Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  Critics and other singers often called him lazy. He seemed as undisciplined in singing as he was about food, abandoning diet after diet in favour of porterhouse steaks or caviar scooped up with a tablespoon. Certainly he was unintellectual, without conservatory training and barely able to read music. Learning from a score, he once said, was “like making love by mail”. Words – even those of “O sole mio”, every tenor’s meal-ticket – were hard to drum in; in opera or recital he almost never ventured out of his crisp, supple Italian. Narrow as his repertoire was, he was choosy in it: “Tosca”, “Rigoletto”, “Un Ballo in Maschera”. His tendency to cancel got him banned from

  several houses and soured his farewell at the New York Met.

  Yet Pavarotti knew what he was doing. He took things easy, hid throat lozenges in his handkerchief, and looked after his instrument. His voice was “gifted from God”; he sang purely by instinct, aware of “how it should go”, and trusting that a good conductor could follow after him. The sheer beauty of his sound, without acting and without musicianship, could bring the audience to its feet, and he would earn the hard-negotiated money that made him the highest-paid singer in opera.

  He was also a natural populist in a field that was sniffy and exclusive, bringing to the Met and Covent Garden a sense of opera as Italian peasant fare, “macaroni” for the masses. Larry King once asked him about singing for the elite. “Why should be elite, music?” came the reply. Pavarotti went on “The Tonight Show” and “Saturday Night Live”; in his charity concerts he performed with Elton John and the Spice Girls. When critics sniffed about “popera”, he fought back stoutly: “If you call pop singer, you can sell theticket.” The numbers backed him up: live audiences in the hundreds of thousands, TV audiences in the millions, more than 50m albums sold, five Grammys. “The word ‘commercial’ is exactly what we want,” said the maestro, who also starred in TV ads for American Express. “If you want to use ... something more derogatory, we don’t care.”

  To the frustration of his rivals, though they were gentlemanly about it, Pavarotti became the world’s favourite tenor. He was the first opera star to be imitated, drunkenly, by legions of joyful or heartbroken football fans. Still crazy for football himself, he never minded. For all his frustrations, sulks and cancellations, a life spent bringing music to mankind was the greatest joy imaginable: singing, and then the crowd’s adoration for his singing, as he jumped from the kitchen table and the cheese, the wine, the pasta and the sausages were lavishly spread before him.

  John Peel

  John Peel, born John Ravenscroft, music lover, died on October 26th 2004, aged 65

  THE modern world of music offers an embarrassment of riches. Faced with shops full of compact discs, records and tapes, the ordinary listener hardly knows where to start. With popular music, in particular, there is now an almost inverse relationship between the popularity of a song and its quality. The best new film or book usually gets noticed; the best new popular song is undoubtedly one that few people have heard of and that fewer still will have the patience, or the funds, to find.

  What is the popular-music lover to do? For the past 37 years, in Britain at least, the answer has been clear: listen to John Peel. From 1967 onwards, Mr Peel broadcast a music show on the BBC’s Radio 1 where he played records he liked. In his eyes, he was no more responsible for the music than a newspaper editor is for the day’s events. He did not, after all, create anything. The music was all there already.

  Yet selection is creating, after a fashion. A sculptor picks which bits of marble to include and which to chisel away. Mr Peel’s medium was larger than that of any of the bands he championed: the whole of popular music, which was shaped, at least to some degree, according to his taste. The number of acts he raised from obscurity to fame (David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Captain Beefheart, the Undertones, the Smiths) is large; the number of bands he raised from obscurity to semi-obscurity is even larger. Happily, though, he never saw promotion as his task. His demeanour on the radio was one of pure delight: delight in the new, the unexpected and the good. Listening to him, it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that the listener was at some level irrelevant – the point was for Mr Peel himself to revel in the music.

  That is not to say he avoided the usual formalities: “I hope you enjoy this one”, and the like. He said such things, and meant them. But they were secondary. He never pandered to the audience. A catchy, addictive tune might be followed by a few minutes of sheer noise. What he most liked, he once said, was not only music he had never heard before, but music he could relate to nothing else.

