The Perils of Pavarotti in New York City

Luciano Pavarotti has been singing the role of Nemorino, the gullible and lovelorn young bumpkin in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore,” for more than 30 years. But it’s probably safe to say that his performances earlier this month at the Metropolitan Opera will be his last in that role in New York, and possibly anywhere.

The 62-year-old tenor, who still draws tens of thousands to hear him perform in stadiums and commands TV audiences of millions, is scheduled to sing Cavaradossi in just three performances of Puccini’s “Tosca” at the Met in the fall. The gala concert at the end of that run, commemorating the 30th anniversary of his Met debut, could double as a farewell from the opera stage. Pavarotti has a few more “Three Tenors” concerts in his appointment book, but as for what happens after that, manager Herbert Breslin said, “We’ll see. The planning is very loose for now.”

Seated in a regal black leather office chair behind a desk in his Central Park South apartment on a recent evening, the tenor echoed his manager’s tentativeness. “After the next few months, I’ll take stock,” Pavarotti said, with little of the jovial optimism and big-bodied bonhomie that has helped make him an icon of the Italian Tenor. “For now, I’ve got to demonstrate to myself that I’m in good health,” he said. “Then I’ll decide what direction to move in.”

Speaking in his native Italian, he sounded serious and reflective as he answered questions about his age, his health and his dwindling plans for the future.

“I think that I’ll have to stop sooner or later,” Pavarotti said, as if he had some other option. “But if I stop, the only reason will be a physical failing of some kind.”

He declined to elaborate, but over the past decade his weight, which hovers around 350 pounds, has all but crippled him, forcing the tenor to sing impassioned love scenes from the comfort of a stool and conduct putative sword fights behind a screen of chorus members. To his old list of afflictions--allergy to stage dust, flu, laryngitis, fatigue, arthritis and sciatica--Pavarotti recently added another. In the middle of a pension benefit fund concert at the Met, he suffered a dizzy spell, possibly because of high blood pressure, scaring himself enough to go home at intermission and cancel two performances of “Elisir” so he could rest. He also decided that he wouldn’t be up to singing three scheduled performances of Verdi’s “Aida” at the Met in the spring of 1999.

Still, he is fond of citing the example of his father, a retired baker in the central Italian town of Modena who, at 86, still sings in church every week with the voice, according to the son, of a much younger man. The implication is clear: Lucianissimo’s fantasy is to keep impersonating operatic youths as long as he can still hobble into the spotlight.

“I’m a fanatic of the stage,” he said. “I don’t want to say that I hope to die onstage--I don’t, I hope to die peacefully in my bed at a very advanced age. But there are times when I get to the end of ‘Rigoletto’ that I would sing it all over again. The second ‘Elisir’ last month felt that way, too.”

Critics, though, tend not to believe that he has either the stamina or the voice to get through many more operatic performances. “From what I’ve heard recently, it sounds as though it’s really beginning to fail him,” said Peter Davis, who reviewed Pavarotti’s Met debut in 1968 for the New York Times and is now the music critic at New York magazine. “He’s had so many vocal problems. I don’t know of any singers who have sung as badly as he has for two years at his age and then recovered.”

Far from making concessions to the passage of time, Pavarotti has raised the stakes as he has gotten older. He began his career as a sunny lyric tenor with the agility to handle the twirling vocal stunts and delicate lines of Rossini, Mozart and Donizetti. Only in his 40s did he begin to add to his repertory Verdi’s weightier dramatic roles--the title role in “Ernani,” Radames in “Aida,” Manrico in “Il Trovatore”--not always with great success.

Many critics see Pavarotti’s cancellation habit and his resume of high-profile fiascoes as a sign of fame-induced numbness. At the beginning, his reviews consistently were packed with praise: for the open, brassy beauty of his voice, for the voltage that cycled through his singing, for making opera sound unmannered, spontaneous and exuberant. But by the early 1980s, Pavarotti had become more than just an opera singer: He was a mass-media phenomenon, and much of the writing about him turned sour.

“I never thought things would get so big,” he said. “But then I never took into an account a very good friend: television.” In 1978, with a concert that was broadcast to 12 million viewers from the Met, he became the first classical singer to give a full recital on live TV. He made a movie, “Yes, Giorgio” (which even he admits was dreadful). He made the cover of both Newsweek and Time magazines. He began to sing, not only in concert halls, but also in stadiums, like a genuine rock star. The crowds were enthralled. The critics were not.

“When I’ve experienced him at events like the Three Tenors concerts, he’s not half the artist he is when he sings opera,” said Davis, echoing many of his colleagues. “He doesn’t seem to care anymore. Every time he appears, any time or anywhere, the opera becomes of secondary interest and it’s the Luciano Pavarotti Show. What’s art got to do with it?”

Pavarotti hears only noxious snobbery in such criticism, brushing away the issue of whether he tries as hard at Giants Stadium as he does at the Met. “To say that music is only for the elect, for refined minds--that’s a line of thinking that shocks me,” he said. “My barber in Modena was the greatest connoisseur of opera I’ve ever known. Music is like sports: You don’t need to explain it.

“If you’ve been able to serve 500,000 people, the way we did in Central Park, where they all came for free and went away feeling fine, well, then, you’ve only done a good deed.” And if money flows from such good deeds, well, much of it goes to stave off other hungers than his. “We’ve set up a music center in Bosnia, and our next benefit concert is to raise money for a village of orphans in Liberia,” he said, pointing to a plaque he had received from the United Nations the day before, designating him honorary Ambassador for Peace. “Tell me, what is there for me to regret?”