BY BENJAMIN IVRY [NY Sun, 7 September 2007]
In England, where his international singing career began in the less politically correct 1960s, the press called him “Fat Lucy” and even “Lucky Luciano.” In his homeland Italy, headlines referred in Italian to “Big Luciano,” in homage to his fame in the English-speaking world. Yet the lyric tenor Luciano Pavarotti, who died of pancreatic cancer this week at age 71 in Modena, Italy, was a complex entity, impossible to sum up in a nickname or a headline.