PAVAROTTI R.I.P.

Part romantic, part ridiculous; idol of the gallery, bête noire of the highbrows; the voice of passion, the voice of the ice-cream man.”
Nobody since Caruso’s heyday a century ago has so happily fulfilled that complicated stereotype as Luciano Pavarotti, who became a worldwide household name in 1990 when the World Cup made an anthem of his recording of Calaf’s aria “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s Turandot (an opera he never sang on stage).
As part of the accompanying jamboree, he then joined with Placido Domingo and José Carreras for the first of what would become a series of blockbuster arena concerts that made The Three Tenors one of the hottest musical properties on the planet.
Pavarotti was the joker in the trio. The public adored his enormous bulk, wide grin and trademark white handkerchief as much as they thrilled to his wonderfully lucid, even-toned and open-throated singing.
Like Caruso, he had the common touch and knew how to play the publicity game. But although the big bucks and mass adulation rolled in throughout the long final phase of his career, one shouldn’t forget that Pavarotti had by then become a mere shadow of the singer he had been as a young man.
The true glory of his art is preserved in the recordings he made in the late 1960s and early 1970s, often in partnership with the Australian soprano Joan Sutherland, who gave him an invaluable leg-up when he was only a promising tyro from Modena.