By Dr. Vincent Patterson
Okay, okay, I heard from you vocalists, “enough about jazz and elementary bands, what about us singers?” So here’s a Musing about a guy you’ll find VERY interesting. Who’s Herbert Breslin? His obit. appeared in the W.Post in May, written by its music critic, Anne Midgette. She and Breslin co-wrote his 2004 memoirs, “The King and I” – the king being not Breslin himself but larger-than-life opera tenor and High-C King Pavarotti! Anne wrote in the May 19 article: “Herbert Breslin, the fast-talking, foulmouthed, street-savvy classical music publicist and manager who oversaw Luciano Pavarotti’s career for 36 years died… in his hotel room in Nice… he was 87. Breslin was a controversial figure in a field that is no stranger to colorful characters. Many people cordially loathed him. He cultivated a brash persona … lots of expletives, uncouth telephone manners and a blunt way of stating facts.” “He was also extremely successful.” “When he was starting out as a classical music publicist in the late 1950s, his first clients were Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne, three of the major female opera singers of the 20th century.” “After hearing a recording of the pianist Alicia de Larrocha he engineered her New York recital debut in 1966 and took over her career as her manager… she ultimately became one of the world’s most acclaimed pianists. But no one could match Pavarotti, whom he shepherded from their first meeting in 1967. The callow, gifted, clumsy tenor was already being touted as someone to watch. ‘You’re a nice guy,’… head of Decca Records told Pavarotti, ‘you need a bastard to manage you.’ Breslin was happy to play that role to the hilt, coming up with all kinds of ideas about how to make his client better known.” “’Marketing an artist is basically like marketing a bar of soap,’ Breslin wrote in his 2004 memoir, about Pavarotti.” “‘You think that’s too commercial’ he added. ‘If you ask me, one of the biggest problems with classical music today is that it’s not commercial enough… nobody knows how to promote anything… nobody knows how to get people to want to hear this stuff.'” “’The King and I’ — subtitled ‘The Uncensored Tale of Luciano Pavarotti’s Rise and Fame by His Manager, Friend, and Sometime Adversary’ — was as controversial as most things surrounding Mr. Breslin. It depicted Pavarotti chasing a girlfriend down a New York street when fully costumed as Otello and devouring a kilo of high-end caviar at Mr. Breslin’s expense and then accusing his manager of trying to kill him with rich food.” “’The King and I isn’t a mere stab in the back’… (editorial director at the Met wrote), ‘what it does is burnish the joint Breslin-Pavarotti legend… Breslin cared more about getting in the news than protecting his own reputation.’ His client roster reads like a Who’s Who of opera: Renee Fleming, Renata Tebaldi, Christa Ludwig, Jessye Norman and others.” “He was somewhat surprised Pavarotti never forgave him for ‘The King and I,’ which Breslin was quite sure the tenor never read. Pavarotti died in 2007 at 71. Breslin would have been annoyed to be upstaged in death by another former client, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the towering German baritone who died May 18. In his book, Breslin quipped, ‘Fischer-Dieskau gave the impression his bodily emanations, shall we say, didn’t smell.'” [More on Fischer-Dieskau in another Musings – stand by.] Okie-dokie, are you singers happy now? 🙂 Article courtesy of the Washington Post.