The fat lady has sung for Luciano Pavarotti!

The great tenor Luciano Pavarotti died today at 5 a.m. [11 p.m. Wednesday EDT] at his home in Modena….The Maestro fought a long, tough battle against the pancreatic cancer which eventually took his life. [Manager Terri Robson]

It would be presumptuous, if not disingenuous, for me to wax too sentimental about Pavarotti. Besides, there are already far too many Opera dilettantes doing that on TV. (Although, I highly recommend the Pavarotti obit in the Washington Post.)

Instead, I shall suffice to eulogize him for doing more than any other performer to make classical music hip. And nothing demonstrated this quite like his willingness to brook the snobbery (and ridicule) of his peers by performing with pop and rock stars. (Never mind his regrettable collaboration with Michael Bolton. It was for a charitable cause [Children of Bosnia] after all….)

In fact, Pavarotti’s crossover appeal was so popular that his 1993 Central Park Concert drew over 500,000 – at a time when only Michael Jackson was popular enough to match this feat (ie, before his unseemly infatuation with little boys became public knowledge).

Therefore, in this respect, his performance at the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Torino, Italy – before 35,000 in the Olympic Stadium and an estimated 2 billion around the world – turns out to have been a fitting curtain call on his illustrious career.