In Search of Pavarotti (Opera News)

Getting an interview with the most famous tenor on the thirtieth anniversary of his Met debut was a good idea. Making it happen turned out to be a story in itself. 

November 2, 1998

Volume: 63, Issue: 5 

ANYONE SETTING OUT to write about the world’s best-known opera singer is confronted with two practical questions: how do you get an interview with Luciano Pavarotti, and what can you possibly say about him that hasn’t been said already?

The answer to the first question seemed relatively straightforward when my OPERA NEWS editor called me early in the summer. The “Pavarotti people”—that is, the agency of Herbert Breslin, who has guided Pavarotti’s career for thirty years—had set up an interview in Italy on August 15, and would I like to do it during my next European trip? Of course I would.

Make that August 20, OPERA NEWS said a few weeks later. The interview date had been moved. I rebooked my flight home accordingly.

The second question was more daunting. Pavarotti has been one of the world’s leading opera singers since before I began listening to opera. This year, his thirtieth season at the Met, is his thirty-seventh on the opera stage. Many of his recordings are benchmarks. I learned opera from my well-worn copies of La bohème and La traviata, L’Elisir d’amore and L’Amico Fritz, Boito’s Mefistofele and my treasured Un Ballo in Maschera under Solti, not to mention the Primo Tenore solo album a tenor friend gave me many years ago to show me what all the Pavarotti fuss was about. Several books and thousands of articles have been written about him, touching on everything from his vocal technique to his 1996 divorce.

Now sixty-three, Pavarotti, whether he sings for another ten years or two, is in the phase known as “the twilight of his career.” Critical opinion leans toward the idea that he should retire soon. Even Dame Joan Sutherland, at a press conference in July, suggested it was time for Luciano, her former protégé, to bow out gracefully. His cancellations—from pulling out of the 1998 Grammys at the last minute to withdrawing from the million-dollar production of Aida that reopened Palermo’s Teatro Massimo in April—have made headlines.

Persistent rumors of his poor health seemed to be confirmed, or explained, in July—the day before I left for Europe—when a friend called to ask if I’d seen the Times. Pavarotti had had a hip replacement in New York. Well, I said, that probably means I won’t be doing an interview with him in Italy in August.

Since I hadn’t officially heard that the interview was off, however, I decided it would be wise to investigate a bit more about Pavarotti’s life. As I was in Germany on another assignment, the available reading material was in German, which gave an odd accent to accounts of this quintessentially Italian tenor. But it did furnish some basic facts.

Luciano Pavarotti was born on October 12, 1935, in Modena. He shared a wet-nurse with [the soprano] Mirella Freni; his father, Fernando, was a gifted tenor who never essayed a career, thanks to a bad case of nerves, but did encourage his son to sing in the local chorus in addition to his soccer-playing activities. Luciano studied privately with tenor Arrigo Pola in Modena, then with Ettore Campogalliani, who also worked with Freni, in Mantua.

In 1961, after nearly seven years of serious vocal study, Luciano won the Achille Peri competition in Reggio Emilia (he had come in second the previous year). As part of the prize, he made his debut in the local theater in La bohème. In the audience was Milan agent Alessandro Ziliani, who had heard a less successful audition by Pavarotti some months before. He took Pavarotti on, and soon had the young tenor singing all over Europe. The next major career boost came when Joan Sutherland took him under her wing—she was happy to find a gifted tenor who was taller than she was—for a 1965 tour of Australia. The collaboration between the two lasted for years and resulted in some of the best opera recordings in history. A 1972 La Fille du Régiment at the Met sealed Pavarotti’s international reputation and marked the start of his ascent to the top ranks of stardom.

Thus informed, I went on to Italy—though I had more or less given up on seeing Pavarotti. The scheduled interview date came and went, and the tenor was, Breslin informed me, recuperating in New York. But as I was lounging by the pool in Spoleto one honey-colored afternoon, Breslin called my cell phone. Pavarotti was en route back to Italy, and I should call him the following Wednesday in Pesaro.

”Ah, you write about opera,” said an Albanian factory worker who struck up a conversation with me on the train from Rome. He named the one opera singer he knew—”Luciano Pavarotti. He was in the hospital this summer, I think.”

Everyone—really everyone—knows something about Luciano Pavarotti. A measure of the singer’s fame is the regularity with which his name appears in gossip columns, tabloids and other contexts not related to music. Thanks in part to his “Pavarotti and Friends” concerts in Modena, with artists from across the pop-world spectrum, from Sting to the Spice Girls, the tenor has taken on the status, and the notoriety, of a pop star.

