Who was the most significant opera singer of the second half of the 20th century? The question, of course, is unanswerable. But ask who had the most significant career, and there can be only one possible answer: Luciano Pavarotti. Along with Leonard Bernstein, Van Cliburn, and Vladimir Horowitz, the Italian tenor was among the handful of postwar classical musicians whose name was generally known to the public at large. Though he retired from the operatic stage last March—he will continue to appear in concert until he turns seventy next October—he remains a star.
Now Pavarotti is the subject of a tell-all memoir by Herbert Breslin, his former manager and publicist. Written in collaboration with the music critic Anne Midgette, The King and I: The Uncensored Tale of Luciano Pavarotti's Rise to Fame by His Manager, Friend, and Sometime Adversary dishes up a generous helping of the gossip that its subtitle promises.1 If you long to know all about Pavarotti's compulsive eating and womanizing, The King and I is the book to read.
Renée Fleming's The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer, by contrast, is as decorous as the author herself, who in the past decade has become the best-known American opera singer of her generation.2 Instead of recounting the travails of her private life (which include a painful divorce), she has chosen instead to concentrate on purely professional matters:
As I set about my education as a singer, I devoured the autobiographies of my predecessors, hoping to find the kind of advice that would improve my singing, but mostly what I found were entertaining accounts of celebrated lives. . . . I searched for such a long time for the book I wanted to read that finally I decided my only recourse was to try to write it myself.
At first glance, it would seem that these two singers have little in common except their celebrity. Unlike the unschooled, incurious Pavarotti, who never sang art songs or modern classical music, and who found it all but impossible to learn new operatic roles of any kind, Fleming has appeared in contemporary opera (she created the role of Blanche DuBois in André Previn's operatic version of A Streetcar Named Desire) and is widely admired for her song recitals. Yet to read The King and I and The Inner Voice in tandem is to be reminded that, like all of today's opera singers, she too lives in the shadow of her older colleague. No singer in our time has done more to reshape the face of major-house opera than Pavarotti, for better or—mostly—for worse.
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How good was Pavarotti? Will he be remembered a century from now, as we remember such indisputably great tenors of the past as Enrico Caruso, Beniamino Gigli, or Lauritz Melchior? Possibly, but not necessarily.
To be sure, he was in his prime a remarkable singer, without doubt the foremost lyric tenor of his day, and well beyond his fiftieth year his luminous, pointed tone and crisp diction retained much of their quality. On the other hand, Pavarotti was never a distinctive interpreter, and his acting was at best barely competent. Instead, he cultivated an expansive, outgoing manner (“He plays the part of being Pavarotti with succulent delectation,” Nicolas Slonimsky quipped) that charmed his listeners at the expense of the dramatic credibility of the operas in which he appeared.
As a result, he had less and less to offer once the natural beauty of his voice began to succumb to advancing age. As I wrote in a New York Daily News review of a recital he gave eight years ago at the Metropolitan Opera House:
Vocally speaking, Pavarotti is no longer consistently comfortable above high A, and moves from soft singing to loud only with audible grinding of gears (he doesn't have much of anything in between). . . . Why does this matter? Because Pavarotti has nothing to offer but his voice. Most singers who perform into their old age do so in order to share new musical insights. But Pavarotti's artistry has not deepened with age, nor has he shown any serious interest in exploring unfamiliar repertoire.
I enjoyed seeing Pavarotti on stage and in concert as late as the early 90's, but I cannot claim to have found his performances illuminating, and for the most part his studio recordings lacked the imaginative idiosyncrasy needed to make them truly memorable.3 Yet it was at that precise moment that he succeeded in establishing himself as the world's most popular opera singer.
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What made him stand out from the crowd? Herbert Breslin supplies the answer in The King and I, and while it is self-serving, it is also correct. Pavarotti's unique popular success was made possible by shrewd promotion. An unabashed vulgarian with a knack for salesmanship, Breslin handled Pavarotti less as an artist than as a product:
I kept him in front of the public with one performance, one event, one “first” after another. First U.S. recital, first “Live from the Met” broadcast, first solo recital from the Metropolitan Opera stage, first American Express commercial, first solo concert in a 20,000-seat arena. . . . I brought that tenor out of the opera house and into the arms of an enormous mass public.
