He obviously has — or had — a truly stupendous voice, matched for magnificence perhaps only by the size of his stomach. But, according to a book to be published this autumn, Luciano Pavarotti is also childish, obsessive, over-demanding, lecherous and very, very rude.
The operatic tenor whose CD became the first classical album to reach number one in the UK pop charts and the man most responsible for the fact that every football fan can hum a Puccini aria is, says his former agent and publicity manager Herbert Breslin, a monster.
Breslin, who represented Pavarotti for more than 30 years before the pair’s acrimonious public break-up in 2002, describes his book, written with the New York Times music critic Anne Midgette, as ”the story of a very beautiful, simple, lovely guy who turned into a very determined, aggressive and somewhat unhappy superstar”.
The King and I: The Uncensored Tale of Luciano Pavarotti’s Rise to Fame by His Manager, Friend and Sometime Adversary, will be published in October by Doubleday in America and Mainstream in the UK. An advance copy was obtained by the Washington Post, which printed excerpts from it on Wednesday.
According to Breslin, Pavarotti, now 68, described the celebrated soprano Dame Joan Sutherland, with whom he enjoyed a historic stage partnership that began in 1965, as ”pretty dopey” if you ever had to talk to her. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, the renowned and supremely elegant German-born soprano, ”looked like a cleaning woman” when she was out of costume.
And of Placido Domingo, the Spanish tenor who, with Pavarotti and Jose Carreras formed the Three Tenors, sang at four World Cups, turned classical opera arias into huge popular hits and in one broadcast sang to a TV audience of 1.5 billion people, Pavarotti said: ”In his dreams, Placido never had a voice like mine.”
Doubleday’s promotional blurb says Breslin ”moved Pavarotti out of the opera house, on to the concert [and the world] stage and into the arms of a huge mass public”. His manager for 36 years ”relates the tale in a brash, candid, witty fashion that is often bitingly frank and profane”, Doubleday says, describing the book as ”by turns affectionate and satirical … full of hilarious details and tales out of school, with Pavarotti emerging as something like the ultimate Italian male”.
According to the Washington Post, the book presents the singer as ”a petulant child who calls his associates ‘stupido’ and other terms of endearment; who denounces Domingo as a ‘black marketeer’ over supposed cruelties to Jose Carreras; who insists upon being chauffeured a single block from his New York apartment to his dentist”.
The book relates how Pavarotti was so worried about the food on a tour of China that he had an entire restaurant packed up and transported across the ocean to feed him while he was there. Among other indiscretions, Breslin recounts the comings and goings of a great number of Pavarotti’s ”secretaries”, and relates how the singer once described his soon-to-be second wife, Nicoletta Mantovani, as ”the favourite in my harem”.
Born in Modena, Italy, on October 12 1935, Pavarotti was the first child and only son of a baker and was a promising footballer before he got bitten by the music bug after singing with his father in the Modena chorus (and winning first prize at the Llangollen international singing competition in Wales). He made his debut on April 29 1961, as Rodolfo in La Boheme, but it was not until February 1972 that the Pavarotti phenomenon was really born.
In a production of Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the tenor hit the nine high Cs of his aria so effortlessly that the audience apparently erupted into a spontaneous ovation.
Since then, Pavarotti has made many of opera’s leading tenor roles his own, performed in the world’s most prestigious opera houses and become, in the words of his record label Decca, ”the most popular artist in the history of the classical recording industry”.
According to the Washington Post, Breslin paints another — or, at least, complementary — story. During a career-long battle with his weight, Pavarotti ”has to have gained and lost more than 5 000lb”, his former manager writes. And in his screen debut, a 1982 romantic comedy called Yes, Giorgio universally acknowledged as awful, the singer was so concerned with his image that he ”wouldn’t do anything that could make people laugh at him. Since he was … the lead in a comedy, this became quite a problem.”
Breslin describes a key scene in the film in which Pavarotti and his co-star, Kathryn Harrold, engage in a food fight, throwing pasta and cheese at each other. ”Very few people would think of trying to play a food fight seriously, but Luciano did,” writes Breslin.
Pavarotti performed what he said was his last performance of a staged opera in New York in March. He had been expected to abandon opera (except for farewell recitals) from next year, but physical and vocal frailty — and, perhaps, some very bad reviews for his final three performances in Tosca at the Met — seem to have brought forward the decision.
”It was sad to hear him with such diminished energy,” wrote Antoni Tommasini, the critic for the New York Times, in remarks worthy of the great man himself.
”It took so much concentration for Pavarotti simply to make his voice work that he essentially left matters of rhythm and pacing to chance.”
An alternative view of the stars
Placido Domingo, Pavarotti’s longstanding friend and rival, has sung more than 120 different roles, more than any other tenor, and has over 100 recordings to his name. Born in Madrid, Domingo moved to Mexico at the age of eight. His operatic debut came at Monterrey as Alfredo in La Traviata in 1960. Now 68, he runs the LA and Washington Operas, and also conducts. His recent Siegmund in Wagner’s Die Walküre in Washington, seen by critics as a big risk so late in his career, was deemed a triumph. ”Tenors 25 years younger would be hard pressed to match it,” wrote the New York Times critic. Newsweek magazine dubbed him the ”king of opera” in a cover story
The celebrated German-born soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf retired from staged opera in 1971 after a career that began when she sang Eurydice in a school performance in Magdeburg, Germany in 1928. She joined the Deutsche Oper in 1938 (and soon afterwards the Nazi party, to keep her job). Her glittering career focused largely on five starring roles: Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, the Countess in Nozze di Figaro, the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, Fiordiligi in Cosi fan tutte, and Countess Madeleine in Capriccio.
She was naturalised as a British citizen in 1953 on marrying record producer and impresario Walter Legge, and made a dame of the British Empire in 1992. Famously, she chose her own performances on Desert Island Discs.
Dame Joan Sutherland retired from opera in 1990 at the age of 64, ending a career that lasted almost 40 years. Born in Point Piper, New South Wales, in 1926, she studied as a mezzo-soprano at Covent Garden. In 1960, Italy named her La Stupenda, following a performance of Handel’s Alcina at Le Fenice in Venice.
Her fabulous voice and sense of humour found fans around the world: the then mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, proclaimed May 6, 1998, Dame Joan Sutherland Day in the city of New York. – Guardian Unlimited Â