In 1996, one tabloid published photos of Pavarotti and his twenty-six-year-old secretary, Nicoletta Mantovani, on a beach. Soon thereafter, Pavarotti and his wife, Adua, were embroiled in divorce proceedings. The couple had been married since 1961 and have three daughters, now in their thirties. Under the terms of the settlement, Pavarotti surrendered the family house in Modena and one-half of his sizable fortune. (He retained his summer house in Pesaro.)


I FINALLY ARRIVED IN PESARO. Set in the region of the Marches, on Italy’s east coast, Pesaro shows two faces to visitors. Music-lovers see Rossini’s home town, with the lovely old Teatro Rossini, a Rossini museum in the composer’s house and the annual Rossini Festival. Thousands of Italians, Germans and even Brits see vacationland. This whole strip of Adriatic coast is built up with concrete hotel blocks and cabanas, and its beaches bristle with tidy ranks of umbrellas.

On the appointed Wednesday, August 26, I dialed Pavarotti’s number and explained in Italian to the man who answered that I was calling to set up an interview. “Your Italian is very good,” he replied in English. “Now, about the interview.” It took me another minute to realize that my supposedly trained ear had just failed to recognize the speaking voice of Luciano Pavarotti. This probably did not help my cause. In any case, Pavarotti informed me, he was convalescing and not seeing anyone until mid-September. I wrested from him the concession that I could call back in a few days from my next assignment, in Leipzig.

I suspected that being in the same town as Pavarotti and talking to him on the phone was as close as I was going to get to an interview. I began framing in my head drafts of an article or short story—”Pavarotti and Me,” perhaps—about a woman traveling around Europe who conspicuously fails to meet Luciano Pavarotti.

After all, there are plenty of other ways to find out about Pavarotti. His website provides a picture of the tenor in a familiar concert pose—arms outstretched, brandishing an enormous handkerchief—and furnishes visitors with information about his most recent “Pavarotti and Friends” concert and the international riding competition he started in Modena (site of the stables he allegedly got to keep in the divorce). 

If you want to know more, you can look up the website of “War Child” (www.warchild.org), a small British charity. Since 1990, four of the “Pavarotti and Friends” concerts have yielded in excess of $7 million for children: $2.5 million for a leukemia foundation and $4.5 million for “War Child.” Funds from the latter financed a music center in Mostar, Bosnia, which Pavarotti opened in 1997. Rather than just providing money, the tenor likes to be directly involved with each project. Revenues from this year’s concert and album will go to build a “children’s village” in civil-war-torn Liberia.

Or you can look into the Pavarotti Vocal Competition, which since its inception has given a major career boost to dozens of singers. Past winners include Kallen Esperian, Mary Jane Johnson, Kathleen Cassello and Roberto Alagna, who credits the competition with jump-starting his career. In 1980, when the competition began, “Luciano was at the height of his career,” says the competition’s director, Jane Grey Nemeth. “He didn’t need to do something like this.” Here, too, Pavarotti’s involvement is not merely nominal, or even financial, but hands-on – “down to the color of the paper the regulations are printed on,” says Nemeth. “He even wants to hear the preliminaries. He loves to sit and listen, loves to work with the singers, loves to coach them.”

Unlike many competitions, this one isn’t designed to pick out one or two winners. The winners’ circle numbers anywhere from twelve to fifty singers, from an initial pool of some 2,500. “Pavarotti always says that if we can’t find 150 wonderful singers from around the world as finalists, then this art form is in trouble,” Nemeth says. The point is to “identify a new generation every three or four years.”


LEIPZIG WAS HAVING A COLD SNAP. I was now into the sixth week of a trip that had been planned for four, and I had packed for Italy in August, not Germany in September. “This is why you want to come,” Pavarotti said to me on the phone, laughing—”is cold in Leipzig.” “That’s right,” I said, huddled in my hotel room. “You are known for your charitable work, and to let me come back to Italy would be an act of charity.” “I am recovering from an operation. I am not seeing anybody,” Pavarotti said, through a burst of crackle. “Call me back in ten minutes—my telephone battery is running out.” I sat on the bed and mused on the chronically weak mobile phone batteries of opera singers.

”All right,” Pavarotti said when I called back. “I will make this one exception for you. When do you want to come?” “I can come?” I said, in disbelief “Hurry, tell me,” he said. “Battery is running out again.” “September third,” I said. I spent two hours in a Leipzig travel agency trying to find, on two days’ notice, a flight that would get me to Italy and then home to America. I went off to call Breslin in Paris for a final briefing, including topics to avoid, that made me feel I was going into combat. “Pavarotti has changed a lot of what’s happened in the opera world single-handedly,” said his agent. “He did a number of great firsts in music—he was the first to give a recital at the Met with piano, the first to do arena concerts. He brought the concert stage back to the public.”

