity to share it!
