Outsized talents

"We shall never see his like again," they have been murmuring all week in New York as Big Lucy galumphed through his farewell run of Toscas at the Met. Shot by firing squad in the finale, Luciano Pavarotti (as Cavaradossi) creaked ponderously to his knees onto what appeared to be a fortuitously positioned pile of beanbags before executing an arm-assisted sideways flop to expire in graceless comfort.

Pavarotti, at 68, may claim sympathy for geriatric infirmity but the slow-motion act of elephantine death is an operatic abomination that he has practised and perfected over three decades of tenorial gigantism. A supple soccer player when he arrived at Covent Garden in 1963, the former Modena centre-forward assumed imperious physical dimensions soon after conquering America with nine top Cs in Donizetti's Daughter of the Regiment at the Metropolitan Opera in February 1972.

Size became as much a part of his universal trademark as the beatific smile with which he unloosed string after string of near-unreachable pearls. The liquid delivery, the seemingly effortless transcendence, was all-too-readily ascribed to his mountainous girth. He cooked regimental tureens of pasta for press photographers and consumed most of the pot himself. Fatness was the source of his cult, his howitzer in a longrunning war with the merely plump Placido Domingo, who could act him off any stage on earth but came distantly second in public affection and perception.

When the pair linked arms with Jose Carreras as the millionaire Three Tenors of the 1990 World Cup (and every tournament since), Pavarotti outgleamed his rivals in corpulent magnitude.

New York is not wrong - we shall never see his like again. The age of big singers is over, a transition confirmed this week by Covent Garden's sacking of American soprano Deborah Voigt because she could not fit into a microfrock. Where Pavarotti once gave permission for singers to overspill, opera in the new century is skimpy and severe.

In retrospect, Pavarotti was an emblem of an excess-driven era. In the last quarter of the 20th century, an increasingly competitive and intrusive media industry demanded that stars be, in some way or other, larger than life. Conspicuous consumption was a fast track to fame, and fatness an acceptable ticket, whether in such soul icons as Barry White and Solomon Burke, or in opera singers who slipstreamed into Pavarotti's media channels.

Size had never before been much of an operatic issue. Opera, an evocation of the unreal, conventionally cast an overweight matron as consumptive Mimi or a skinnyshanks ingénue as ear th- mo t he rly Br¸nnhilde. It did not matter much to the fans.

Luisa Tetrazzini, one of the most celebrated Golden Age divas, could barely fit into most dressing rooms (once inside, it was rumoured, she liked to be closeted for a few minutes with a choice young stagehand). But when she stepped out, it was how she sang that counted, not how she looked. The waist measurements of Jussi Bjˆrling and Tito Gobbi were immaterial to their wondrous voices and never discussed.

The relation of physical substance to sound production arose with Maria Callas, who started out in 1941 as a podgy Tosca and sylphed down in the mid-Fifties to a searingly dramatic bel canto heroine.

Purists, who complained that she sometimes shrieked, linked her variable tone control to excessive weight loss, to which they also ascribed her early retirement in 1965, at an age, 41, when most sopranos have yet to peak. Their cavils stand unproven. After Callas, opera singers continued to appear in all shapes and sizes until Pavarotti blew up the mould.