  Mr Peel’s show was quite unpredictable, save, in later years, for one fixture: “Pig’s Big 78”, halfway through. This was a 78 rpm record chosen by his wife, affectionately nicknamed Pig. The sound quality would be terrible, as no one had made such records since the late 1950s, and the ones Mr Peel played often came from much earlier than that. But the 78s were no exception to his passion for novelty. They were old enough to be new again.

  Radio shows are by nature ephemeral. But from his early days on the BBC, Mr Peel had invited musicians to come into the studio and perform for him and his audience. These “Peel Sessions”, as they came to be known, were a sort of shadow Greatest Hits of popular music of the past 30 years. Bands liked coming on his show as much as he liked having them. The publicity, of course, did not hurt, and Mr Peel’s own enthusiasm seemed to lend the music vitality. For all that, he rarely formed close relationships with musicians. It was the end product that mattered to him, not the process of creation.

  Mr Peel lived in Suffolk, a gently undulating county two hours away from London, in a house he dubbed “Peel Acres”. He kept chickens there, like a country yeoman. On the long drive home from the studio after recording his show, he would listen to demo tapes that unknown bands had sent him, throwing the ones he didn’t like on the floor and the ones he did on the back seat. One day, he supposed, he would be squinting to discern a good new band’s name and would kill himself by crashing the car. It was probably, he said, how people imagined he would like to go.

  Yet Mr Peel always seemed too young to be considering how he would like to die. And there was too much music to be listened to. Although it was not work tohim, but sheer pleasure, he nonetheless spent hours every day listening to music he had never heard before. By the time he died – suddenly, of a heart attack in Peru – he had possibly listened to more music than anyone else alive. And though studios had become as computerised as the rest of the world, he continued to prefer playing vinyls on turntables. They sounded better.

  He did not start his radio career at the BBC, but at WRR, in Dallas, Texas. He had been in America for two years, working as a crop-insurance agent, when the Beatles started sweeping America. His scouse accent was suddenly marketable, even if he hammed it up a bit. Although he was born just outside Liverpool, the son of a cotton broker, he went to Shrewsbury, a mid-ranking public school. He once said that his life was changed, and set on course, at Shrewsbury when he first heard Elvis Presley singing “Heartbreak Hotel”. If it had not been Elvis, it would have been some other song.

  He also credited his time at Shrewsbury with sustaining his BBC career. The toffs at the corporation figured that an old boy couldn’t be all that bad, even if he played music no one else on the station knew. But he remained a slightly dangerous outlier. When he first returned to England in 1967, he spent six months working for a pirate radio station on a ship in the North Sea. He never lost that pirate streak.

  Alejo Peralta

  Alejo Peralta y Diaz Ceballos, Mexican industrial pioneer and government collaborator, died on April 8th 1997, aged 80

  The industrial revolution came late to Mexico, perhaps because it was held back by other less beneficial revolutions. Alejo Peralta, who as much as anyone fostered industrialisation in Mexico, set up in business in 1939. By then, Britain’s industrial revolution, founded on James Watt’s steam engine, had been pounding away for some 170 years, and Henry Ford, the
pioneer of assembly-line production, was an old man. Anything on sale in Mexico that was made in a factory quite likely came from America or Britain. “I was the beginning of Mexican industrialisation,” Mr Peralta liked to say. It was not wholly true, but he was enough of an innovator for the claim, made with his usual forcefulness, to go unchallenged.

  In setting out to change things, Mr Peralta had, as it happened, the same obsessive interest in how things worked that had motivated Watt and Ford. His father had sold and serviced sewing machines (American ones) and Alejo recalled playing with spindles and other bits of discarded machinery. After getting some training as an engineer, Mr Peralta set up his first enterprise with a capital of 650 pesos (about $1,400 today) and a staff of two. He made candles from waste material he obtained free. Using Bakelite, an early plastic, he turned to making buttons for industrial clothing. By 1943 he had 200 employees producing conductors and other electrical goods. At his death his Industrias Unidas Sociedad Anonima, known as IUSA, was a conglomerate of more than 100 companies, producing a range of goods from ballpoint pens to cellular telephones. Last year, Forbes magazine reckoned the Peralta family was worth $2.5 billion.

