Italian Tenor Luciano Pavarotti, Superstar of Opera

Mr. Pavarotti also attracted criticism for his frequent cancellations. The Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1989 refused to hire him anymore after he canceled 26 of 41 scheduled performances over eight years.

Nor did his stadium concerts find him at his best. When he came to Washington's Capital Centre in 1992, he sang for only 37 minutes. "Those who paid top price [$175 per ticket] spent about $4.75 per minute to hear mediocre sound and see Pavarotti from a distance on a giant video screen," Joseph McLellan reported in The Post. "Yes, they were in the same room with the great singer, but it was an awfully big room."

Mr. Pavarotti joined up with two of his most celebrated colleagues to create the Three Tenors for a 1990 concert at the Roman Baths of Caracalla.

Understandably miffed that they had accepted a flat fee for their first disc and therefore received not a penny in royalties, Mr. Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras made no such mistake when they sang together again four years later in Los Angeles.

It is estimated that as many as a billion people heard portions of the second Three Tenors event, which was disseminated via cable, audio and video and remains a popular fundraiser for PBS.

In 1996, the trio reunited for a world tour that brought each man a cool $1 million per night. Another Three Tenors disc was issued in 1998 and a Christmas album (complete with "Jingle Bells" and "Feliz Navidad") in 2000. The final reunion took place in 2003 in the English city of Bath.

Whether the success of the Three Tenors was a good thing for classical music has been much debated. The Three Tenors, in the very act of proving that an ostensibly classical album could make a fortune, helped inspire a vast dumbing-down at the record companies, which had previously been delighted on those rare occasions when a classical record came close to selling 100,000 copies.

Moreover, the concerts hardly represented Mr. Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras at their best. The famous arias were rolled out in a perfunctory manner -- scarcely comparable to the tenors' best studio recordings -- and the novelty numbers were sometimes downright awful.

Fortunately, Mr. Pavarotti made a great number of other recordings, including complete performances of many of the most popular operas by Donizetti, Verdi and Puccini; Leoncavallo's "I Pagliacci" and Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana"; as well as numerous collections of arias and ensembles. Some of his finest discs were of unexpected repertory, such as Rossini's enormous French opera "William Tell."

Mr. Pavarotti's last appearance at the Metropolitan Opera took place in March 2004. At the age of 68, he shepherded his voice carefully, singing quietly when he could and breaking up long phrases more eagerly than he used to (although never to the detriment of musical or dramatic sense). He moved slowly and with what seemed an unsteady stiffness; indeed, he was barely recognizable as Puccini's hero, Mario Cavaradossi, the ardent young lover of diva Floria Tosca. But he was still recognizable as Pavarotti -- the man with the lambent, sun-splashed voice, diminished by time and infirmity but still the most sheerly beautiful sound made by any tenor in recent memory.

Mr. Pavarotti's private life was complicated and he was not immune to scandal. In 1996, tabloid photographers spotted him on a beach kissing his 26-year-old secretary, Nicoletta Mantovani. Soon after, he separated from his wife of 35 years, the former Adua Veroni, and endured years of bitter alimony negotiations.

He married Mantovani in 2003. Besides his second wife, survivors include three daughters from the first marriage and a daughter from the second marriage.

Staff writer Adam Bernstein in Washington and special correspondent Sarah Delaney in Rome contributed to this report.