Operadämmerung
My Pre-Opera Program today was a tribute to Pavarotti, as you might expect. But what I didn’t expect was how it would make me feel. You see, when I wrote about his death earlier this week, I probably did not really convey the true significance of the occasion. I think this may be because for the last couple years, as Pavarotti has been off the stage, and my listening consisted primarily of the German repertoire, I considered him something of a permanent fixture, or an institution, but lost focus of just how important he was to me as a fan.
As I prepared for today’s program, and gathered together the CDs from my collection that feature Pavarotti, it could not escape my notice how many were critical to my appreciation of the art form of opera. Meanwhile, seeing a few of the profiles on the network newscasts, I became choked up as I watched old footage of Pavarotti singing, both in the opera house and at open air concerts. What got me most was an appearance that I recall seeing live, but did not realize was his last public performance: “Nessun dorma” at the opening ceremony of the 2004 Winter Olympic Games in Torino. It made me cry to see it again.
I think that seeing the smiling face once more–always smiling–was what got to me. The beautiful voice is one you don’t forget, but the man whose instrument it was was so omnipresent in his day that his very ubiquity made it hard for me, at first, to grasp that he is gone. It seems that, in a way, opera itself is now dead. Pavarotti was, of course, the most prominent of a generation of performers that followed a real “golden age”. With his death–and the deaths of Beverly Sills, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Nicolai Ghiaurov, Hans Hotter, Franco Corelli, Robert Merrill, Piero Cappuccilli and others in recent years–it is clear that the sun has set on the second golden age, with no sign of a third on the horizon. Worst of all is that we have only more sorrow to look forward to, as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Leontyne Price, Giuseppe Di Stefano, Sherrill Milnes, Joan Sutherland, Placido Domingo and others pass from our midst.
Luciano Pavarotti had been such a familiar figure to me, from the earliest days of my opera fandom, that I lost touch with the reality that he was, to everyone else, the face of opera. I remembered that today, and it hurts.
Filed under: Current Events, Music, Work on September 8th, 2007 | No Comments »