Pavarotti says farewell to the operatic stage in New York

By ANDREW GUMBEL

He came, he sang, he wobbled a lot - but he expired right on cue, with the help of a judiciously placed pile of beanbags to hold his famous girth and limit the strain on his arthritic knees.

Thus did Luciano Pavarotti say farewell to the operatic stage in an emotional final performance of Puccini's Tosca at the New York Met on Saturday night.

It was far from the apex of his singing career, his once effortlessly silken voice no longer as flexible or as capable of racing up the scale to the high Cs.

As an artistic interpretation of Cavaradossi, the ardent young painter who falls in love with the wrong woman and ends up on the receiving end of a firing squad, it was not so much an acting job - never Pavarotti's strong point - as an exercise in on-stage immobility.

According to the write-ups in yesterday's New York papers, he had to be propped up by his fellow singers at various junctures and barely opened his eyes as he sang.

But no matter. The occasion marked the passing of a operatic colossus, in every sense of the word, and the packed crowd at the Metropolitan Opera House was determined to give him the send-off that his glittering 40-year career deserved.

They rose to their feet in applause when he made his first appearance, and they amped up their approval into a deafening roar after his climactic third-act aria "E lucevan le stelle".

When the opera ended, they clamoured for no fewer than 10 curtain calls, including three personal bows by the 68-year-old master tenor alone.

After the third curtain call, a large red and white banner dropped from the second tier of the auditorium, reading "We Love You Luciano". The letter "o" in love was fashioned into a heart shape.

When it was clear that Pavarotti had made his final thank-you and was not returning to the stage, the applause sharpened into several minutes of rhythmic clapping.

This was a crowd that did not want to see him go.

In truth, there were two Pavarottis on display at the Met, the opera house he has favoured like no other since his New York debut in 1968.

The first was the critics' Pavarotti, the soaring talent who almost certainly outstayed his welcome, who carried on singing well beyond the point where his elephantine presence and fading vocal prowess started to become an embarrassment.

They would have been happier if he had called it a day in 1998, his previous outing at the Met, or even earlier.

The second Pavarotti, however, was the opera singer as celebrity, the icon of popular culture who has claimed a unique hold on the world's collective imagination even since his triumphant moment singing "Nessun dorma" - another Puccini number - with his fellow tenors Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras at the 1990 World Cup.

Of the three, Pavarotti was always most willing to promote himself as a popular artist, happy to share a stage with Sting or Celine Dion or Elton John without worrying too much about the near-kitsch stylistic mishmash that resulted from their collaborations.

He, too, came closest to the public perception of what an opera singer should be, with his gargantuan proportions, his broad, toothy smile, his ever-present white handkerchief wiping away the spittle of all the throaty romantic passion, and his voracious appetites - for life, food and the lithesome younger women he referred to as his "harem".

This second Pavarotti was the one that had audiences beating down the doors of the Met for tickets to his final three performances over the past week, the one who had long since left the rarefied elitist world of opera as a fine art and turned himself into a superstar.

As a critic for the New York Times put it, he performed in Tosca "with one foot in Puccini's world and the other in his own spotlight".

This is the Pavarotti who would make vast pots of home-made pasta for journalists and then polish off most of it himself, the Pavarotti who made it on to the pages of the tabloid newspapers as he ditched his wife for his much younger secretary and suffered first joy and then tragedy as one of the twin babies he sired last year died in childbirth.

The audience for this Pavarotti is clearly ready to forgive him anything.

After all, he let them down badly in 2002 - the original date set for his farewell to opera - when he cancelled two out of two scheduled performances at the Met, citing a cold. His only appearance since then was a lone performance in Berlin last June.

Rather than accept that this is the end of the road, Pavarotti's most ardent fans seem to be hoping that he will come back for more, no matter what he says.

Opera singers are, after all, notorious for their multiple retirements and final encores. And Saturday night was, at least officially, only the end of his operatic career.

There is talk of a revival of the Three Tenors line-up for a more informal concert appearance, as well as some kind of farewell tour.

Hopes for a revival may be illusory, however.

Pavarotti himself has repeatedly said that he will definitively call it quits on 12 October, 2005, the date of his 70th birthday. And he told the Associated Press the day before his finale on Saturday night that he regarded the occasion as his last stage performance anywhere.

"I think it's time," he reflected.

Operatic purists would certainly agree with that sentiment. For several years, Pavarotti has looked like a parody of himself on stage, struggling with his bad knees, his bad hips and his ballooning weight. He has delivered arias sitting down, making no attempt to play his parts or interact with his fellow singers, and has been known to conceal cups of water on stage to help him through.

He admitted to the Associated Press that this was less than ideal. "Let's say that in the last 10 years there are a lot of performances that are not super," he said.

Opera critics have often made the same point with a lot less tenderness. Just a few days ago, Norman Lebrecht, author of "The Complete Companion to 20th Century Music", pondered how posterity will come to regard Pavarotti.

"Will it be as the most exquisite lyrical voice of his epoch, or as an artist who outgrew his art by craving wealth and celebrity and conforming more to Oprah expectations than to the sensibilities of grand opera?" he asked.

And he added, with pointed indelicacy: "Pavarotti grew famous by growing fat. That was both his triumph and his tragedy."

Pavarotti's celebrity status has also made him as many enemies as it has friends.

His wife Adua, whom he left in 1996, had been his loyal business manager as well as the mother of his first three children before she was unceremoniously dumped.

Earlier this year, Pavarotti also split from his US publicist Herbert Breslin, who is busy writing a tell-all book to be called The King And I.

Breslin told reporters recently the book was about "a beautiful, simple, lovely guy who turned into a very determined, aggressive and somewhat unhappy superstar". Luciano, watch out.

- INDEPENDENT