That evening, I returned to my hotel room from another interview to find a message from Breslin’s New York office. Pavarotti’s plans had changed. He would see me on September 5. 

I called Breslin’s office and explained as politely as possible that I had a non-refundable ticket back home to New York’s JFK on September 4. Breslin’s office placed a few calls. Pavarotti was inflexible. So was I. ”At least call Pavarotti,” said Hans Boon, in Breslin’s office, “and let him know you’re not coming.”

“I am waiting for you,” Pavarotti told me on the phone. After his initial resistance, he had clearly accepted me as a necessary evil, and was prepared to be gallant. I explained my situation, and started to make my apologies. “I will do this thing for you,” Pavarotti said. “I will see you on the third.”


THE UNIVERSE HAD BEEN SENDING plenty of signals that this interview was not supposed to take place. When you go against karma, you reap the rewards. I got off the plane in Milan to find a taxi strike. The airport parking lot looked like a scene from news footage of the fall of Saigon: a solid mass of people all trying to fling themselves onto any moving vehicle that showed signs of being able to get them out of there. I shoved my way onto a public bus that I very much hoped was going to someplace accessible, since I didn’t know the city. It followed a circuitous route to a subway stop, where I dragged my luggage through miles of tunnels, humming Wagner to spite Pavarotti. All that kept me from calling to cancel was the sense that it would be stupid to have gone through so much for nothing. I had come to Europe with Pavarotti on my agenda, and by God I was going to talk to Pavarotti. Of course I missed my train connection. It took several other trains and taxis to get me to Pesaro, where I arrived at three in the morning. To justify the energy expended on the interview at this point, Pavarotti would have to reveal to me the meaning of life itself.

Just north of Pesaro, the flat coastline draws itself up into a rather majestic bluff in a startling, almost self-conscious gesture of uncharacteristic drama. Pavarotti’s house is perched halfway up it, looking out over the sea. The beach road from town, lined with swimmers’ parked cars and cabanas, ends abruptly at a gate that slides open to allow visitors up the switch backing drive. The whole thing is neither as remote nor as grand as one might expect, but it is certainly beautiful. Low, vaguely Southwestern-looking buildings sit amid beds of flowers and broad patios. Pavarotti told one biographer that he wanted a house in Pesaro because, in the Modena of his childhood, a summer home in Pesaro was a sure sign that you’d “arrived.”

Pavarotti’s hale octogenarian father was reading the paper in the shade, while his more fragile mother seemed displeased at having to share the attentions of the household staff with me, an unwanted intruder. “She walks very well when she is alone,” the masseuse whispered as the old lady made a tottering exit. 

I basked in the sun and pondered the fact that I, exhausted and out of sorts, and Pavarotti, convalescent and wanting his peace, were to be forced by circumstances to assume the roles of gung-ho journalist and World’s Greatest Tenor at ten o’clock on a glorious, sunny morning.

I was then summoned into the presence of the man who is known, at home, as the Maestro. I took my seat across from one of the most recognizable faces on the globe. Whether you’re watching him on TV or the opera stage, or sitting across from him in a living room that seems dark after the brightness of the September sun, Pavarotti looks just like Pavarotti. And his performance was impeccable. He spoke slowly and with great precision, completely focused on presenting words that would convey the impression he desired—words that, like an opera role, one sensed he’d uttered many times before. A colleague of mine once said that the two greatest masters of spin he had ever encountered in his professional life were Bill Clinton and Luciano Pavarotti.

Pavarotti wanted to start with the story of his 1968 Met debut in the opera that has been the vehicle of so many Pavarotti debuts, Puccini's La bohème. “I arrived in New York from San Francisco not feeling very well,” he said. “I had, without knowing it, the Hong Kong flu. Of course a singer must catch all the bad things. It was very scary beginning with all these famous singers and the conductor of that time [Francesco Molinari-Pradelli]. But Mr. Bing was very nice to me and said, ‘Luciano, if you want to sing, sing; if you are not well, don’t worry—next year you are coming back’

“So I sang the first performance—so-so. I sang the second performance, and I stopped in the middle. And that,” he said, laughing, “is not a big memory. But they told me that Mr. Bergonzi, who I think is one of the greatest tenors of history, did worse than me—he went onstage and he began to speak [instead of singing]. So I took what happened almost as good luck And in fact, it was good luck, because after thirty years we are still there.