  It has to be said, though, that Mr Peralta’s rise to riches was not entirely a triumph of selfless individualism. It owed a lot to his successful cultivation of leaders of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. The party set out in the 1920s with the admirable aim of building a free and progressive society after a century of revolutions, civil war and fights with the United States. But in 70 years of power, the PRI has turned Mexico, although formally a democracy, into an authoritarian one-party state. Mr Peralta went along with the policies of the party, cultivating its leaders. He was an adviser to President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz during modern Mexico’s darkest hour, when the army, acting under government orders, calculatedly opened fire with machineguns on a demonstration in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Plaza in 1968, killing hundreds of people.

  In an interview in 1992 Mr Peralta defended the massacre, claiming that the stability of the country was under threat. At the time, he said, “you feel bad that there were so many victims, but over time you understand that this was necessary”. Stalin could not have put it better, but other Mexican businessmen who have done well under the government’s patronage share his view. Indeed, perhaps the main interest in Mr Peralta’s life is that it was an archetype of the relationship between tycoon and government which has become commonplace, not only in Mexico but elsewhere; for example, in South Korea.

  But whereas ordinary Koreans have done well from the unholy alliance, Mexico remains distressingly poor. In a couple of generations, South Korea, once a country of peasants, has developed a large middle class. In Mexico, according to a United Nations report published last year, 43% of the rural population and 23% of those in towns live in poverty. Mr Peralta reckoned that his companies provided work that supported more than 13,000 families. Other Mexican industrial firms could proudly produce comparable figures. But these firms are oases in a desert of the unemployed and underemployed.

  If the inequities of Mexican society bothered Mr Peralta, he had the consolation of baseball, for which he had a passion. In the 1930s he played professionally for a time, and when he became rich he founded a baseball team, the Mexico City Tigres. His death was mostly written about in the sports pages of Mexican newspapers, and the Mexican Baseball League called for a period of mourning. Mr Peralta liked to dash about, in sports cars, his helicopter and a private jet. He underwent heart surgery four times. “I’ve lived as I wanted to live,” he said.

  But to younger industrialists in Mexico Mr Peralta and his like are dinosaurs who have outlived their time. They fear more decades of underdevelopment and human misery unless Mexico throws off its old ways. Mexico is changing, they say. The PRI is losing elections. Television reporting is less biased towards the government. The sons of the old guard

  tend to be well educated, often in the United States. They like to paint a picture of peaceful democratic modernisation. The congressional and other elections due in July will, it is claimed, be cleaner than before. Not difficult, perhaps, but already there are doubts. The PRI, fearing electoral disaster, is expected to spend more than it is legally entitled to in a bid to buy votes. Mexico may be changing, but hardly at a revolutionary pace.

  Max Perutz

  Max Ferdinand Perutz, scientist, died on February 6th 2002, aged 87

  A favourite word of Max Perutz, if perhaps an unscientific one, was “Fantastic!”, with the exclamation mark given its full value. In the spring of 1953 at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge he was using the word quite frequently. Francis Crick and James Watson were solving the structure of DNA. Mr Perutz and his colleague John Kendrew were advancing the knowledge of molecular biology. All four men were to be awarded Nobel prizes as a result of their work in that spring. Since the 1950s the laboratory and its successors have been home to the winners of nine Nobel prizes.

  If you can say that the spirit of a place can inspire people to do, well, fantastic things, the Cavendish is a telling example. This homely building was a birthplace of nuclear physics and other earth-moving developments. As a chemistry student working for a doctorate Max Perutz came under its spell. His native Austria was absorbed by Germany in 1938. Cambridge, he said, was where he wanted to spend his life. In Cambridge Lawrence Bragg was working on a method of examining the molecular structure in a crystal by shining x-rays through it (for which he had got a Nobel at the age of 25, still the youngest recipient). Some molecules, such as those of salt, had been found to have simple atomic structures. Young Max boldly suggested that x-ray crystallography might be used to examine more complex molecules, such as proteins, which make up organisms.

