Backstage with Pavarotti and Other Egos

With his death in 2007, the world lost not merely one of the greatest classical singers of all time, it lost an outsize, lovable personality with an ego to match. Much has been written about his life but no book provides as much detail as this by John Duffus about the background to the artist, how in the second half of his career he took his art into mega arenas where he was seen by hundreds of millions. Backstage with Pavarotti reviews the many characters backstage who made his career and concerts possible, the "snake" and "barracuda" Herbert Breslin who was his personal manager and the casino entertainment entrepreneur "with his taste for tinsel", a craggy Hungarian American Tibor Rudas who ended up paying him a fortune to persuade him into arenas. Duffus describes the dozen concerts he worked on and presented with Pavarotti in Asia over a 15 year period, including the last three he was ever to sing for a paying public in December 2005. These included disasters aplenty and the book provides a telling insight into the tactics and underhand shenanigans to make possible several, including the frantic efforts to make a Three Tenors concert finally happen in Beijing's Forbidden City in 2001The egos described include the lust for power by the great violinist Isaac Stern and the excessive vanity of the conductor Herbert von Karajan. On the other hand diva Jessye Norman emerges as a singer with a huge sense of fun. The flood of money into making stars in classical music is described with cameo appearances by such characters as Spiro Agnew, Nixon's disgraced Vice-President. Definitely a must-read for all who attended concerts by the great and much-adored singer..Amazon Review