The voice:Legend has it that Pavarotti's Irish debut took place not in Dublin but in Cork in 1957, writes Michael Dervan
Luciano Pavarotti was in every sense a larger than life individual. There was that voice, unmistakable, ringingly clear, and with a command at the top of the range that fully warranted the moniker "King of the high Cs".
There was the Pavarotti bulk, so large in later life that he hardly moved in performance, and his concerts were arranged so that he wouldn't even have to walk across the stage in front of the orchestra. There were the outrageous stories, about, for instance, his having the full staff of an Italian restaurant travel with him to China for a performance in Beijing. There were his notorious tax problems in his native Italy, the last of which dragged on for years, leaving him with the threat of jail if he lost. There was the celebrity-style gossip about his private life, a snap on the beach with a former secretary, leading to divorce, remarriage and a second family. Wherever he went, whatever he did - whether he sang or whether he cancelled, whether he was on form or out of voice - Pavarotti was major news.
When I was young it was not really possible to move in musical circles in Ireland without hearing about the singer's important Irish connections.
He sang for the Dublin Grand Opera Society (as Opera Ireland was then called) in 1963. And it was in Rigoletto in Dublin he was spotted and hired by Covent Garden's Joan Ingpen as a cover for an upcoming La bohème. The Rodolfo for that bohème, Giuseppe di Stefano, cancelled, Pavarotti replaced him, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Most versions of this story have Pavarotti's Irish debut placed in Dublin. But, as John Allen wrote in Music Ireland magazine on the occasion of the singer's RDS concert in April 1990, the great tenor had preceded his Dublin debut with performances in Madama Butterfly in Belfast, and in Dundalk he sang in a concert with piano.
And the truth of his Irish debut may be even stranger than that. Legend has it that he first appeared on an Irish stage in Cork, at the choral festival of 1957, in his father's choir, the Corale Gioachino Rossini di Modena, which took the prize for male voice choirs that year.
When I was a music student, Pavarotti was a name frequently invoked to demonstrate the quality of casting that was to be found in the glory days of the Dublin Grand Opera Society. But that was the past, and the only way to hear his voice in Ireland was on record or on radio. Or, of course, you could travel to hear a performance abroad.
It didn't take Pavarotti long in the 1960s to become both a big name opera singer and a major recording star. He was a luminary of the Decca stable, establishing famous partnerships with sopranos Joan Sutherland and Mirella Freni. But it took the use of his recording of Nessun dorma for the 1990 World Cup, and the famous Three Tenors concert associated with that event, to launch him to megastardom.
I can remember a claim in the late 1980s that the early music band, the Academy of Ancient Music, had actually sold more records than the King of the High Cs. Within a year or two, that claim was history. The Essential Pavarotti became a top-selling album, not just in classical terms, but in pop terms. His personal success, and the success of the Three Tenors as a marketing tool, changed the face of classical music within the record industry.
His achievements were instrumental in turning executives' heads, and leading them to seek out ways of emulating the phenomenal sales he had achieved.
The scale of the Pavarotti fever can be gauged from the fact that his 1990 Dublin concert grossed more than €800,000, an amount for a single performance which at the time would have comfortably exceeded the annual box office takings of both the Abbey and Gate theatres.
Talk to the aficionados and you'll hear that he was not much of an actor on the operatic stage, that Plácido Domingo is a much more refined performer, a deeper and more profound musician, that the tenors of an earlier age had skills and insights that Pavarotti never mastered.
The truth, I think, is he had such a wealth of talent, a kind of natural ease and savoir faire that, combined with a voice of unique appeal, allowed people to take his achievements for granted, as if he had never had to work and train in order to sing so well.
He had the kind of personality that, for whatever reason, a mass audience simply related to without any difficulty whatsoever. His trademark gesture, a white hankie held aloft, was corny in the extreme. The thing about star quality is that it makes its own rules. In almost every way, Luciano Pavarotti did that, and his public loved him for it. He gave the impression of enjoying singing and enjoying life, and did it in a way that helped other people enjoy singing and enjoy life through him.