When Luciano Pavarotti, the greatest operatic tenor since Caruso, passed away on the 6th, he did so exactly a decade after attending Princess Di’s own funeral. Unlike most performers, he actually enriched the planet’s culture with his amazing voice and his grand sendoff in Modena, Italy is not the mourning of the mortal theft of a great cultural phenomenon but a celebration of extraordinary achievement.
Pavarotti’s funeral also underscores something to which we ought to pay heed here in the states: A reverence for culture at its very highest level, a reverence that transcends the merely respectful. It is a great European nation’s salute to its own culture.
Whatever your thoughts about the sheer scope and scale of Pavarotti’s funeral and whether or not all of it was necessary and appropriate is not with standing. The point that ought to be brought home is that the Italian government and luminaries from the worlds of entertainment and politics bothered to make a spectacle of Pavarotti’s funeral.
There were acrobatic jets emitting colored trails of smoke from the Italian air force. A brief list of some of the luminaries in attendance: U2’s Bono; Romano Prodi, the premier of Italy; former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Franco Zeffirelli.
Consider Caruso’s achievement in a much shorter life. By the time of his death in 1921, radio and recording technology were still emerging and developing and were hardly available. Yet Caruso’s talent that had to be heard almost exclusively in a live setting secured his place as one of the greatest singers of all time. Devotion and a fine appreciation of the arts alone can account for that. And Caruso’s own funeral in Naples was one normally reserved for royalty or heads of state.
If one goes to Reuters, one will see a strange juxtaposition, news of Pavarotti’s death with other entertainment items. As if Pavarotti’s funeral is on an equal footing, this Reuters blurb also mentions the return of Britney, Madonna’s adopted kids and Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe. And the upshot of this skewed relativism is the fact that Britney or Madonna are never in the news anymore except for their own maternity skills or lack thereof.
Then, as an embarrassing counterpoint, consider Bush’s seemingly endless parade of gaffes at the Sydney Opera House, the venue of some of the most memorable operatic performance of the last two generations and at which the great tenor had sung three times.
George Bush, badly-timed as a debater and public speaker but invariably in perfect tempo with the cruelty of coincidence, displayed not only his personal failings in a bumbling, slurred public address but also our nation's ability to produce someone who claims to have read 87 books this year yet cannot distinguish between Australia and Austria, APEC from OPEC or pronounce Canberra and Kuala Lumpur even with a prepared text before him.
In a way, it would've been sheer, tragic poetry if Australia's Prime Minister John Howard didn't stop Bush from dropping out of site had he continued his exit. The steep drop that Bush would've suffered would've been perfectly emblematic of a nation that prizes corporate profit above all else and allows culture to drop off the edge and into an abyss.
Corporate culture, obviously, is a contradiction in terms. The bottom line is the bottom line and, as I’ve been saying for two or three decades, “the business of business is business.” It’s a vicious, profit-driven culture, for want of a better word, that emphasizes and maximizes profitability and exposure. But we cannot completely blame corporations, conglomerates or George W. Bush’s Republican party for this descent into an artless Hell. Because corporations only feed a demand that is merely shaped rather than created by a political party that would love to completely obliterate Head Start and National Endowment of the Arts grants faithfully funded by Congress. In other words, those of us who do not care to advance the cause of culture have no right to complain about corporations feeding a demand that is provided and driven by us. We are part of the reason for this self-fulfilling prophecy.
No, we cannot blame George W. Bush for the paucity of cultural education, a trend that had begun decades ago and valiantly battled by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet George W. Bush and his No Child Left Behind program can certainly be blamed for not only not reversing this trend but exacerbating it. In its incidental, ancillary function (the primary being providing contact information to the DoD’s recruiters in exchange for federal funding), NCLB does indeed stress the three R’s but not the arts upon which two of these rudimentary skills are built.
As a result of decades of such unimaginative bureaucracy, we’ve produced a generation or two of adolescents whose sole cultural contribution to America is in wearing its clothes backwards and having committed to enduring memory the lyrics of thousands of heavy metal and hip hop songs while not being able to perfectly recite a single line by Shakespeare or Keats. Mention Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” and most people under 40 will automatically think of the other, more popular but no less tragic Christina.
Pavarotti’s funeral. Anna Nicole Smith’s funeral. Let’s be honest, folks: Which one got the most feverish press?
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