To be fair, PM did do a little piece from Modena (including, iirc, an interview with a professor from the University) completely separate from, and earlier than, the Bono interview.  I must confess I'd heard a preview of the Bono interview and, with all due respect, it was cringeworthy ("He didn't sing opera, he WAS opera" etc).  The full piece was a bit better but amounted to little more than a few of Bono's memories.  Of course there's a place for people connected with the man to pay their respects and share their memories but I can't help feeling the choice of this particular individual to be by far the main interviewee on Radio 4's flagship news programme was unsatisfactory.  The interview would have been better used as part of a lengthier 'tribute' programme rather than in the news programme covering the passing of the great tenor.

I don't know if anyone heard Thought for the Day on R4 this morning, by my most respected Thinker for the Day, the Reverend Angela Tilby.  It was all about Pavarotti, rather than using some news item as a peg for some religious platitude.  She said when someone as big as Pavarotti dies we don't just feel grief, but a sense of completion.

The word she didn't use, but I think what she was getting at, was generosity.

Thank you for that, Don B, for the word 'completion' there brings me to an understanding of what it is about S_K's threads that often irks me, which is that they tend to shun the holistic view of a subject in favour of an exaggeration of a specific foible or flaw. There is much more yet to be told about Pavarotti, but to the general public the term 'opera singer', for good or ill, needs no further explanation; they are aware of it, but it wasn't the part of his life they owned. The later 'commodified' singer is how he is known to vastly more people than those who will have seen him in the opera house or bought complete operas featuring him rather than the best-selling compilation discs, and when the news media are reporting a story to the general public, that is the slant that they will be expected to represent: another world celebrity (and as much as S_K obviously loathes Bono, that's what he undoubtedly is) who, despite his very different musical genre, has had a long association with the deceased, is more likely to speak directly to the later public than another in the string of purely classical colleagues.

 At the same time as PM was on the air, 'In Tune' was also engaged in a retrospective: I'm sure that that will have concentrated far more on the operatic side of his career.

I guess I've read too much Norman Lebrecht! 

Sorry my posts irk you, Ron. Believe me, it's never any part of my purpose to offend. 

However, I do tend to use these boards as a forum for 'letting off steam', because so many of the attitudes that I inveigh against are ones I encounter in everyday life, usually from people I work with.  It wouldn't be politic for me to tell them exactly what I think of them, so I air my more polemical views on here - a place where people aren't narrow-minded, blinkered, philistine, or 'contemporary' (a pejorative phrase in my book).  Not that you yourself are any of these things, of course! 

Whenever you feel yourself getting irked by my posts, please feel free to roll your eyes and move on.  It's what my best friends have been doing for years! 

S_K, thanks for that; it does help me to understand why, despite your obvious love for the medium, you've appeared to be so negative: that what you're actually seeking is amunition against the hordes of Philistines presssing in on you. That makes a deal of difference, and may well stop me rolling my eyes and moving on quite so much....

Ron

But surely, Ron, it is the failure of PM - which is one of our more serious news programmes - to present a holistic view of the great tenor which is irksome.  Instead of celebrity causing people to investigate the Luciano Pavarotti story, celebrity has itself become the story.

I think what’s being bemoaned here is the way some news reports have promoted Pavarotti’s celebrity status above his musical accomplishments.  Ernani mentioned interviews with Jenkins and Watson but PM undoubtedly had the scoop if you accept that Pavarotti the celebrity is more important than Pavarotti the singer.  In fact it’s difficult to think of anyone other than Bono who was both a personal acquaintance of Pavarotti and enjoyed the same degree of international recognition.

I suspect Ernani, Swan_Knight and others would, like me, prefer a bit more dignity in the reporting.  Personally I would prefer that they didn’t do in-depth interviews with any individual in the news programmes.  I didn’t hear the ‘In Tune’ feature but I think the Bono interview would have been more appropriate for a ‘retrospective’ where a degree of balance would have been provided by other lengthy tributes.  What some of the Radio 3 listeners would have thought of this is, of course, another matter.

But surely the only reason he was able (able, allowed, invited, whatever) to do these populist activites was because of his considerable achievements in the classical field.

I've just finished watching the repeat of the Arena documentary and what it shows is that he excelled in every period of his career. He could do serious opera and he could do populist works; he was big enough to encompass both and he should be remembered for both.

Well, that's the opinion of this not-really-a-big-opera-fan.

Sadly, this is too true. It seems only the demise of cross-over artists will be mentioned on the main news bulletins.  It took me a long time to catch up with the spate of operatic deaths we've had in the last two years.  Victoria de los Angeles did merit a mention on BBC teletext, but not on television, as I recall.

And a friend of mine was unaware until 1998 that Boris Christoff had died in 1993.