Get Out Your Handkerchiefs

Pavarotti a film by Ron Howard.  With Placido Domingo, Zubin Mehta, Jose Carreras, Bono.  *****

Pavarotti is an unabashed example of cinematic hagiography, which tells the life story of Luciano Pavarotti through a group of loving admirers.  The film mentions a couple of illicit affairs—including the notorious one that led to his divorce and second marriage—and various people mention that he was persnickety and difficult to get along with (he was the male equivalent of a diva, in other words.  The man traveled with 28 suitcases, but apparently never packed any of them).  But for the most part all the talking heads here loved the man, were astounded by his voice, and couldn’t say enough good things about him.

And really, what’s not to like?  As both an artist and a man, he seemed to be the most open, effusive, and energetic of all people.  He was a huge (I mean that in every sense of the term) extrovert, surrounding himself with people and loving interactions with his fans; we see him waving at and riding a double decker bus in London and riding a bicycle in China (the bicycle actually held him.  Que milagro, as the Chinese would say), mixing in crowds of fans at every opportunity.  Even when he returned to his hotel room, he still had a huge entourage to get together and eat (copiously).  He was a man of enormous charm because he genuinely loved and liked people, and didn’t have a suspicious bone in his body.  As my wife said when we left, she was sure those two affairs were just a drop in the bucket: any woman would have fallen for him on sight, even thought at one point—all that pasta adds up—Pavarotti had ballooned to 396 pounds.

He was born in Modena, Italy, in 1935, and lived through the Second World War; when, later in his life, he was doing benefits for children in Bosnia, he spoke of the things he had seen during the war, including men hanging by their necks as a form of execution.  He was the first boy born in his family and was surrounded by loving woman who adored and spoiled him (though he was hardly the only Italian boy to have that experience.  I had a friend who experienced the same thing in the Bloomfield section of Pittsburgh).  When he was a young boy he contracted tetanus and almost died.  He was apparently in a coma and the priests were called (this part of the movie was narrated rather quickly and I may have gotten the details wrong).  He said that, when you’ve gone through an experience like that, you come out of it determined to love life, every tree, the blue sky, the earth itself.

His father too was a tenor, and Luciano followed him in that avocation, though it eventually became a vocation for him.  He says that his father’s voice was better than his, but that hardly seems possible.  He started off as an elementary school teacher (another thing that’s hard to picture), but won an early competition for tenors, and was given the opportunity to sing in a full-scale opera.  He was acclaimed and decided to study in earnest.  He also, as a young man, fell in love and got married, and within four and a half years his wife had given birth to three girls (more women!).  His daughters are among the most interesting commentators in the film.

He says that he learned to breathe as a singer when he toured with Joan Sutherland, and saw—or rather, felt, he says—the way she breathed, how strong she made her diaphragm.  There is a fair amount of talk about the technique of singing in this movie, and it’s all fascinating, the way singers learn to measure out the breath, expending it when they need it.  The word for voice is feminine, as Placido Domingo points out, and the voice must be treated as a jealous female.  Almost anything in life can affect it.  Singers also speak of the way, in Italian opera, the composers match the melody to the words, so it is by singing the words correctly, and with the right emotion, that one arrives at the correct rhythm, and pace.

I’m fascinated by the fact that Pavarotti suffered from dreadful stage fright all his life.  “I go to die,” he would say, as he walked off to give a performance.  Normally stage fright has a constrictive effect on the breathing, at least it does for me, but Pavarotti had apparently learned to counteract that physically.  It almost seems that the strength of his voice had something to do with the strength of his fear; people said the fear was palpable when you stood near him before a performance.

A series of canny managers got Pavarotti out of the famous opera houses and out where ordinary people lived; the first such concert was at a town in Missouri.  At those recitals he wasn’t playing a role; it was just him and a pianist, and he had to be himself (he began carrying his famous handkerchief because he didn’t know what to do with his hands).  He brought operatic music to the people, and as the years went on he found himself more and more enamored of the people and less concerned with what he was singing.  He had a series of famous concerts with rock singers (when you hear them sing beside him, even the best of them, it’s as if they don’t even have voices.  I don’t know why they weren’t embarrassed to be there).  And as it turns out, one of the most eloquent commentators on Pavarotti the man was Bono, who got to know him well (and who dropped a few f-bombs in his commentary, sending a jolt through the elderly audience.  As I said to my wife, we were the two youngest people in the audience, and I’m almost 71).

Toward the end of his life, people complained that Pavarotti’s voice wasn’t what it once had been.  He could no longer hit the high C’s he was once famous for.  But Bono said those complaints betrayed a misunderstanding of what singing is.  The things Pavarotti was singing, Bono said, were all familiar to his audience, and quite famous.  The music was unquestionably beautiful.  What he brought to the music was who he was, the life he had lived, and that didn’t have to do with how his voice had held up.  His character came through in the singing.  After Bono had said those words, we heard Pavarotti sing an aria that more or less proved his point.  The audience applauded so long at the sheer emotion of the music that he had to turn away.

Probably the high point of the performing is the concerts he did with Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras, the famous Three Tenors concerts, which began as an effort to bring Carreras back to performing after he’d battled leukemia.  The three men got along famously, and supposedly never argued about who got to sing what.  The competition only showed up when they were actually on staged and performing, cutting each other the way jazz musicians do, but it was good natured, with spectacular results.

Director Ron Howard tried to illustrate various moments in Pavarotti’s life by the arias he sang, and as I watched the movie the second time (I took my brother in law, a true music lover), I could see how skillfully he had done that.  There were certainly sad moments in Pavarotti’s life—he died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 71, when his daughter with his second wife was just four and a half—but in general this movie is one of the most joyous you’ll see this year.  What brings you to tears is the beauty of the music.  You could attend this movie for the soundtrack alone.  But it’s also a portrait of a unique artist, who seemed to love the people he was singing for as much as his art.  He’s the Caruso of his day, as one person said.  But the recordings from Pavarotti’s era have survived a lot better than Caruso’s.