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There are music lovers --- and then there are opera fans. The two species are not necessarily identical.
Opera fans oftentimes have zero interest in any other type of classical music. Ask them about Beethoven sonatas or Stravinsky ballets and they give you this blank look. Many of them, in fact, are not even really interested in operatic music. All they really care about is singers and their voices.
THE KING AND I is a book for that sort of opera fan. It is breezy, irreverent, gossipy and titillating, full of juicy backstage and offstage anecdotes and trivia, virtually unburdened with anything so boring as discussion of music.
Now that Luciano Pavarotti's extraordinary career on the world's opera stages is over, his longtime publicist and manager, Herbert Breslin, has here told the story of their relationship. His collaborator on this first-person narrative is Anne Midgette, a well-respected member of the music reviewing corps at The New York Times.
Breslin is a well-known (and much-feared) figure in the New York music business. He ends up looming almost as large in this book as does Pavarotti himself. There is a lot of padding dealing with Breslin's other clients (e.g. Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Alice DeLarrocha), a lot of space is devoted to his own hard-nosed musings on the music business, and one of the appendices is a three-page listing of all his clients. He keeps professing, no doubt sincerely, his own deep love for music --- but he comes across as a hard-nosed, unsentimental businessman who believes --- and states here --- that classical music must be marketed the same way you market soap flakes.
The Breslin/Midgette version of Pavarotti is a kind of overgrown child, ignorant of anything musical except his own singing, hard to please, endlessly demanding, vain, self-centered --- yet somehow lovable. Breslin admits that Pavarotti was a ticket to immense wealth for him, but insists that the relationship also worked in the reverse direction.
This low-calorie quick-read of a book will be devoured on the standee line at the Metropolitan Opera. You can read all about Pavarotti's voracious appetite, his sexual escapades with a series of "secretaries," his shrewd financial dealings, his interest in horses, and his often unpleasant dealings with other singers. His great rival, Placido Domingo, is treated with a dollop of grudging respect balanced by a lot of sniping. The sad last few years of Pavarotti's physical decline are detailed, along with Breslin's eventual disillusionment and parting from his famous client. This is the sort of extra-musical gossip that is meat and drink to many opera fanatics, as distinct from mainstream music lovers.
And speaking of padding, the book is larded with little vignettes from those who have known or worked with Pavarotti --- but they are generally innocuous, adding little to the overall Breslin/Midgette portrait. The same can be said for a final chapter, presented as the work of Pavarotti himself. One suspects that the tenor was invited to add his two cents worth without first being given the chance to read the rest of the book.
So, if you want to know about Luciano Pavarotti's traveling entourage, learn the names of his "secretaries" and find out what wines are his favorites, this lightweight confection is for you. I will offer here only one sample:
Once when Pavarotti was in Chicago, in a fit of operatic despair he called Breslin in New York and told him he was about to end it all by throwing himself out the window of his hotel room. Breslin caught the next plane, raced to the hotel, woke up one of the tenor's Praetorian Guard and told her what was happening.
Said the guardian, calmly: "How can he throw himself out of a window? He wouldn't fit!"
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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