The death of Luciano Pavarotti has galvanised the media into lamenting the death of an opera singer. The coverage has rivalled or exceeded the attention given to the great composers Igor Stravinsky and Dmitri Shostakovich in the 1970s and the megastar conductors Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein in the 1980s and 1990s. In terms of public grief for an opera singer, there hasn't been a similar outpouring since the death of Maria Callas thirty years ago
The speed and extent of the response is in part due to developments in the world of the media. But the widespread sense of loss has been generated by the fact that, for hundreds of millions of people over most of the last half century, Luciano Pavarotti has embodied the very idea of what it is to be an Italian tenor.
The identity of his likely successor in that role is as cloudy now as was his own succession at the time of his first Dublin appearances in 1963 and 1964. Succession, of course, does not have to be seamless. In the 20th century the careers of Enrico Caruso and Beniamino Gigli did actually overlap. But there was a gap between the death of Gigli in 1957 and the rise of Pavarotti. Various successors have been identified and hyped. But none has yet managed to convince the wider public that the crown is actually theirs.
Pavarotti became a public icon on a new level when his recording of Nessun dorma was used in the promotion of the 1990 World Cup.
His earning power rocketed. The "Three Tenors" phenomenon which he headed is still being imitated. And his Essential Pavarotti CD compilation has changed the way the record industry's major labels treat classical music. The instant success, the quick buck, has become the order of the day.
The successes which made him a superstar in the 1990s have actually worked to undermine the very recording infrastructure which enabled him to develop his own career and reputation in the 1960s and 1970s.
The later years of Pavarotti's career have not been inspiring either for opera and music lovers or for fans of his great tenor voice which was so unmistakable in timbre, and which he knew how to use as if it were an unfettered force of nature to which everyone had to yield. The heavily amplified, arena-style concerts offered but a pale reflection of the vocal and musical achievements on which he had built his original operatic success. It is to be hoped that his passing will focus attention on the kind of singing which made him great as well as on the things which in later years made him so rich and famous.