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The first few times I heard Pavarotti I remember my mouth sagging open whenever he began to sing. No, I was not presuming to sing along with him: the dropped jaw was my tribute of gaping amazement. It hardly seemed possible for a human being - especially the
podgy, affable, pasta-engorged blob you saw before you - to produce sounds of such beaming, warming brilliance. His voice was like the sun rising over the horizon, electrically thrilling in its radiance. I recall a performance of the Verdi Requiem at the Edinburgh Festival, back in the 1970s, conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini. In one of his solos, Pavarotti delivered the Latin text in which the soul begs to be placed among the sheep not the goats with an innocent spiritual ardour that made him seem like the lamb of God, baaing in contentment as it was ushered into the company of the blessed. On that occasion he sang himself into heaven, and took you there with him.
Then there were the operatic performances with Joan Sutherland - Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor at Covent Garden, Bellini's I puritani at the Met in New York. He began as Sutherland's protege, and taught himself how to support his voice by gripping her diaphragm during their love scenes; she regarded him as an adorable and somewhat unruly child, forgiven for his infractions because of the sensuous tones in which he apologised.
Their partnership was complementary but never competitive. Her freakish technical virtuosity encouraged him to try harder, rather than relying on gifts that were almost too liberally lavished on him, while his spontaneity aroused in her a giddy, girlish delight she seldom exhibited with other tenors. The high Cs they sang in unison are probably still orbiting somewhere in outer space, astonishing any passing angels.
Late in the 1980s, also at the Met, I heard Pavarotti and his childhood friend Mirella Freni in Puccini's La boheme, mercurially conducted by Carlos Kleiber. By then, he and the soprano were both stoutly middle-aged, but opera is about the spirit's transcendence of the flesh, and I still remember the sounds they made together - quivering with erotic elation at first, then ravaged by dissatisfaction and distress, finally serene in the recollection of vanished bliss - as the definitive account of young love and its tragic curtailment.
The lushness and liquidity of Pavarotti's sound always made me think of Keats' line about bursting joy's grape against your palate. The words he sang - whether they were excerpts from the Latin mass or the burbling folderol of Neapolitan songs - exuded juice. Italian vowels never sounded so deliciously tangy, so frankly sensual, as when they tripped off his tongue and exploded from his lips. With Pavarotti, you could never forget that singing is an oral pleasure, like eating or kissing. He was certainly well aware of this: in his sweetly, naively pious way, he often remarked that God had kissed him on the throat as a sign of special favour when creating him (and he once added, when sizing up a nubile soprano, "God must have kissed you all over").
Pavarotti embodied Italy - the pagan place with its ancient, lecherous deities and ribald appetites, and also the Christianised country with its more benign God, who assures the faithful of a happy ending. Touchingly, one of his daughters remarked a few weeks ago that he was at peace with the prospect of approaching death, because he was looking forward to seeing his parents again in the afterlife. His father was a baker, his mother a factory worker: she never heard him sing because she feared that her weak heart wouldn't survive such happiness.
Because of Pavarotti's own rural simplicity, the operatic role that best defined him was the bumpkin Nemorino in Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore: at first a mooning dolt, but then, when he sings an aria about the trickling tear he has seen in the eye of the rich woman who previously disdained him, irresistibly lovable.
Pavarotti was a child of nature - by which I mean that culture added very little to his astonishing natural talent. God, in his own grateful estimation, gave him that voice; he had no responsibility for it, and, after the first glorious decade of his career, seemed at a loss to know what to do with it. Placido Domingo, in the absence of golden tonsils, constructed a voice that has served him well for 40 years; its very limitations enable him to express an urgency and anguish that were never in Pavarotti's repertory of available emotions.