Breslin was not the first promoter to use the mass media to sell classical music; opera singers had been hiring publicists as far back as the 30's. Nor was he the first to recognize that for singers, the big money was not in opera, with its limited per-service fees and high overhead, but in solo concerts, where the artist performs for a percentage of the gate. What made Breslin exceptional was his ambition—and his good timing.
When Breslin and Pavarotti began working together, it was still possible to get classical musicians into the pages of Time and Newsweek and on TV programs like The Ed Sullivan Show. Recognizing that his client's rough charm made him a natural for mass marketing, Breslin promoted him as aggressively as “a bar of soap,” working closely with Decca/London, the tenor's record label, which hawked his albums no less energetically.
Not all of Breslin's ideas worked. Pavarotti's appearance in the feature film Yes, Giorgio (1982), for instance, was disastrous. And as the 70's gave way to the 80's, it became steadily harder to get the tenor, or any other classical musician, on network TV. But by then he had become sufficiently well known to sell out such huge arenas as New York's Madison Square Garden. When the Hungarian promoter Tibor Rudas had the idea of presenting him in concert with Placido Domingo and José Carreras, billing the group as “The Three Tenors,” Pavarotti no longer had to rely on TV—or on Herbert Breslin. He had become a self-sustaining media phenomenon.
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Pavarotti's appearances and recordings with the Three Tenors, though of negligible artistic value, were not in and of themselves a bad thing. Here is what I wrote of them in 1996:
In a way, the Three Tenors are the closest thing we have to the lost middlebrow culture. Far coarser in their approach than, say, Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops (that quintessential middlebrow institution), they are still capable of lifting aspiring music lovers from a more debased level of culture to a less debased one.4
But as was to be demonstrated by the rest of Pavarotti's later career, the Three Tenors phenomenon also had an unintended consequence: inflating the commercial expectations of the recording industry to a dangerous degree. The major classical labels thereafter sought to reproduce the unprecedented success of the Three Tenors by “encouraging” their top artists to record “crossover” versions of popular music (Pavarotti was a prime offender) and similar projects meant to reap maximum short-term profit.
This fateful shift in emphasis, coupled with the equally unforeseen effects of digital recording and web-based file sharing, led in a few short years to the implosion of the classical recording industry. The long-term effects of this development will be of incalculable significance in the immediate future, since recordings were the engine that drove the international star system on which the culture of classical music had hitherto been based.5
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In The Inner Voice, Renée Fleming describes the realities of a post-Pavarotti singing career. A “heavy” lyric soprano whose core repertoire consists of the operas of Mozart and Richard Strauss, Fleming is one of the last classical singers to have been signed by Decca/London, Pavarotti's label. A beautiful woman with a warm, engaging offstage personality, Fleming was an ideal candidate for mass marketing, and though her artistic priorities could hardly have been more different from those of Pavarotti, she was handled by her promoters in similar ways.
Matthew Epstein, Fleming's manager, pushed her to restrict her wide-ranging repertoire so as to make her more attractive to opera companies; Mary Lou Falcone, her publicist, sought to place her on a “steady upward trajectory” of media exposure. Like Pavarotti (though for different reasons), Fleming then began to cut back on opera in favor of concert appearances, and Decca/London capitalized on the success of these events by releasing a series of glamorously packaged recital CD's with such titles as By Request and The Beautiful Voice.
So far, Fleming has managed to steer clear of at least some of the pitfalls that can befall so aggressively marketed a singer. As she proudly explains in The Inner Voice:
If I wanted to capitalize on my commercial potential entirely, I would sing only the most popular classical arias, not in their original forms, but arranged stylistically to fit everything from techno to Hollywood film music. I would sing even less opera, and then only Italian opera and not the lesser-known Strauss and French rarities that I adore. I would tour only my recordings in pursuit of ever larger sales, rather than performing world premieres and the concert repertoire of Strauss, Berg, and Schoenberg.
