Pavarotti and Miss Sarajevo
Sadly, opera legend Luciano Pavarotti died today at 71 at his home in Italy following a bout with pancreatic cancer.
One of my favorite Pavarotti performances was his solo in the song ”Miss Sarajevo,” performed with the rock band U2. The song from the mid-90s protests the war in Bosnia and other countries’ inability or unwillingness to stop it. It was inspired in part by the television broadcast of a Sarajevo beauty pageant where the contestants held up a banner which read “DON’T LET THEM KILL US.”
The video can be seen here, or below. It is footage of a live performance from Modena, Italy, interspersed with clips of the Bosnian conflict. Pavarotti really gets going about 4 or 4 and a half minutes in. In the picture, Pavarotti and Bono embrace after the song.
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September 6th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
A hugely colourful character, one who has been there for most of my adult life, has passed. Very few people in the world, that one has never met, let alone dined with, have had the power to make my tears flow but he managed that every time I had the extraordinary pleasure of listening to him sing his ’signature piece’, Nessum Dorma.
I have heard other great tenors sing this rather simple little song, and very well, but only he could reach deep into some part of my brain and turn the tap. As his great chords vibrated their way up the scale, my chest would tighten, my eyes would fill, my height would strain to increase to match his effort, carried along with the crescendo, and I would involuntarily choke on the tears welling upward from deep within. A cascade of emotion induced by a voice gifted by God Himself.
Goodbye my friend Luciano. You truely added to the sum of human experience.
September 7th, 2007 at 12:09 am
Amfortas.
Did I understand you right that you are so high up the foood chain having “dined with” late Luciano Pavarotti?
But some women who adored his voice were bitter that he dumped his first spouse for a younger “trophy wife”, From Wikipedia
On 13 December 2003 he married his former personal assistant, Nicoletta Mantovani, with whom he already had a daughter, Alice.[5] He started his farewell tour in 2004, at the age of 69, performing one last time in old and new locations, after over four decades on the stage.
Politicians ,like Fred Thomson did similar thing by marrying his 24 some years younger “tropphy wife” after dumping his spouse and being a Washington ladies man for a while.
It gives rest of the husbands who have their nose in the grindstone a bad name.
September 7th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Well, I know this; that Heaven is a better place with the arrival of Luciano. Those angels will have a hard time outsinging him.
September 7th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
“Very few people in the world, that one has never met, let alone dined with..” AAG, I speak of ‘one’ in the English sense and ‘dined’ in a poetic sense. I have not met him, and have only ‘dined’ on his music. I am not as high on the food chain as I once was.
As for Pavarotti’s personal relationships…. no one is perfect and it is his voice that moves me.