Recalling Pavarotti, pro and con

MARK SWED’S lovely words [“High Notes That Set All-New Standards,” Sept. 7] captured the very essence of Luciano Pavarotti’s unique gift: “When that sound so fresh and alive and gorgeous, like nothing I have ever heard before or since, generously poured forth. . . .”

This was a man in love with his music whose sheer joy of singing gave voice to his passion for life. I don’t care about the foolishness, the commercial follies. For one brief, shining moment, our generation was blessed by this unique, supreme artist.

You’re right, Mark Swed: We won’t see his like again.

Johanna Dordick

Los Angeles

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Swed’s obituary [Sept. 6] called Pavarotti “the opera world’s greatest star.” Hardly. Pavarotti had a voice suited for the “bel canto” of Vincenzo Bellini, but Pavarotti made a decision early in his operatic career to take on the punishing tenor roles in the Verdi repertoire. The result: a prematurely frayed voice in decline since the late 1980s.

An intuitive singer (like Ezio Pinza, who, like Pavarotti, never learned to read a musical score), Pavarotti was a less thorough musician than Plácido Domingo, who has progressively expanded his repertoire, now including German opera and conducting. Furthermore, unlike Domingo, Pavarotti never acquired the faintest ability at thespian histrionics -- he couldn’t act.

Pavarotti was not the great tenor of his generation -- that honor belongs to Domingo -- nor was Pavarotti much less the great singer of the last half-century; this honor probably belongs to Bjoerling.

Marco-Antonio Loera

Inglewood

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On the night of Aug. 25, 1973, Luciano Pavarotti made his Los Angeles debut at the Hollywood Bowl in “La Boheme.”

Los Angeles then was not a very opera-savvy city, but when Pavarotti sang an especially beautiful and arching phrase in his first act aria, the audience -- most of whom did not know who he was -- gasped in unison.

In more than 50 years of opera-going, I have never heard an audience do what it did that night: 9,500 people recognized his greatness in a single instant. For vocal splendor, he was unsurpassed.

Walter J. Kelly

Glendale