  A friend proposed haemoglobin, whose large oxygen-carrying protein molecules make red blood cells red. Haemoglobin carries oxygen and carbon dioxide through the bloodstream with great efficiency, essential to life. How it did this was a mystery, although it was evident that the molecules changed shape during their journey.

  An obliging physiologist grew Mr Perutz some crystals of haemoglobin of horse. Bragg saw at once the attraction and immensity of dealing with so large a structure. “Haemoglobin of horse!” Mr Perutz was to exclaim. Sometimes, he said, the difficult choice for his experiments “seemed like a curse”. In 1939 Mr Perutz encountered a different sort of curse. His experiments were delayed with the outbreak of the second world war and Mr Perutz was interned as an enemy alien.

  Max Perutz came from a moneyed family of textile manufacturers who moved to Britain when their business was confiscated. Max had been expected to study law but at university in Vienna had found science vastly more attractive. As happened to many scientists who found freedom in Britain, he was first detained and then released to resume his scientific work. In one of the odder exploits of the war Mr Perutz was asked to examine the mechanical properties of ice, with a view to creating an aerodrome of ice in the middle of the Atlantic. Someone high up in the government had discovered that before the war Mr Perutz had published a paper on the science of glaciers (in order, he sometimes said, to justify skiing holidays). The project was named Habakkuk, after a Jewish prophet who foretold beastly punishments on the wicked. It was abandoned when military aircraft were

  developed with enough range to make a mid-ocean stop unnecessary.

  In Cambridge after the war, Mr Perutz became chairman of the Medical Research Council Laboratory, a unit at the Cavendish, where the tools of physics were applied to biological problems. He kept the administration minimal and informal, qualities that helped to make the laboratory a magnet to attract other gifted researchers. “Mountains of futile paperwork” can kill creativity, he said.

  In his own tenacious pursuit of a scientific goal he was what a colleague said was “a force of nature”. In a series of experiments during the 1950s and 1960s by Mr Perutz the mystery of the haemoglobin molecule’s efficiency began to yield. What was true of haemoglobin proved to be true about s
cores of other proteins. A colleague at the Cavendish said last week that Mr Perutz’s work on protein structure had become especially relevant as scientists sought to make sense of thehuman genome and the mechanisms of disease.

  Max Perutz wrote many essays and reviews. One of his collections is typically called Is Science Necessary? He had a happy facility at explaining science vividly, whatever his audience, school children, prime ministers, journalists or other scientists. If Mr Perutz was seen to have an eccentricity, it was perhaps about food. He could not digest anything made with flour, nor onions, pepper or most spices. He liked soft foods, such as ripe bananas, or cold boiled potatoes with butter. He stepped down as chairman of the Cambridge laboratory at 65, but never really retired. Over the past 22 years he published more than 100 papers.

  Mr Perutz turned down the offer of a knighthood. He said that at the laboratory the most junior member could talk science with anyone: a handle to the chairman’s name could only get in the way. Anyway, his wife Gisela didn’t want to be Lady Perutz. He was made a Companion of Honour and was awarded the Order of Merit, both of which are far rarer than knighthoods. Fantastic!

  Pham Van Dong

  Pham Van Dong, Vietnam’s chief in war and peace, died on April 29th 2000, aged 94

  Of the Vietnamese who became world celebrities, the best known were no doubt Ho Chi Minh, Uncle Ho to his admirers, and Vo Nguyen Giap, still alert at 88 and happy to reminisce about how he beat the French at Dien Bien Phu, the fortress they believed was impregnable. Quite likely, Pham Van Dong was envious of both men. Both had retained their colourful reputations. Ho had died in 1969, at a time when the war was moving Vietnam’s way. Giap was an unbeaten general, a name for the military history books.