“I have had with the Met an incredible collaboration. I feel really at home in this theater. Working there is a pleasure, even if you are not at 100 percent. Maestro Levine is a genius. I don’t think we have had one like that since Toscanini, in terms of embracing all the music. He was able to bring the orchestra of the Met from a good orchestra to an exceptional orchestra. And there’s always a great rapport with the audience. The Met has a public who remembers the service that a singer has given, so if one night the singer is not in good condition, they still support him. So the singer goes home and says, ‘The next performance, I must be better, because they deserve it.’

“Lately, unfortunately, I made too audacious a choice, because I was born audacious. [Donizetti's] La Fille du Régiment [which Pavarotti essayed most recently in November 1995] is an opera that you do if you are 100 percent well. If you wake up in the morning with just a little trouble, you are lost. The performances were more or less all good. Except one. And about that one the critics probably wrote, ‘300 Pound Wink Around the World.”’ My surprised laughter was unfeigned, because that Fille du Régiment was one of the topics Breslin had told me to avoid.

“But the ups and downs of my voice,” he said, smiling at my reaction, “have just been in the last two, three years. Because of this problem with the legs, we had to take medicine, and the medicine bothered the stomach, and the stomach bothered the voice. That is the reason why I decided to have the operation. They operated on both my legs—a little here, a little there, the knee, the hip. They suppose that they make me new. Ciccio,” he said to a passing member of the household, “bring us something to drink.” 

My role as journalist called for me, at this juncture, to ask about the future. “I have no plan,” he said. “No idea, really no idea. I am a little wild soul. I have to wait. I have had an important operation. I am recuperating very, very well. But I have in mind, of course, to sing new stuff, because as you see I am unable to do just the old things.

“I’ve begun to sing with pop singers, which is for me an incredible pleasure. First, I like people—most of the people I work with are absolutely incredible. Others are a little less incredible, but I am not expecting sanctity on this planet. I am not myself a saint. Second, I like music. I don’t care which music it is. I went in New York to see Rent. Some people, the people who complain because I make big concerts for the multitude, they would probably be scandalized. But I really liked it very much. Different music, of course, but good.”

The drinks arrived: cocktails of fruit juice in tall frosted glasses. “The life of a singer outside the theater can be very boring,” said Pavarotti, sipping. “Excuse me—is not me talking. Boring for somebody else, watching me from outside. I don’t go out—generally I eat at home. I am surrounded always by a lot of people, but it’s very difficult to go in public places without being recognized. I try to give myself beautiful houses, like this incredible place. In New York I am right in front of the park, Monte Carlo too. And that makes my life a little less boring.

“But I always make music,” he continued. “I always study music in my brain, even if I am not singing. The point is”—for there are persistent rumors that Pavarotti can’t read music, which were allegedly confirmed in a Corriere della Sera interview in 1997—”that when I learn music, I know music; I know music here.”

He pointed to his head—an accurate gesture. Pavarotti’s singing seems the most intangible and visceral of gifts, a kind of instinct that enables him to process knowledge received aurally into the glorious floods of sound familiar from such classic recordings as “Cielo e mar,” on the Primo Tenore album. “The technique of singing is very simple,” he says. “You just have to produce a sound, and you feel if you’re producing the sound well. And if you have to go up, you feel it, and you go up.” Simple—if you’re Pavarotti.

Much of the learning process, for him, has from the beginning involved hearing something, understanding it musically and repeating it. “I was very lucky,” he said, “because I had a teacher who was a tenor, Arrigo Pola. So every time I was working on something that seemed to me impossible, he’d say, ‘You have to do it like this.’ I would try it one, and two, and three, and 3,000 times, until it came out as he said. 

“In every opera, there are one hundred points which you have to do in a certain way. If you have problems during the performance it’s because you have touched some of these places in the wrong way. Generally they are between F, F-sharp and G—not for everybody, but for me, definitely. If I make too open a sound, it can be that I pay for it later. When you close the sound, the vocal cords vibrate only in the middle [rather than along their whole length], and so the elasticity of the instrument is there when you need it, for the note after.” One concrete illustration of this is the last line of “Nessun dorma.” “You can hear if the top note will go well from the ‘vinceró’ before.

