This, from legendary Italian tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, who died on Thursday, September 6 at the age of 71:

“I’m not a politician, I’m a musician,” he told the BBC Music Magazine in an April 1998 article about his efforts for Bosnia. “I care about giving people a place where they can go to enjoy themselves and to begin to live again. To the man you have to give the spirit, and when you give him the spirit, you have done everything.”

More at the New York Times.

Maryland Public Television is running a performance at the Metropolitan of one of the operas he was most famous for, Donizetti’s comic opera, “L’Elisir d’Amour” (The Elixir of Love) – a gorgeous example of the bel canto style (literally, “beautiful singing), and an infinitely better use of human breath and lung capacity than anything emanating from the halls of power.

Classical music, fortunately, never caught onto the doctrinaire and self-indulgent egalitarianism of our times. It takes completely unearned talent and relentless self-discipline and criticism; it glorifies individualism and self-actualization, disdains the slightest mediocrity and bestows its prizes only on an aristocracy. No amount of sweat, good intentions, or legislation will turn you into either Pavarotti or Donizetti.

Supremely unfair, but a lesson best learned early. As my piano teacher once told me crushingly: You can’t have something just because you want it.

And what people never seem to remember is that great talent usually goes hand in hand with torments beyond the ordinary — Donizetti, who composed 31 operas in about a dozen years, also lost his three children and his wife, suffered from syphilis and died after a bout of insanity at the age of 51. I wonder how that could be distributed equally to everyone.