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Pavarotti and the magic of crowds
Dan Rottenberg
The miracle maker
DAN ROTTENBERG
Luciano Pavarotti’s death on September 6 got me thinking about the rare times my mind has been blown by the sheer power of crowds. There was a Saturday night at a huge black nightclub on Chicago’s South Side, circa 1970, where the stage show and the thousand-or-so patrons in their suits and fancy dresses left me feeling I’d been transported back to Harlem in the ’20s. There was another Saturday night just a few years ago in Buckhead, a white night-club suburb of Atlanta, where mobs of young costumed women and their T-shirted boyfriends spilled out of the clubs into the streets in a scene that could have been choreographed by Fellini.
There was the annual fête de la musique on the summer solstice in Lyon, France in 2006— an entire city taking to the streets on a weeknight, with bands at every intersection playing everything from classical to old Beatles songs to hard rock ’n roll. That same summer there was a Sunday afternoon concert in the municipal park of Chalons-en-Champagne, a provincial French city of some 50,000 residents. The whole town seemed to be there (the streets were empty); when the amateur musicians and choir sang the chorus of the Hebrew slaves from Verdi’s Nabucco— one of the most moving pleas for human liberation ever written— hundreds of people in the audience joined in. I remember the tears welling up in my eyes as the thought dawned on me: These people know the words!
And, yes, such a crowd produced a similar effect in Philadelphia. On a Friday in March of 1989, Pavarotti was in town to sing Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore with winners of his international voice competition. But that afternoon, engineers at the Academy of Music discovered two widening cracks in a wooden ceiling truss 72 feet above the old building’s auditorium. The Philadelphia Orchestra’s Friday afternoon concert was cancelled immediately— at intermission— and the Academy was shut down for at least two weeks. In tears, the Opera Company’s general director, Margaret Anne Everitt, cancelled that evening’s performance.
From his hotel window
But Pavarotti had other ideas. From his room at the Four Seasons, he stared out of his window across Logan Square at a sight so familiar to Philadelphians that we’d come to take it for granted. There Pavarotti saw something we’d missed: The opportunity for an exquisite dramatic gesture. “We will sing in the cathedral,” he announced.
This was no easy thing. L’Elisir d’Amore is a country comedy, utterly inappropriate for a Catholic cathedral (Tosca, maybe; L’Elisir d’Amore, no). The pope had recently declared his church’s cathedrals off-limits to non-liturgical entertainment. Archbishop Anthony Bevilacqua was away at a weekend retreat and inaccessible. And who could round up and notify the necessary singers and musicians within a few hours, not to mention the 2,900 ticket holders?
No matter: Pavarotti would not (could not?) be denied. He ordered a miracle of operatic dimensions, and that’s what we got. Somehow the necessary permissions were obtained, and somehow the news was spread by word of mouth (no Internet in those days).
At 7:45 that night, assuming I’d be virtually the only one there, I arrived at the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul in a steady rain to find a stunning sight: Some 2,000 Philadelphians standing under their umbrellas, waiting silently for the doors to open. One line stretched from the front entrance down 18th Street, east on Race Street and then north on 17th toward Vine; a second line stretched north on18th Street. The rain continued to fall. Yet despite the weather and the uncertainty, few people left or even complained. Without prior planning or direction from above, a large mass of people demonstrated the ability to rise to a difficult occasion.
Cutting through the hype
Eventually the doors swung open, the cathedral quickly filled on a first-come, first-served basis, and Pavarotti and his young soloists gave us a night to remember— a glimpse not merely of what theater and opera could be, but of what Philadelphia and even the world could be. And Pavarotti made it happen.
Pavarotti was often derided as a rock star, as an athlete rather than an artist, as the man who brought mass culture to opera and vice versa. He was such a promoter, such a ubiquitous multi-media presence, that it became easy to take his splendid voice for granted. Yet when you cut through the hype, the two secrets of his success remain: He possessed a magnificent instrument, and he perceived that opera is above all a collaborative effort designed to lift performers and audiences alike to sublime heights. That he fell in love with the Academy of Music, and consequently with this city, was my great fortune, and perhaps yours as well.♦
To read responses, click here.
