The Three Tenors’ Cup Runneth Over

Luciano Pavarotti may not walk as easily as he once did, and he may even get light-headed on stage, as happened this past season at the Metropolitan Opera. Jose Carreras may not have much voice left. Placido Domingo may have a few other things to do, such as singing everywhere all the time, and running an opera company in Washington and a restaurant in New York. James Levine may have the Met to look after in New York, a new orchestra post to begin in Munich in the fall, and a “Ring” to conduct at Bayreuth this summer.

But nothing stops the Three Tenors.

At noon today, you can join 2 billion other viewers (the unverifiable figure flaunted by Tibor Rudas, the Three Tenors producer) for a brand-new Three Tenors concert broadcast live from Paris on KCET (with repeats tonight, Monday and Aug. 19, at 8 p.m.). The concert, on the Champs de Mars in front of the Eiffel Tower, celebrates the World Cup final on Sunday.

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If you believe the tenors, it was their love of soccer and their good hearts that brought them together eight years ago in Rome for a charity concert during the World Cup. If you believe the reams of publicity from the various Three Tenors concerts that have followed, it is for the future of a glorious art form that the tenors interrupt their busy schedules, to bring opera to the wide world. If you believe your common sense, the Three Tenors is a business venture that makes a lot of money.

In fact, I am willing to believe it all--well, maybe 2 billion viewers sounds a trifle optimistic. I think that Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti genuinely feel that they are up to some good. By branding themselves as the personification of opera, their celebrity has surely done much to put opera on the mass culture radar screen and brought new audiences into the opera house.

I also suspect they are having a pretty good time doing it. After all, mass adulation isn’t so bad. And the work is, for them, easy. Each sings a few arias and songs that have been part of their repertory for decades. They learn a simple medley that hardly compares with the difficulty of learning an opera role.

And who can argue with the big bucks? The tenors each walk away with a cool $1 million per show (the conductor snags half that), along with royalties for recordings and merchandise. Record companies and PBS are also beneficiaries. Revenues from Three Tenors CDs and videos have the potential for putting ailing classical record divisions in the black. Three Tenors broadcasts keep public television pledge drives alive, year after year.

Still, the Three Tenors is a business, and the business of business is not, of course, art. The Three Tenors actually benefits all kinds of businesses. Some of the statistics offered by the Rudas organization include the employment of 100 program sellers and a production team of 1,200. The event is also great for champagne and mineral water concerns. Concertgoers in Paris are expected to consume 150,000 glasses of the former and 250,000 bottles of the latter, we’re told.

But the real money comes from CDs and videos. In a less greedy age, that would have been an unequivocal blessing, when blockbusters helped pay for recording less commercially viable music. But now the larger labels are owned by big corporations that want the profits for themselves. They want only to repeat the Three Tenors success over and over again, and they will go to any lengths to do so, be it promoting the honeyed, romantic pseudo-opera tenor Andrea Bocelli, or even unloosing popster Michael Bolton on opera.

And it is not just big media business that has bought into Three Tenors greed. Nonprofit PBS is nearly as bad. The Three Tenors have been broadcast dozens of times on KCET and brought our local station more than $2 million in viewer pledges. PBS now is a regular receptacle for the likes of Bocelli and that other pseudo-classical crossover artists, such as the Strauss conductor Andre Rieu.

Clearly the station needs the money. But generating it this way also plays right into the hands of a government no longer eager to support arts broadcasting. If the Three Tenors and their like can accomplish so much, who needs Congress? But then such broadcasting starts to take the place of real performing arts programs. “Great Performances” and “Live From Lincoln Center” hardly cover the extraordinary range of opera, music, dance and theater readily available.

As for the new audiences these events attract, they, too, are a mixed blessing. I have no doubt that the first Three Tenors concert in 1990 was quite an occasion, and I would have liked to have been there. No one can deny Domingo and Pavarotti their greatness, and Carreras, while not quite of their caliber, was surely a seductive singer in his prime and he had the added sympathy of having won a battle with leukemia. The setting was great, the historic Roman ruins, the Baths of Caracalla. And there was a real frisson among the three competing singers working together for the first time. The fact that they, and their conductor, Zubin Mehta, were doing this for charity also helped the mood.

It should have been a one-of-a-kind event. But no one had expected that the CD would top the pop charts and sell millions of copies. At the repeat of the show at Dodger Stadium four years ago, the tenors went into it for the money, although each is known to give generously to charitable causes. Tibor Rudas, who produces Pavarotti’s tasteless stadium events, became the producer of the show. And it was taken on the road.

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The Three Tenors concert I attended two years ago at the Meadowlands in New Jersey was not fun. Fans battled traffic for hours to get into the football stadium. They jostled for tailgate party space. Huge amounts of liquor were indeed consumed, and any number of drunken fights occurred all evening.

From the vast majority of the seats, the performers, even the plump ones, were tiny specks in the distance, or profusely sweating close-ups on large video screens. The sound was stadium amplification.

It is not obvious to me that this is the best way to prepare a new audience for attendance at an opera. Will stadium-goers be disappointed by unamplified sound, no video and the need to pay undivided attention? Are not the hard-sell of the Three Tenors and the demands of art antithetical?

But when I think back to that New Jersey evening, I do recall that the three singers, and the conductor, James Levine, did all have the indefinable something that we call operatic. And maybe that is enough these days. Certainly compared with Bocelli, Bolton or Rieu, the Three Tenors almost seem like a class act.