“What you can develop on the stage, which is anyhow the best teacher, is the breathing, because you have the great luck of working with big colleagues. From Joan Sutherland, I learned the breathing.” To support his point, he brought up the difficulty he had early in his career with the high C in “La donna è mobile” [from Verdi's Rigoletto]. “The performance could be phenomenal, until when I arrived there, for some reason, something happened. The top note was not really forward—it was a little behind.” He chuckled. “I picture myself doing ‘La donna è mobile.’ You know, the religion of this libertine Duke is so laughing, so I-don’t-care. And I picture myself laughing, laughing, until I arrive at the note, and”—he made a suddenly sober, long face—”I become all serious and concentrated. So I began to investigate with the big singers around the world. One was Piero Cappuccilli—incredible, long breathing, sensational. And the other was Sutherland.” After the Australian tour, “La donna è mobile” was secure, “because I was in control of the diaphragm.”

Pavarotti still learns by listening to others. “Every time I make a record I get the interpretation of the piece from six or seven tenors. Schipa, for the songs. Gigli, Bergonzi, Corelli—sometimes Plácido and José. And I am a fanatic of Di Stefano. There is nobody in the world who phrases like him. I listen to all of them, and then I do myself.”

Not that it’s sheer imitation. “I think an important quality that I have is that if you turn on the radio and hear somebody sing, you know it’s me. You don’t confuse my voice with another voice.” But, he added, “I don’t think you can create true expression if it’s not double-checked by many people.” His theory is that working with someone else, rather than struggling to figure out the music alone, gives you “the freedom to approach certain important things with exuberance.”

He sipped his drink, his eye on the clock on the wall behind me, and addressed the future of opera. “Beautiful,” he said. “I remember when I began singing, in 1961, one person said, ‘Run quick, because opera is going to have at maximum ten years of life.’ At that time it was really going down. But then, I was lucky enough to make the first Live from the Met telecast [in 1977]. And the day after, people stopped me on the street. So I realized the importance of bringing opera to the masses. I think there were people who didn’t know what an opera was, before. And they saw Bohème, and of course Bohème is so good.

“Bohème is always new. Puccini is this kind of composer. Puccini is not a colossal composer. The music is always made of little floating situations. Putting together this opera, you can never be tired. At the very end, if Mimì is dying very well, I am always crying on the stage. This means there is something there.”

For Pavarotti, one major question of the future will be finding ways to pass on this spark of love of opera. His competition was founded in 1980 as a way for him to share with young singers some of his own experience. “In my competition, I have never found a singer who was already a professional. When you are twenty-five or even thirty, you are not really so deep. I was the same. Joan [Sutherland] and Ricky [Bonynge] really taught me something very special with their example. I learned to be serious in my profession. For example, in Australia we did two general dress rehearsals on the same day, one in the afternoon, one at night. The performances were [Bellini's] La sonnambula and [Verdi's] La traviata. Joan sang both in full voice. And I did the same. I realized, the more you sing, if you sing correctly, the better it is. I will never forget that day.

“Generally a young singer is a little amateurish. For example, he comes in with an opera like Bohème, and sings an aria, and you say, ‘Do you know the other?’ ‘No, I don’t.’ When you are thirty and you don’t have a complete opera in your repertoire, it means”—he clicked his tongue— “you’re trying, but not really. But the worst of all is the young singer who has already changed teachers five times, and says, ‘Those teachers were not right for me.’ That phrase tells you that that person will never make it onstage.”

In her 1992 book My Life with Luciano, Adua Pavarotti, now Veroni, suggested that her husband’s dream for the competition was to find a tenor capable of someday assuming the Pavarotti crown, a worthy recipient of the tenor tradition. “Teaching is something that I’ve always wanted to do,” Pavarotti told me. “But I would like to do something different. I would like to take people who are really singing, onstage, and try to adjust one thing here or there. I know, for example, a tenor who is sensational—he has a phenomenal voice, beautiful expression, and he does not realize that his top notes, they are back”—singer jargon, meaning not properly “placed.”—“And this one I can try to teach. And if I am able to do this thing, it’s going to be one of the best tenors.”

But rising young tenors today are faced with a world of hype and recording-studio pressure that offers overnight fame and, in the absence of the kind of abiding love of opera that has kept their predecessors going for more than thirty years, overnight decline. They’re also faced with the daunting precedent of music-making, and of stardom, set by Pavarotti himself. While the media have been eagerly searching for the next great tenor, no one has yet been able to attain and maintain anything close to Pavarottian heights—neither of sheer vocalism nor of the larger-than-life persona that can draw a journalist, for example, across Europe for an interview.

Maybe you can’t say anything new about Pavarotti, I thought, as I was shown out, still ignorant of the meaning of life. But part of his talent is an ability to make old roles appear continually new, fresh, even exciting. His artistry will continue to draw people to hear Pavarotti as long as he is willing to sing for them. 

ANNE MIDGETTE writes for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other publications.