At the age of 10, I decided I was going to grow up to become an Italian tenor.
I had just seen a movie called "The Great Caruso" and I couldn't imagine a more glorious life. Enrico Caruso was the Babe Ruth of opera, larger than life and twice as popular. In exchange for singing a few arias he got lots of money, beautiful women and unlimited spaghetti. At that point I had no particular interest in money or women, but I was a huge fan of spaghetti.
Two things kept me from realizing my ambition. One, I was not Italian and probably never would be. And, two, I skipped tenor; my voice went directly from sweet soprano to barely baritone.
But if Caruso was Babe Ruth, Luciano Pavarotti was Barry Bonds . . . onstage, at least. For a tenor, hitting a high C was a home run. In an aria in "La Fille du Regiment," Pavarotti blasted NINE of them. In the same inning.
Like Bonds, Pavarotti had flaws. He dumped his wife of 37 years and married a woman who was young enough to be his secretary. He had tax problems in two countries. As a singer, he may or may not have been the greatest tenor ever. As an actor, he was a bearded Elvis Presley.
And, like Bonds, he had his detractors, some of whom felt he had sold his musical soul for a mess of marketing. The first time I saw Pavarotti live was in Cleveland, where he was starring in "Un Ballo in Maschera." Before the performance I was seated at a bar in a restaurant and mentioned to someone that I thought Pavarotti was the greatest tenor ever. A guy on the other side of the bar who claimed to be a member of the opera orchestra reacted as if I'd said the Bengals were better than the Browns. Pavarotti was, he said in effect, "overrated." But maybe the guy was suffering from pianist envy.
Rudolph Bing, manager of the Metropolitan Opera when Pavarotti made his debut there, complained to New York magazine in 1968 that, "seeing that stupid, ugly face everywhere I go is getting on my nerves. It's all so unnecessary, so undignified."
The public disagreed. We couldn't get enough of him.
If Pavarotti was not the greatest tenor of all time, he was the most heard. In 1977 he appeared on the first "Live From the Met" television broadcast, viewed by the widest audience ever to see a single opera. He teamed with Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras in 1994 for a televised performance seen by 1.5 billion worldwide.
People who didn't know grand opera from soap opera discovered "Nessun dorma" after Pavarotti performed it at the World Cup Soccer tournament. In his 40-year career he brought unprecedented exposure to opera and crossed unexplored boundaries, singing duets with everyone from Frank Sinatra to the Spice Girls.
Was he the greatest ever? I'm not qualified to say.
I never heard Caruso live and I'm sure the few scratchy recordings of him don't do him justice. But I have a large collection of Pavarotti's arias on CDs. And on the day he died I went home from work that evening, slid one of them into my Bose player and sat down to marvel again at the incredible voice of Luciano Pavarotti.
Over a large bowl of spaghetti.
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Spaghetti and Pavarotti, all one could ask for
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