All this is true—and that she has tried to resist the trap of marketing is admirable. Yet, as Fleming herself suggests, she may have paid a price for not resisting harder. “These days,” she writes, “it sometimes feels as if I spend more of my time on the logistics of singing than I do on the art and performance of it.” Might this preoccupation be affecting her artistry? In recent years, it seems to me, Fleming's singing has not developed, either expressively or technically, in the ways once expected of it, to the point where one can no longer be certain that she will become a truly great singer (as opposed to an exceptionally good one). Whether this can be attributed to the heavy emphasis she and her handlers have placed on career development cannot be known—but neither can the possibility be discounted.
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Renée Fleming continues to make much of her great gifts. But The Inner Voice suggests that she knows there are limits to what she can hope to achieve in the diminished world of post-Pavarotti opera.
The major houses where Fleming sings, after all, rarely if ever produce the new operas she longs to perform, just as Decca/London no longer records new full-length performances of the older works in which she most frequently appears.6 And though her publicists continue to make heroic efforts to get her on network TV and into national magazines, the media long ago stopped paying more than cursory attention to the fine arts, making it unlikely that she will ever attain more than a fraction of Luciano Pavarotti's singular celebrity.
As for Pavarotti himself, his day is nearly done, and all that remains is for posterity to render its final verdict. It may be that my own judgment of his singing will ultimately prove too harsh, and that he will indeed be remembered as one of the great voices of the 20th century. But no matter what tomorrow's listeners make of his recordings, they will also have to reckon with the other part of his legacy: the effect that he and his promoters have had on the culture of classical music.
Herbert Breslin sums up that effect in his characteristically crude manner:
This book is really the story of two people who came from nowhere. I started out with nothing and worked my way to the very top of this little pissant business and helped change it and alter its limits and redefine the way people see it. Luciano started with nothing and became the most famous opera singer of a generation.
So they did. And so it was that a “little pissant business” that for five centuries had been one of the supreme glories of Western culture suddenly became inflated beyond recognition, then popped like a toy balloon filled with too much hot air. Needless to say, Breslin and his most famous client made out like bandits before the bubble burst. As for the rest of us—including, alas, Renée Fleming—we can expect to live in the wreckage they left behind for a long time to come.
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1 Doubleday, 308 pp., $25.95.
2 Viking, 222 pp., $24.95. Although no collaborator is credited on the dust jacket, it is evident from the acknowledgements that Fleming wrote The Inner Voice together with the novelist Ann Patchett.
3 Two notable exceptions are the spectacularly sung performance of Donizetti's La Fille du régiment that he recorded in 1968 with the soprano Joan Sutherland (Decca/London 414 520-2, two CD's) and a 1974 recording of a Puccini opera, Madama Butterfly, whose interpretative distinction is in large part a function of the conductor, Herbert von Karajan (Decca/London 417 577-2, three CD's).
4 “Battle of the Brows,” COMMENTARY, October 1996, reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader (Yale).
5 I have written about this in a series of pieces for COMMENTARY, the most recent of which is “Why Listening Will Never Be the Same” (September 2002). “Life Without Records,” a longer essay based on these pieces, is included in the Teachout Reader.
6 Signatures: Great Opera Scenes, Fleming's 1996 debut album for London, contains scenes and arias by Mozart, Dvořák, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss, and Benjamin Britten that give a clear idea of her promise (Decca/London 455 760-2). Of comparable interest is I Want Magic!: American Opera Arias, conducted by James Levine, which contains selections from Samuel Barber's Vanessa, Leonard Bernstein's Candide, Carlisle Floyd's Susannah, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, Bernard Herrmann's Wuthering Heights, Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe, Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire, and Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (Decca/London 460 567-2).
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