Even Elizabeth Taylor isn’t immune. At the Hollywood Bowl two weeks ago, she walked onstage during an encore to pay homage. Bocelli invited the actress to stay and launched into song. “My heart was in my mouth. I could hardly breathe,” she says. “Afterwards, I walked off in a trance, hoping I wouldn’t bang into a violinist.” Backstage, Taylor hid in a corner where she could catch a glimpse of the tenor as he left. “I just wanted to see him for the last time, getting into his car. I still haven’t come down from that high.”
Nowadays, when there’s this much love afoot, it means someone’s making a fortune. Thanks to Bocelli’s mix of Italian pop ballads and operatic crowd pleasers, he’s become the hottest tenor since Pavarotti. He’s just completed a sold-out stadium tour of the West Coast and has sold more than 20 million albums since 1995, 5 million in the United States. His new pop CD, “Sogno,” debuted at No. 4, joining previous sorties “Romanza” and “Aria” on the Billboard 200. Ironically, Bocelli, 40, doesn’t care much about the pop songs that have made him a superstar. He prefers the classics; in October he makes his U.S. opera debut in Massenet’s “Werther” at the Detroit Opera House. “No one would have ever allowed me to do opera had I not had success in pop,” Bocelli says through a translator. “I do opera against everybody’s interest. My record company doesn’t earn a dollar.” Still, he’s been savaged by opera critics who see him merely as a triumph of marketing–a handsome guy with a tragic story who doesn’t know how to sing.
Bocelli grew up on his family’s farm in Tuscany; his mother would put tenors on the record player to get him to stop crying. He believed his blindness would keep him from opera forever and became a lawyer instead, but quit after a year and started taking vocal lessons. Singing in piano bars, he was discovered by the Italian pop star Zucchero, and his own pop career was launched. “Because I was not able to start my career normally,” says Bocelli, “I found luck in my misfortune.”
Bocelli seems preternaturally gentle and sweet–those qualities, coupled with his vulnerability, his shy smile and his dark, scruffy looks, help account for the mass adoration. His love songs, especially “Time to Say Goodbye” and “The Prayer,” hit home with a melody-deprived public hungry for romance. (Cheesiness always goes down easier in Italian.) Though the tenor can go on at length about opera, he’s baffled when asked to explain the phenomenal popularity of those two songs. “Basically I did my job, and fortunately the public loved them,” he says with a shrug.
“Sogno,” Bocelli’s fourth recording, is a much stronger and more original offering than “Romanza,” but milks the same cheap climaxes and melodramatic finales. The songs seem designed to go bad after a half-dozen listens–a trick, perhaps, to get you to buy the next album coming down the pike. In opera, Bocelli’s voice has an innate and luxurious beauty; he can swoop up to hit stunning high Cs without a hint of strain. But his interpretations are all very much the same, aria after aria. Many critics have pointed out that Bocelli didn’t train well, doesn’t gesture enough, doesn’t pay attention to the conductor. But it seems unfair to criticize him for these shortcomings–all related to his handicap. (When the L.A. Times’s Mark Swed gave Bocelli a mixed-to-negative review two weeks ago, readers wrote in calling the critic a snob and an egomaniac, and suggested he seek therapy.) The singer admits he was hurt by the criticism at first, but claims that it’s barely affected his career. Bocelli’s a good tenor, sometimes very good. But he’s not one of the greats–and the classical-music world is so small and competitive that it doesn’t have room for anything less.
The night before his final concert, Bocelli’s coughing and clearly exhausted; doing seven stadiums in one month has taken its toll. He misses his wife and two young sons back in Italy. Asked to confirm where he lives, he says, “I live on airplanes and hotels. I don’t know where I live any longer.” Musically, he doesn’t have much of a home, either. The next night, he will sing two hours of operatic arias to 17,000 fans before delivering the pop songs they really came for. Classical-music veterans talk endlessly about where to find new audiences. Maybe they should be checking the stadiums.
