Luciano Pavarotti dead at 71

Luciano Pavarotti, 71, an arena artist whose talents lured love from far beyond the narrow confines of the traditional classical music audience, and from whose rotund body rose one of the great voices of the 20th century, died yesterday at his home in Modena, Italy.

The Italian tenor was diagnosed more than a year ago with pancreatic cancer, forcing cancellation of the rest of his "farewell tour" concerts for 2006 while he received treatment at a New York hospital.

Last month, he was hospitalized in his hometown of Modena, where he reportedly was being treated for pneumonia after a vacation on the Adriatic Sea. Earlier in the summer, he was reported to be recording a disc of religious music for release in 2008.

Born in Modena, the son of a baker who was also an accomplished singer, Mr. Pavarotti parlayed a stupendous voice and a small repertoire into a multimillion-dollar career that was sometimes a joke among opera aficionados but that represented a friendly point of entry into a rarefied genre for millions of ardent fans.

He was, for decades, the Rodolfo - a role captured in La Bohème recordings opposite Mirella Freni still in print after four decades. Some of his most celebrated performances were in Philadelphia, where he recorded I Pagliacci in the early 1990s with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Riccardo Muti.

With the Opera Company of Philadelphia, he launched a competition for young singers in 1980. The prize: the singer himself. Winners of the Pavarotti International Vocal Competition, held every few years, appeared in operas with the tenor at the Academy of Music.

With Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras, he made up perhaps slightly more than one-third of the Three Tenors, who sang at four World Cup finals and dozens of concerts between 1990 and 2003.

In credit-card commercials and TV talk-show appearances, in gossip columns documenting his weight fluctuations and a late-in-life second marriage to his secretary half his age, he seemed to relish the celebrity of a smiley, down-to-earth image.

The profile of the singer near the end of his career was hardly that of a serious artist. But he performed in opera's high temple, the Metropolitan Opera, 379 times, and was said to be a more dependable box-office draw than Domingo. His last performance at the Met was on March 13, 2004.

The "King of the High C's" made his U.S. debut in Miami in 1965, opposite Joan Sutherland, who called him "the tall tenor" because he was one of the few leading men that she didn't tower over. By the mid-1970s, he was a sensation, with a boyish timbre that burst with Italian sunshine and his extroverted personality.

In the spirit of a sports game, Mr. Pavarotti seemed egged on by positive audience response, going from one impressive strength to another during the course of an operatic performance. With an equally magnetic leading lady, he could inspire a response usually reserved for rock stars. One such performance was Beverly Sills' first collaboration with Mr. Pavarotti, a 1972 Philadelphia production of I Puritani. She spoke for many in her autobiography, Beverly (Bantam, 1987), when she described her first onstage encounter with the tenor: "I can't imagine being more touched by a voice. . .." Bootleg recordings of that Puritani still circulate.

Philadelphia, with its strong Italian ethnic community, was destined to play an important role in the middle years of his career. Few would recognize the older, crossover-oriented singer by his repertoire in a series of recitals through the 1970s and early '80s at the Academy of Music - singing the expected high-C arias, but also Beethoven, Liszt, Bononcini, Pergolesi, Scarlatti and Respighi.

He added sparkle to an Academy Anniversary Concert in 1975, and, despite a cold rain, drew 6,000 fans to the Robin Hood Dell West (Mann Center) in the summer of 1979 for a Tosca with the Metropolitan Opera. He sang again at the Mann to raise money for the Marian Anderson library and scholarship. He performed in six Opera Company of Philadelphia productions in the 1980s - as Rodolfo in La Bohème in 1982, '86 and '89; as Nemorino in L'Elisir d'amore in 1982 and '89; and as Riccardo in Un Ballo in Maschera in 1986.

He was famously ambivalent toward conductors. But even though his appearances with Muti didn't extend much beyond an I Pagliacci concert version in Philadelphia and a fully staged Don Carlo at La Scala, he gave Muti credit for being one who "always makes you see things in a fresh way."

Though he particularly relished Italian comic roles and was an accomplished comedian, many of Mr. Pavarotti's followers thought his best moments were in darker characters, such as the Duke in Rigoletto, who sings tuneful arias while destroying the people around him, and the murderer Tonio in I Pagliacci. Though his voice had its imposing side, the ultimate dramatic Italian tenor role, Otello, eluded him. He recorded the Verdi masterwork in concert with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra but was ill during the occasion, and sang only Act 1 at a Metropolitan Opera gala.

Mr. Pavarotti's vocal competition in Philadelphia lacked credibility because the tenor proclaimed as many winners as he saw fit - so many as to render victory meaningless. But several went on to indisputably major careers - most notably Roberto Alagna, Barbara Frittoli, Andrea Gruber and Deborah Voigt. Mr. Pavarotti was also an early champion of Andrea Bocelli. The competitions, however, devoured huge amounts of time and energy - one reason why Opera Company of Philadelphia chief Robert B. Driver made the controversial decision in the 1990s not to continue his association with the superstar tenor.

Nonetheless, Mr. Pavarotti seemed favorably disposed toward Philadelphia, spending time with Main Line society, playing tennis, riding horses, and lending his name to charities. The chef at La Buca on Locust Street honored him with a dish called Veal Pavarotti. Mr. Pavarotti considered his vocal competition to be on hiatus, but when he returned for a Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia benefit concert in 2003, at age 68, his attempts to bring it back drew passing interest but no takers.

Throughout his stardom, Mr. Pavarotti often seemed to have a Teflon coating. No matter that there were numerous embarrassing incidents reported in gossip columns, or that he made a poor showing in a 1982 flop film, Yes, Giorgio, or that his recordings often seemed haphazard; his large public remained remarkably loyal. His tone quality and natural, vivid projection of Italian text never left him, even when he was so physically debilitated that operas were staged to give him scenery to lean on when not singing.

That criticism-proof quality is perhaps one reason that Mr. Pavarotti allowed himself to fall into artistic decline. His final years were marked with repertoire choices that would have been ill advised even 20 years earlier. Cancellations were frequent, and often at the last minute.

A 2004 memoir written by Herbert Breslin, The King and I: The Uncensored Tale of Luciano Pavarotti's Rise to Fame by His Manager, Friend and Sometime Adversary, delivered a significant clue as to why the tenor couldn't grow old gracefully: He reached a point where he couldn't learn new music and had to fall back on the high-wire repertoire he knew.

In many ways, Mr. Pavarotti came to embody the downside of stardom - the lack of privacy, the ego-feeding acolytes, and constant competition with his younger self. Sills recalled that when the audience demanded encore after encore in one of their joint performances, the tenor sadly stated, sometime later, "There is nothing left for us to do except to be clowns."