ABSTRACT
The Mirror (Leyfield 2015), The Telegraph (Burn-Callander 2015), the Sunday Express (Edge 2013) and the Daily Mail (Cliff 2015) all agree: the advertising campaign for insurance-comparison website Go Compare, featuring a rotund tenor with a heavy Italian accent and a gravity-defying moustache, is one of the most annoying of all time. Readers of The Guardian will also have noted that it received one of the highest number of complaints (Sweney 2013). But in the figure of Gio Compario (the rotund tenor’s name) are contained a number of stereotypes of the tenor singer (because, of course, stereotypes help humour work, and to work quickly enough for a 40-second television advert): the tenor is ideally Italian, and ideally as large in size as he is in voice. The significance of the tenor in popular culture has a long history, with Enrico Caruso being one of the first to enjoy the mass distribution of music through sound recording, and Mario Lanza (who played Caruso in The Great Caruso [dir. Thorpe 1951]) being a mid-century example of the combined capacity of the Hollywood film and recording industries to propel a classical artist into mainstream popular success. Towards the end of the century, Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras would come to the fore as another major junction in this historical lineage, performing as The Three Tenors in Rome in July 1990, just ahead of the FIFA World Cup Final. But it was Pavarotti who provided the major tune in the soundtrack to the Cup; his 1972 recording of ‘Nessun dorma’ was adopted as the official theme song of the competition. In Pavarotti, and in that recording particularly, are found the knots of truth that define various stereotypes of the tenor. Known as ‘Big Lucy’, his weight was something of a trademark, and, at a full six seconds, the penultimate syllable of his performance of this aria is one of the longest on commercially available record. 1
