A Factory Called Pavarotti
By 1990, Pavarotti and Domingo were further apart in style and aspiration than ever before. It took a third tenor to bring them together in a common purpose. Jose Carreras, a chirpy Catalan with a knack for breaking hearts backstage and front, fell ill with leukaemia and miraculously recovered. To give thanks for his restoration, he asked his good friends Placido and Luciano to join him in a concert for childrens cancer charities. Carreras was no threat vocally to either of the big men and they volunteered their services readily, as did the conductor Zubin Mehta.
Then the music business took over. A computer salesman turned music agent, Mario Dradi by name, fixed up a link with the soccer world cup finals, which all three tenors were mad keen to watch. James Lock set up Deccas digital console and television networks came charging in with transmission offers. For reasons still uncertain, whether because of viability or because they were badly advised, the tenors decided to take a flat fee for their recording and broadcast rights a sum not hugely in excess of what Pavarotti got paid per night in a Rudas marquee. When three hundred million people watched the telecast and Decca sold 12 million compact discs, the singers rued their lost royalties.
Once the Three Tenors concert was over, Rudas (Pavarottis manager) stepped in to make sure neither he nor Pavarotti got ripped off again. For a repeat performance at the Los Angeles World Cup he held the media to ransom and earned the three tenors and their conductor more money than they could sensibly spend in two lifetimes. Sales of the discs and videos slipped to eight million, but there was plenty of life left in the Rudas formula. Pavarotti took to singing for him so often in the open air that his voice was under stress. A 1991 concert in Londons Hyde Park attended in pouring rain by the Prince and Princess of Wales left Deccas engineers dismayed. The leading Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, accused Pavarotti of descending to the level of Madonna. He was booed at La Scala in December 1992 when a top note cracked on opening night in Verdis Don Carlos. He admitted that the audience was right to have barracked him: he had gone into the performance underprepared.
A 1994 Verdi Requiem at Wembley Arena, with people paying up to 95 to hear him, contained woefully out of tune meanderings. Critics commented that anyone paying for a concert ticket had a right to expect that the basics are in place. Before the Requiem, instead of resting, the star attended the inauguration of a Channel tunnel train named Pavarotti. He travelled on to the Philippines, where his tickets were priced at 25,000 pesos (600), or the equivalent of five months average wages so much for claims that his concerts expanded the popular audience for classical music.
A 1996 Three Tenors roadshow was announced by Rudas on Pavarottis sixtieth birthday, with concerts planned in London, New York, Tokyo, Munich and Melbourne and tickets priced between 35 and 350. It would be hypocrisy if we said we are not looking for success for our sponsors and ourselves, said Domingo on behalf of tenors united. Rudas, this time round, had a German co-promoter, Mathias Hofmann, and the involvement of a rock-label patriarch, the celebrated Ahmad Ertegun of Atlantic Records.
Singing Verdis Ballo in Maschera at Covent Garden, Pavarotti took time off to launch a new perfume then cancelled performances because of fatigue. BBC plans to televise a concert from his horse show in Modena were hastily scrapped when it was discovered that Pavarotti was not actually singing, but miming to a pre-recorded tape. I dont think there is a more difficult or honest profession than mine, he told television viewers. Home in Modena, apologists said, he was professionally less rigorous. In September 1995 he gave a benefit concert in Modena for child victims of the Bosnia war. He improvised duets for Decca with the pop singers Meatloaf and Simon Le Bon and was pictured embracing the Princess of Wales. The world of Luciano Pavarotti was far removed from the haughty, disciplined formalities of fine, high art.
Herbert Breslin was still in attendance, watching over Tibor Rudas like an axeman over a turkey and Adua Pavarotti was never far away, alternately threatening divorce and accepting contrition for an affair with his travelling companion, Nicoletta Mantovani. Aduas Stage Door Management employed more staff than Breslins agency and supplied entire casts to certain Italian opera houses. Her conductors included the talented Daniele Gatti, and Carlo Rizzi. It was Aduas ambition to produce a second Pavarotti. Some hope.
Breslin no longer harboured such fantasies. At the age of seventy he formed a profound attachment to a young man whom he announced as his heir to the agency. Three of his oldest associates walked out, taking their artists in tow. The spate of defections left the Breslin agency looking battered, tattered and more than a little bewildered.
As Luciano Pavarotti surveyed his hospitable table in Modena he might well have asked himself which of his partners Adua, Breslin or Rudas had exercised the greatest influence on his spectacular career. Breslin had been crucial on the first lap, but Rudas overtook him on the straight. Adua, meanwhile had tended his domestic affairs and prepared to share the fruits of a happy retirement. But no individual was responsible for more than a fraction of the Pavarotti phenomenon, and none of those who grew rich on his percentages was able to justify their fortune by repeating the feat and producing another money-maker out of the hat.
This did not stop a myth taking wing in the world of music, a notion that Pavarotti was somehow man-made. If only the music-biz could latch on to the forces that made him, classical music would be rolling in money.
Extracted from When the Music Stops: Managers, Maestros and the Corporate Murder of Cla$$ical Music, written by Norman Lebrecht, published by Simon & Schuster, distributed by IBD, 4.99, 455 pages