Switzerland's opera scene has been paying tribute to legendary Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti, whose death was announced on Thursday, the official Swissinfo website reported.
Pavarotti, who was 71 years old, was suffering from pancreatic cancer. He died in his home town of Modena in northern Italy.
The world famous singer was literally a larger-than-life character who is credited with bringing opera to the masses, particularly through his performances with fellow tenors Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras, Swissinfo said.
Grisha Asagaroff, artistic director of the Zurich Opera House, said that Pavarotti was the most popular singer since Enrico Caruso, who died in 1921.
"Even if people didn't really know about singers, they all knew about Pavarotti," he said. "Every taxi driver in every country knew him."
For Alain Perroux, a music expert in Geneva who has written widely on opera, Pavarotti was the antithesis of today's slim and beautiful singers.
"He was the very incarnation of the (opera) giant -- physically imposing, not a very good actor, who was able to transmit the nuances of opera with his heavenly voice, which had an incredibly seductive power," Perroux told Swissinfo.
"He gave the impression that singing was so easy for him. It was a very natural voice."
Perroux also pointed Pavarotti's other side -- his colorful personal life, which took up many newspaper inches, as well as his tendency in his later years to go for more commercial projects.
In 2003 Pavarotti married Nicoletta Mantovani, an assistant 34 years his junior, after an acrimonious divorce form Adua, his wife of 37 years. His second marriage produced a daughter, Alice, who is four years old. He has three daughters from his first marriage.
Aviel Kahn, a former director of Bern's Opera House and general manager designate of Flanders Opera, said the opera world would remember Pavarotti's amazing voice.
"Singers who worked with him described him as a bon viveur, somebody who was the same on stage as he was in private," Kahn told Swissinfo.
Pavarotti had worked in Zurich's Opera House as a young tenor before he was well known.
But he only appeared twice in Switzerland after that, at a concert at the city's Hallenstadion stadium and for an evening of German Lieder at the Opera House.
Source: Xinhua
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