DAN ROTTENBERG
Luciano Pavarotti’s death on September 6 got me thinking about the rare times my mind has been blown by the sheer power of crowds. There was a Saturday night at a huge black nightclub on Chicago’s South Side, circa 1970, where the stage show and the thousand-or-so patrons in their suits and fancy dresses left me feeling I’d been transported back to Harlem in the ’20s. There was another Saturday night just a few years ago in Buckhead, a white night-club suburb of Atlanta, where mobs of young costumed women and their T-shirted boyfriends spilled out of the clubs into the streets in a scene that could have been choreographed by Fellini.
There was the annual fête de la musique on the summer solstice in Lyon, France in 2006— an entire city taking to the streets on a weeknight, with bands at every intersection playing everything from classical to old Beatles songs to hard rock ’n roll. That same summer there was a Sunday afternoon concert in the municipal park of Chalons-en-Champagne, a provincial French city of some 50,000 residents. The whole town seemed to be there (the streets were empty); when the amateur musicians and choir sang the chorus of the Hebrew slaves from Verdi’s Nabucco— one of the most moving pleas for human liberation ever written— hundreds of people in the audience joined in. I remember the tears welling up in my eyes as the thought dawned on me: These people know the words!
And, yes, such a crowd produced a similar effect in Philadelphia. On a Friday in March of 1989, Pavarotti was in town to sing Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore with winners of his international voice competition. But that afternoon, engineers at the Academy of Music discovered two widening cracks in a wooden ceiling truss 72 feet above the old building’s auditorium. The Philadelphia Orchestra’s Friday afternoon concert was cancelled immediately— at intermission— and the Academy was shut down for at least two weeks. In tears, the Opera Company’s general director, Margaret Anne Everitt, cancelled that evening’s performance.
From his hotel window
But Pavarotti had other ideas. From his room at the Four Seasons, he stared out of his window across Logan Square at a sight so familiar to Philadelphians that we’d come to take it for granted. There Pavarotti saw something we’d missed: The opportunity for an exquisite dramatic gesture. “We will sing in the cathedral,” he announced.
This was no easy thing. L’Elisir d’Amore is a country comedy, utterly inappropriate for a Catholic cathedral (Tosca, maybe; L’Elisir d’Amore, no). The pope had recently declared his church’s cathedrals off-limits to non-liturgical entertainment. Archbishop Anthony Bevilacqua was away at a weekend retreat and inaccessible. And who could round up and notify the necessary singers and musicians within a few hours, not to mention the 2,900 ticket holders?
No matter: Pavarotti would not (could not?) be denied. He ordered a miracle of operatic dimensions, and that’s what we got. Somehow the necessary permissions were obtained, and somehow the news was spread by word of mouth (no Internet in those days).
At 7:45 that night, assuming I’d be virtually the only one there, I arrived at the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul in a steady rain to find a stunning sight: Some 2,000 Philadelphians standing under their umbrellas, waiting silently for the doors to open. One line stretched from the front entrance down 18th Street, east on Race Street and then north on 17th toward Vine; a second line stretched north on18th Street. The rain continued to fall. Yet despite the weather and the uncertainty, few people left or even complained. Without prior planning or direction from above, a large mass of people demonstrated the ability to rise to a difficult occasion.
Cutting through the hype
Eventually the doors swung open, the cathedral quickly filled on a first-come, first-served basis, and Pavarotti and his young soloists gave us a night to remember— a glimpse not merely of what theater and opera could be, but of what Philadelphia and even the world could be. And Pavarotti made it happen.
Pavarotti was often derided as a rock star, as an athlete rather than an artist, as the man who brought mass culture to opera and vice versa. He was such a promoter, such a ubiquitous multi-media presence, that it became easy to take his splendid voice for granted. Yet when you cut through the hype, the two secrets of his success remain: He possessed a magnificent instrument, and he perceived that opera is above all a collaborative effort designed to lift performers and audiences alike to sublime heights. That he fell in love with the Academy of Music, and consequently with this city, was my great fortune, and perhaps yours as well.♦
To read responses, click here.
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