Have you ever noticed that some brilliant souls seem to come to earth close together in time, eddy near one another in genius, and then also leave the earth within a few short months of one another? … as though they arrive in pods, like creatures of the sea and together swim away at a signal only they know. The most recent: Antonioni, and Bergman. Now Sills, now Pavarotti.

Luciano Pavarotti, who passed away yesterday at age 71, made Puccini’s aria, Nessun dorma more famous yet: In the opera Turandot, the Unknown Prince sings to Princess Turandot who’s rejected all suitors thus far. He sings that though she’s proclaimed that no one shall sleep, no one! until they can discover this hidden prince’s name… that they will never discover his name… that he will keep his name secret until ‘the right moment.’

Then, in one of the most erotic passages of opera, the Prince sings as thought he is Night itself… and that his bold heart is almost breaking with longing and passion for the difficult Turandot. He sings that he will keep his name well hidden… but only until morning comes. And then… he will place his name into her mouth with his kiss. And thus he prays for daylight to break through night.

Whether Pavarotti, looking like a huge enchanted black bear-turned-man…sang Nessun dorma or Ave Maria or Pagliacci “Vesti la guibba,” or most anything else, including “It’s A Man’s World,” with James Brown (Yes, truly) (and he also sang with Sting )

… there are now hundreds of thousands of people across the world who can pause in the midst of work or shaving or walking across the room, and suddenly hear him again: they are imprinted by his singing.

Shamans of eld in mythic works were said to be able to sing health into the souls of humans. Pavarotti’s shapely voice that radiated through the mask of his face became for many, a sonic evocation of something greater than human, in us….

There is lyric music; and then there is deep music… that has a mysterious presence far greater than its notes, far greater than its tempo, its words. Many listeners love, adore, genuflect before whatever they consider to be the deeper music, because it cracks off all the armor that’s fastened itself to their hearts and souls by their hours of mundane work, their frustrations, their fast ways with what ought be slow days…

This primal kind of music makes them remember an essential core self. But deep music needs a giant of some sort to sing it. A shaman. Pavarotti with all his genius wrapped in foibles and trickster qualities, was indeed that.

It is an amazing thing to see a singer sing into the dead bones of listeners’ bodies and watch the listeners come alive again, soften, glow even… I’ve seen it up close.

I’ve a crusty neighbor who is short on temper and long on judgmentalness. Yet, often when I pass his open door at night in the summer, I know the beast is being returned to human somewhere there in the dark, for some operatic tenor on CD is wafting out his door. And sure enough, in the morning, my friend is human again. Strong still, but far more mellow. And that lasts at least until noon. And then must be repeated that night.

This shamanic quality to a voice seems true: Some singing voices vibrate the sternum and the long bones of the listeners. The musicians in our family, call this ‘ruffling the marrow.’ Once done, ever after, the listener carries a bone-deep ’sense memory’… something akin to feeling they now know the poignancy of and preciousness of life. Again. Once more. Pavarotti did that; ruffled the marrow; sang into people’s very bones, restored their memories of poignant, precious life. Reset the humanity switch.

Yet, you’d hardly have placed bets on that happening from where he began in life.

As a child, Pavarotti slept in the tiny kitchen on a little fold-up bed made of iron. His father rose ungodly early for he was a baker. His mother labored in a cigar factory. It almost makes me cry to remember Pavarotti saying he’d had a happy childhood…

for he was just a 6 year old child in Italy during World War II. He lived through the bombings and strafings carried out by the Allies in the dark of night. He’d said that the families of the town who had loved and nourished one another for eons were divided by coldness, as one neighbor was pro-Fascist but the next one was anti-Fascist.

Yet… maybe that’s one reason why he could sing with such warmth about the cold and dark, about the mysteries of love, about the happiness to sometimes to be found inside sorrow. He’d been immersed in the study of such difficult matters by living through them when young.

These are the words to the aria Nessun dorma

No one shall sleep!…
No one shall sleep!…
Nor shall you, O Princess
in your cold room…
Look, the stars that tremble
with love and hope!

But my mystery
it is locked in me,
my name no one shall know it!
No, no!
Only into your mouth shall I reveal it,
when dawn’s light will shine!
My kiss will break the silence
and then you shall be my own.

Vanish, o night!
Set, stars! Set!
Bring the daylight
and I shall conquer!

And conquer you did Pavarotti. Even Caruso was not granted your reach, nor Callas. Nor any others now gone.

What is a fitting epitaph for such as you? Maybe this: For the child who survived the World War in Italy, and yet still poured a memory of the ecstatic into this too often warring maelstrom we call planet earth… there’s a song you sang many times, one I think so richly describes how and what you did on earth. The song is Panis angelicus. And the first line, says it all Lucianito:

Panis angelicus fit panis hominum
“The bread of the angels
becomes the bread of humanity.”