Word: pavarotti
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...Modena baker, himself an amateur opera singer, the young Pavarotti grew up dreaming instead of a career as a soccer player. Decades later, he would sing his signature tune Nessun Dorma at the inauguration of the 1990 World Cup in Italy, which by many accounts may have been his most widely seen peformance by hundreds of millions of television viewers. His last major appearance was singing at the opening ceremonies of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin...
...both a perfectionist and a born showman, as his status as cultural icon was sealed by unprecedented duets with rock and pop music singers, from Bono to Stevie Wonder to Celine Dion. Some opera purists will never forgive the tenor for these Pavarotti and Friends performances, which he acknowledged in one of his final interviews last year with Italian journalist Ettore Mo. "There were polemics because I'd thrown myself into a completely different genre," Pavarotti noted. But in the same interview, just a few months after cancer surgery, Pavarotti was counting his blessings. "I am and have been...
...Gemma Luzzi, 65, a retired high school Italian teacher from Rome, recalled how Pavarotti's early performances gave new impetus to the classical form. But she wondered if the singer grew too attached to his fame. "He had a grand voice, but maybe he didn't have the strength to retire when he was on top. Maybe I'm a purist, but I never liked these duets (with pop singers). It kept him in the spotlight, so I guess he had fun doing them...
...That was in 1972. The tenor was Luciano Pavarotti. For a decade he had been building an international operatic reputation as a real comer. Now, with those high C's at the Met, he announced that he had fully arrived. Virtually from that moment until he died this week of pancreatic cancer at 71, he reigned in the public mind as the primo tenor - make that the primissimo tenor...
...extravagance of the label was just right. In both his music and his personality, Pavarotti's exuberance was multissimo. His voice - "one of those freaks of nature that comes very rarely in a hundred years," according to conductor Richard Bonynge - had a clear, penetrating timbre, alive with the resonance known to singers as "ping." At the same time it radiated a gorgeously warm romantic sheen. He produced it with an unforced, open-throated quality that Italians call lasciarsi andare - letting it pour forth...