Three years ago, the Oscar-winning director Ron Howard of such dramas as Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind made the hit documentary The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years. He followed this up with Made in America, a backstage peep into rapper Jay-Z’s music festival.
Clearly comfortable in the world of music, Howard, his long-time producing partner Brian Grazer, and their team have now turned their cameras onto yet another musical legend – the late, iconic and very much beloved tenor Luciano Pavarotti.
With The Beatles documentary, Howard captured the electricity of the Fab Four’s performances and the effect on their fans over a four-year period. Here the director gets much closer and more intimate with his subject, telling the story of Pavarotti’s life from birth to his death in 2007. Howard very much follows the customary documentary route – charting Pavarotti’s inexorable rise from his small-town origins to the very top of his game – with all the emotional and artistic highs and lows that come with it in both his professional and personal life as he capitalised on his incredible voice to become the artist he did.
The routine treatment does not make the experience any less engaging, however. Born in Modena, the young Pavarotti started his singing career with performances with his local choir, which also featured his father, himself a tenor and huge opera fan. Luciano’s working life started as a village teacher, but he soon followed his heart and it seemed not very long before he took the first steps to becoming one of opera’s greats.
There is much never-before-seen footage of the man himself
The documentary features in-depth interviews with Pavarotti’s family, managers and protegés and his fellow tenors – much time is spent on the formation of the Three Tenors with Placido Domingo and José Carreras. U2’s Bono makes a touching contribution as he recounts the collaboration between the singer and the band, which led to the launch of the single Miss Sarajevo.
And of course there is much never-before-seen footage of the man himself with this larger-than-life personality talking about his love of people, his adoration of his craft, his desire to share his gift and the wonderful world of opera – oft perceived to be aimed at a privileged few – with the people, thus earning him the moniker ‘The People’s Tenor’.
The film tracks his performances in recitals and concerts all across the globe – from the stately and renowned opera houses of Europe, to China, to the American heartlands, where he was received like a rock star – and his mingling with rock stars was a move frowned upon by opera purists, but one that made his star soar even higher.
In his reverence towards the subject, Howard succeeds in painting a very human side to Pavarotti, yet in such a luminous light, the darker sides of his personal life are skirted over. The relationship with his assistant Nicoletta Mantovani, the woman who became his second wife, caused a massive scandal. She was 35 years his junior and at the time it caused many of his fans to look on in dismay while causing irreparable rifts with his first family.
That said, the genuine love and poignant nostalgia that colour the interventions of his first wife Adua Veroni and their three daughters, Cristina, Lorenza and Giuliana Pavarotti, are those that paint the most honest picture of the man behind the legend, adding more weight to his self-confessed regret that he wasn’t as good a father he could have been.
“At first, I was engrossed just by the shape of Pavarotti’s journey, this remarkable, nothing-but-high watermarks career, the vast success,” says Howard.
“But when I looked deeper, I also saw that he bore the brunt of taking so many artistic risks. That drama was unexpected and felt extremely human.”
Of course, music features prominently, with numerous clips of Il Maestro’s myriad performances across the years underscoring the narrative. From his remarkable feat of hitting the all nine high Cs in Donizetti’s La Fille Du Regiment – earning him the title ‘The King of High Cs’ – to his trademark rendition of the illustrious aria Nessun Dorma from Giacomo Puccini’s celebrated opera Turandot, which runs through this film as a recurring motif, culminating in that performance at the 1990 World Cup.
It is a brilliant reminder of Pavarotti’s unparalleled warm, rich and honeyed tone of his voice, which he used with seeming effortlessness – one that was sadly taken away too early, following his death of pancreatic cancer in 2007.
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