Should Luciano Pavarotti retire?
It depends on who's talking. The 63-year-old tenor's harshest critics, citing the effects of age on one of the century's great larynxes, say yes. Rabid admirers say no. Opera fanatics say yes. He says no, at least for now."I think that I'll have to stop sooner or later," he told a Newsday interviewer last year. "But if I stop, the only reason will be a physical failing of some kind."
Pavarotti didn't specify, but it's easy to guess which ones: In the past several years he's been plagued by ailments, from a crippling weight problem to chronic leg woes that limited his mobility on stage. His voice, too, seemed to have lost some of its radiance, becoming less focused during piano (or soft) sections and less reliable on high notes.
In 1995 he caused a small firestorm of disapproval when he transposed a difficult Donizetti aria ("Pour mes amis" from "La Fille du regiment") down a half-step, turning every high C into a cool B natural. Three years earlier, he got caught lip-syncing before a live audience in his native Modena, Italy.
Still, he's kept at it. And at it. In recent months he's dropped a lot of weight, his hobbling joints have been replaced, and his voice (as though in sympathy with his rejuvenated body) has been ringing with new vim. He continues to appear in operas and tour the world in one big-splash gig after another.
Pavarotti, the Energizer Bunny of global singing sensations, keeps on ticking. And why not? He wants to sing. His fans want him to sing. Therefore, until both his voice and his fan base disintegrate entirely or until the Hand of God strikes him dead in the middle of "Nessun dorma," there is no reason why Luciano Pavarotti shouldn't go on singing indefinitely.
He's a free man in a free market catering to free consumers with free cash and the freedom to spend it wherever they like.
The Pavarotti debate nevertheless raises an interesting issue. When should a performer hang it up? When he gets tired of performing? Or when his artistic prowess has started to sag?
As a rule, we're accustomed to athletes retiring at the height of their powers and feel slightly embarrassed when they don't; Wayne Gretzky's graceful departure from hockey and Michael Jordan's from basketball stand in stark contrast to, say, Sugar Ray Leonard's cringe-inducing refusal to retire from boxing. We want to see our idols play in top form. We don't want to see them getting old.
So it is with classical musicians. Like world-class athletes, world-class soloists become famous mastering skills of monstrous technical difficulty. No mere human can score 55 points against the New York Knicks, just as no mere human can play a Paganini violin caprice without error or nail the high Cs in Rossini. Those who can are a class apart. And those in a class apart are expected to stay there, or pack it up and go home.
Pavarotti is, without doubt, in the highest class of all. Some say he's the world's greatest tenor. Some say he's the century's greatest tenor. Others say he's the most popular tenor ever. All of this is hyperbole, and all of it's endlessly disputable: The first statement might be refuted with two words ("Placido Domingo"), the second by another two ("Jussi Bjoerling"), the third by yet two more ("Enrico Caruso").
Yet what's missing in all of this earnest wrangling is a workable definition of "great." What distinguishes a great performer from a so-so one isn't purely a matter of technical ability; it's a matter of communication, inspiration and emotion, both theirs and ours.
Maria Callas' strength as a soprano was never the perfection of her voice that was Renata Tebaldi's business but the wild fire in her phrasings, the emotive power of her roles. The best musician sends chills up our spines. A middling one, no matter how note-perfect the performance, does not.
Pavarotti has always been a good one for chills. From his earliest recitals in Modena through his 1968 Metropolitan Opera debut and the three-plus decades of music that followed, he has snared listeners with his bright-hued lyric tenor. His first recordings show a voice both dazzling in tone and explosive in power, a perfect combination for the ornate, urgent lyricism typical of the 18th-century bel canto operas (Bellini, for instance) that established his early career.
But as Pavarotti's reputation soared, he began to take on heavier dramatic roles -- think Berlioz -- and started to tax his supple voice. The thrilling high notes didn't disappear, but they became less breathtakingly facile. Listen to his most recent recordings, and you'll hear it: that same, gleaming voice, still so seductive, reaching for high notes from a tip-toe.
"A once-fabulous voice is no longer viable for operatic performance," Peter G. Davis wrote just a few months ago in New York magazine, and he isn't alone in his opinion. Critics often bemoan the passing of Pavarotti's brilliant instrument.
"As for my operatic career, I know it cannot go on forever and that it must end before too long. I will know when," wrote the man himself (with some help from William Wright) in a tome of memoirs titled "Pavarotti: My World."
Please note: He said operatic career, not concert career. Performing the standard repertoire in the Met or La Scala is a much tougher undertaking, musically and acoustically, than belting out "Singin' in the Rain" with Domingo and Jose Carreras at a "Three Tenors" bash.
Opera houses are smaller, more intimate, less wired (i.e., no amps) and far less forgiving; ears are sharper, errors less easily ignored.
If and when Pavarotti ever announces his retirement, chances are he'll be retreating not from the large concert halls of the world but from the Mets.
Whatever Pavarotti's ailments over the years, he has what he's always had and that's greatness. So long as that survives, so will his career.