Written by ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN, Globe and Mail | 06 September 2007

TORONTO — Like most people (including many who bought tickets to his frequently cancelled shows), I never heard Luciano Pavarotti live. It would have been a treat, I'm sure, to have been at La Scala or the Metropolitan Opera in the sixties or seventies, when his unmistakable tenor voice was in its prime and global fame had not yet caught up with him.

The Pavarotti of my experience is a rather traditional singer whose talents and limitations conspired to make him a very modern media star. In one sense, he was definitely the last of his kind, because the pop pantheon only needs one iconic tenor, just as it has no use for another Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe.

He had a beautiful voice, and a specifically, almost generically, Italian way of using it. His best recordings are those from his days as a lyric tenor, when his nearly flawless voice and instinctive style of delivery revitalized some of opera's most familiar roles. Operatic singing isn't a particularly natural way to use the voice, but Pavarotti made it seem so. His tenor in those days was a flexible, silvery, passionate instrument, more suited to intimate scenes than to the stentorian stuff he did later on.

If he had retired in 1980, he would have been celebrated as a singer of enormous natural gifts whose direct engagement with music and the public more than made up for an unreflective attitude towards his art. Some musicians act as if they are on a journey; Pavarotti mostly sang as if he were already at the destination. He celebrated the view, which could be splendid. But he didn't seem much inclined to imagine the next part of the adventure, aside from a not entirely successful move into heavier dramatic roles.

The irony was that once he stepped out of the opera house and into popular media, as he began to do in the eighties, he became a much more surprising figure than he ever had been at La Scala or Covent Garden. Who could have predicted that a lumbering bear of a man, singing pop songs in a flagrantly outmoded style, would become a household name? More than anyone else, Pavarotti created the market for the kind of pop-classical recordings that have made big careers for Andrea Bocelli, Russell Watson and every tenor who can count to three.

He did it not by being a great or even always a good singer (some of his crossover performances are painful to hear), but by having a strong personal narrative and an ability to communicate it. Even when he was groping for words or reading a script, Pavarotti always seemed like an ordinary guy with an extraordinary talent. He was often compared to Enrico Caruso, but Pavarotti was in some ways closer to Ronald Reagan, another canny communicator whose personal style and image let him get away with any number of wrong notes.

It's no accident that Pavarotti's rise coincided with a general drop in musical literacy. The less people understood of what opera singers can and should do, the more he seemed a friendly emissary from an unknown world. Earlier this summer, Paul Potts, a truly mediocre Welsh tenor, won the TV contest Britain's Got Talent by belting out a short version of Pavarotti's signature aria, Nessun dorma. Pavarotti was nowhere near the studio, but he was partly responsible for Potts's victory. The hangdog cell-phone salesman with the big voice was like a ninth-generation photocopy of Pavarotti, with more story and far less talent.

Pavarotti was renowned for his generous spirit, even though he didn't always pay his taxes or show up for work (he was banned from Chicago's Lyric Opera in 1989 after his twenty-sixth cancellation there). He was certainly generous with his fans, singing almost to the end of his long life, and leaving us all something to be grateful for. In the end (or for me, near the beginning), everyone got the Pavarotti they wanted.

 Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070906.wgreeononluc0906/BNStory/Front