The voice of the people
Michael Scott
LUCIANO PAVAROTTI: THE MYTH OF THE TENOR by Jurgen Kesting Robson Books, £16.95, pp. 246 Jurgen Kesting claims that this is a study of Pavarotti's fame, 'an examination of the "Myth of the Tenor" '. He does not wish, he says, to be dismissive of 'marketing tech- niques', since any success his book may enjoy must be dependent on them; what he does object to are those who jump on Pavarotti's bandwagon and dismiss any `discriminating critical appraisal', fully pre- pared to take him at face value.
He is not complaining that Pavarotti is not the greatest tenor around these days, only about the scale of his fame — 'He's famous for being famous'; 'The music dis- appears behind the star who plays or sings it' — and so on. But is that so different from opera singers long ago? The critic Hanslick said much the same thing of Patti in 1872: 'She is capable of offering an utterly individual pleasure almost indepen- dent of the composition.'
Kesting seems at all costs to want to make the Pavarotti myth sound as sensa- tional as possible, as if it were something new and different. Had he thought a minute he might not have quoted the fee Jenny Lind demanded in 1850 that Phineas T. Barnum put in escrow before she came to New York — $187,500. Barnum tells, in Bamum's Own Story, the gross receipts for her 95 concerts amounted to $712,161. Taking into account that there was no microphone and no media then, and how much smaller the population was, it does not make the $1.5 million earned at Pavarotti's Hyde Park concert in London in 1991, televised around the world, seem quite so sensational.
The book is weighed down with a quanti- ty of quotations from countless different sources. In the first couple of chapters alone a fleet of names crops up: Daniel Boorstin, Peter Sloterdijk, Georg Simmel, Rolv Heuer, Hans Enzesberger and Klaus Umbachs among others. Whether they are there to impress us — only sometimes does Kesting tell us who they are — or whether to hide his judgments behind, is difficult to know. However, if we confine ourselves just to what he writes we find too many errors; inevitably these cause us to question his thesis.
I shall content myself with picking just one, contained in the first paragraph of the first chapter, when he discusses Pavarotti going to Berlin in 1988 to sing Nemorino. `Twenty or 30 years ago, veteran ensemble groups would have considered Donizetti's Elisir d'Amore a filler at best,' he writes. `Yet Berlin's music lovers — in today's jar- gon, music fans — have been besieging the box-office for days, as if Otello or Tristan were on the programme.' He should have looked at the photograph on page 186 of my Caruso biography, published in Ger- many as Caruso, Die Jahrhunderstimme (Heyne Biographien, `Miinchen, 1993), which shows, across a double-page spread, the queue strung out round the Berliner KOniglichen Opernhaus in 1911, when Caruso appeared in Elisir, and that was not 30 but 86 years ago.
Indicatively, in Kesting's view, Otello and Tristan are worth more than Elisir; and that old-fashioned judgment typifies the book: Elisir and Pavarotti suit each other — Elisir is only pop. He quotes Marxist writers, like Theodor Adorno, who denigrate popular culture, seeking to find in it only commer- cialism. He ignores the obvious parallel between Pavarotti and pop singers, like the Beatles, Sinatra or Madonna; they all enjoy (or have enjoyed) a similar kind of fame. They are, as he seems contemptuously to style them, 'artist-courtesans'; but all artists court the public, by definition; no one paints pictures, writes books or composes music solely for their own benefit.
Similarly, without examining it, he can- not resist quoting, presumably because he finds it amusing, what Rossini is supposed to have said (though he does not cite the source) of the tenor Duprez's high notes `like a capon squawking as its throat is cut'. A better, less sensational, more revelatory way to explain the affecting power of the tenor's top notes (and the soprano's, too) is that they demand attention naturally, as and I got this one for sexual harassment.' does the high-pitched cry of a baby.
The revived interest in opera — that Pavarotti has been at the forefront of satis- fying — is the result of a perennial problem besetting popular music. The trouble is that western music has only a limited vocabu- lary; although it may be richer and more variegated than other types of music, it is still not enough to satisfy the demand.
In the first quarter of this century, in the days of the acoustic gramophone when voices had to be powered naturally by the breath to be able to command wide atten- tion, a tenor like Caruso succeeded equally in all kinds of music. After 1925 and the introduction of the microphone and the electrification of the gramophone it did not take long for music to divide into what is now called classical music and popular music. At first the new popular singers, crooners as they were then called, who took advantage of the microphone were still imitative of opera singers and in their thrall. It took more than a decade, through the years of the Depression, before they managed to escape their example.
After the second world war came renewed prosperity, the invention of the LP, the greater sophistication of amplifica- tion, and consequent increase in the noise level. A new young audience introduced pop, rock and roll, Bill Haley and the Comets, Elvis Presley, etc. By this time the gramophone had recorded a quarter of a century's popular music, and it did not take long for pop, as classical music had done in the latter part of the 19th century, to begin to develop an historical dimension, and musicians and their audiences to become self-conscious.
The media's appetite continually grew, looking for rejuvenation anywhere and everywhere, to new, variegated styles from different origins: folk, heavy metal, soul. By the Seventies popular music had fragment- ed into numerous different types. The demand became great, threatening to exhaust it; but modern technology, always in the nick of time as it seemed, was able to satisfy it, supplying revitalising techniques. With the invention of video it introduced a new dimension, complementing the aural with the visual — as we see today on pop videos and Michael Jackson's spectacular shows.
It was this ever-increasing demand and shortage of supply, the need for novelty at all costs, that caused the rediscovery of popular opera. This time, forgotten as it was, at least by the media, it made its come-back; but reversing the precedent of the Thirties in the Eighties, in a world dominated by the media, Pavarotti, at his giant-sized concerts, simulated pop, being dependent on the microphone. As a result, as The Myth of the Tenor proves, right round the world popular opera, though dead since the days of Turandot, in default of anything new in pop is still alive and well. Jurgen Kesting should not worry.
Previous page