Domingo's greedy musical curiosity has kept his career constantly evolving, while Pavarotti could only ineffectually try to compete with the vocal athlete he once was. In 1966 at Covent Garden he incited a riot by emitting a fusillade of nine pinging, exactly-pitched high Cs during one deliriously exhibitionistic aria in Donizetti's La fille du regiment. In 1995 he suicidally insisted that the Met revive the same production for him, but either ducked the money note or sneakily transposed them down, failing to justify his reputation as "king of the high Cs".
By this time, his career had ignominiously stalled. I gave up on him after a concert performance of Verdi's Otello at Carnegie Hall in 1991, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Solti. This was supposed to be Pavarotti's assault on a role monopolised by Domingo, and his effort to prove himself capable of tragedy. He flunked out, pleading the flu.
Although he was persuaded to sing, he insisted on making himself comfortable while doing so. Ensconced in an armchair on the platform with a table of treats by his side, he snacked and tippled his way through the opera, sometimes retiring under a bath towel to inhale mentholated vapours. He ignored Solti, and took his cues from a personal conductor, Mirella Freni's former husband, who crouched among the orchestra and mouthed the words for his benefit. It would have been farcical if it hadn't been so dismaying: I felt I was watching a nervous breakdown take place in public.
Otello collapses into epileptic raving, but recovers for a last melodious self-justification after the murder of Desdemona. Pavarotti's failure of nerve seemed more real and raw and more incurable than the cathartic agony of the character he was meant to be playing.
Domingo successively reinvented himself. Pavarotti, unable to grow, simply put on weight. For a while, his bulk was the most famous thing about him: as globular as Falstaff, he became a symbol of self-contentment, advertising a gluttonous version of the good life. The man became more important than his art. In America he cooked pasta on television talk shows, and played a version of himself in a lamentable Hollywood romantic comedy, Yes, Giorgio; at home in Modena, he organised an international horse show.
He was persuaded to see himself as a saviour of suffering humanity: he raised funds for charity, and in the process came to be numbered among Princess Diana's 10,000 best friends. Starting in 1990, he teamed up with Domingo and Jose Carreras for a series of Three Tenors concerts that became a global franchise. The official justification for these anthologies of miked medleys was that they encouraged new audiences to go to the opera.
More importantly, perhaps, they sold CDs in unimaginable quantities. The collaboration was meant to be a meeting of fraternal equals, but a secret deal negotiated by Pavarotti's manager ensured that he was paid a million dollars more than his blood-brothers for every gig. As an icon, he deserved the bonus.
Once or twice he was caught lip-synching to his own recordings during open-air performances. Well, why should he bother to sing, since the crowds had come simply to be in his bouncy, ebullient, unbuttoned presence?
Gradually, grand opera was replaced by the soap opera of an unravelling private life. Unsurprisingly, that over-indulged body gave way. His knees and hips caved in, and he performed operas sitting down. Frantically denying the advance of the years, he hid beneath an inky toupee, and dyed his beard and his eyebrows to match its raven hues. He went through a messy, ill-tempered divorce, and was lucky to escape prison after the Italian government accused him of tax evasion. As a young man he was irresistible when playing libertines like the promiscuous Duke in Verdi's Rigoletto: his own life was about unbridled instinct, and he dispensed an infectious carnal pleasure when he sang. An elderly scapegrace, however, is embarrassing.
Pavarotti's death eliminates all these latter-day failings. It releases him from time, and preserves him at his best. His gift was precious because tenors are such unnecessary, almost supernaturally improbable beings. They sing in a stratospheric vocal range that lies well above the gruff, hoarse, grumbling baritonal register in which most men speak and argue, so the sounds they make - when professing eternal love like the heroes in Italian opera, or pleading for admission to heaven like the tenor in the Verdi Requiem - have an ideal purity that holds out the hope of a better self, a reformed and redeemed humanity. The owner of such a voice can never live up to it, which is why voices like these are so often lodged in unworthy, ill-shaped bodies. But when the man dies, the voice survives him. Isn't that what we were once told would happen to the soul?
- Observer