After a fine 40-year career, maybe Pavarotti should retire

Here's what happens when you walk the tightrope between art and money: Sometimes you fall off.

This appears to be the case with super-tenor Luciano Pavarotti, 65, who on Nov. 11 in the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, N.J., apparently gave a performance so poor that even he thought it wasn't up to his standards.

Critics have been lambasting these arenalike appearances for years, dismissing them as what they have become: shameful, artless efforts to make as much money as possible off the tenor's now-waning voice.

According to those who attended the Taj Mahal concert, Pavarotti's voice cracked, he couldn't hit high notes, and he left the stage abruptly, choosing not to return for any of his legendary encores.

On Nov. 14, representatives of Pavarotti's longtime partner-in-excess, the producer Tibor Rudas, announced the tenor felt so sorry about his performance, which he blamed on a bad cold, that he was going to do it all again. For free.

That's probably excellent news to audience members who paid anywhere from about $80 to the ridiculous fee of $750 to attend.

In fact, it was in Atlantic City in 1983 that Rudas and Pavarotti arguably created the contemporary opera mega-star phenomenon when Pavarotti performed in a tent for 8,000 people. The Three Tenors juggernaut launched soon after. Pavarotti, with his silvery pure and radiant voice, is speculatively the richest of the three, pulling in by some accounts as much as $50 million a year.

Yes, his is a God-given talent and voice.

Yes, he has, in a 40-year opera career, worked with the best musicians in the world and has taken his place rightfully beside them, helping their reputations in the process.

And, yes, these stadium-like events - of which he still does about 15 each season, reportedly pulling in about $1.5 million per - do powerfully spread the idea that a classical artist can play with the big boys of pop when it comes to world popularity and commercial draw.

But is this last point a plus? Classical arts advocates have gotten themselves in a bind in recent decades by arguing that quality in the arts can be measured by how many people attend. Commercial presenters, like Rudas, have worked miracles parlaying truly gifted artists, like Pavarotti, into international celebrities. In a sense, the two principles work in tandem, though for different ends: Both break down the image of an opera singer as an elitist relating to only the few and the initiated.

It's a perilous road to walk, though, and Pavarotti's Atlantic City debacle shows why. He is now apologizing to Donald Trump, the symbolic King of Money in this country, for a performance that, in an opera house, might have been dismissed as an off-night. The tenor is under tremendous financial and artistic pressure these days. His soon-to-be ex-wife, Adua, is suing him for $100 million. Last summer he lost a case in Italian courts and was ordered to pay $12 million in back taxes; words like "traitor" and "unpatriotic" were for the first time attached to Pavarotti's name.

His actual opera appearances are rare now, though in these he takes far more care vocally, and has shown he still has enough control to present his voice well. His upcoming performance in "Aida" at the Metropolitan Opera in January is a highly anticipated event.

To repeat the Atlantic City show might indeed be a gracious act, but I can think of an even more respectful motion toward his audience, his talent and himself.

Retirement.

Putting a graceful, self-drawn period mark at the end of a spectacular career would preserve both the singer's reputation and the art form he says he still so loves. And it would prevent us from watching him humiliate himself publicly in this embarrassing balancing act that, as events last week showed, he is bound to occasionally lose.