OperaObit: Luciano Pavarotti

Luciano Pavarotti has died from pancreatic cancer in Modena. Besides being one of the few opera singers to have had a genuine operatic chart hit, with the Three Tenors' Nessun Dorma (which, in English, means "the theme from World Cup Match Of The Day"), Pavarotti also made a genuine rock record. He recorded Miss Sarajevo as part of the U2-pretending-to-not-be-U2 Eno collaboration Passengers.

In addition, through collaborations with Elton John and Zucchero, he managed to clock up six top forty hits of varying degrees of desperation; the stuttering struggle to get You'll Never Walk Alone higher than 35, however, seemed to remove most of the fun from the projects and - whether the pop-opera crossovers were intended as pension funds or genuine attempts to try and engage with a new audience - they dried up.

Nevertheless, Pavarotti created a niche for himself as "what the rock world thinks of when they think of opera", down in part, we suspect, to looking the part as much as sounding it.