Philip Hensher: It takes more than a good voice to be an opera singer

On Sunday night, ITV, of all people, found time to broadcast a performance of the G major tenor aria from the last act of Turandot. If that sounds frankly unlikely, put it like this. On Sunday night, tragic Carphone Warehouse salesman Paul Potts, 36, struggled against the odds and wowed the audience of ITV's hit talent show Britain's Got Talent performing "Nessun Dorma". He now goes on to perform for the Queen at the Royal Variety Performance. "Her Majesty can't wait," said a top royal aide.

Which just goes to show that you can flog any old rubbish, so long as you put it in terms of a knock-out phone-in competition on the telly. Mr Potts is the sort of bog-standard tenor to be found in any amateur opera company in any corner of the country. His previous career highlight was in winning Michael Barrymore's My Kind of Music - he spent the money, sensibly but, on the evidence, fruitlessly, on singing courses in Italy.

Despite that, however, he has found it difficult to interest the operatic world in his talents, blaming this on a heartrending series of illnesses, motorbike crashes, and so on. One such accident, his online biography says, "which broke his collar bone kept him away from performing and he got left out of the opera circles."

It's rather difficult to believe; I don't think "the opera circles" are so flooded with talent that they would keep a good singer out for the sake of it. In reality, listening to Mr Potts, he would have difficulty in maintaining a place in the chorus of the opera house of Mönchengladbach- Krefeld. His tuning was all over the place; his voice sounded strained and uncontrolled; his phrasing was stubby and lumpy; he made a constipated approximation only of the fluid sound of the Italianate tenor.

It's clear what awaits Mr Potts after the Royal Variety Performance. He is going to join that category of singers described as "opera singers" in the press whose fame does not depend on their singing on an operatic stage. The craze for inauthenticity in modern life is overwhelming; to "painters" who never hold a paintbrush and "novelists" who ask a publisher to find someone to write the words on their behalf, we now have "opera singers" who might not be able to sing in an opera.

There is a Welsh singer called Katherine Jenkins, for instance, who, though self-described as an opera singer, has never sung in an opera, and whose records are mostly filled with arrangements of non-operatic numbers such as "Cwm Rhondda", "The Lord Is My Shepherd", "Amazing Grace" and "Over The Rainbow". To old-fashioned people like me, to whom opera is a medium or a genre, and not merely a wishful state of mind, this sort of thing is perfectly all right, but not very accurately described.

Mr Potts's triumph in the talent show, however, bore some examination. In the first instance, the producers were at pains to demonstrate that they had nothing in tow so snobbish as an orchestra, showing a hired hand pressing a button as the music started up. Secondly, Mr Potts was handed a microphone, though a practised operatic tenor could make himself heard in a much larger space than a television studio. But most remarkable was the response of the studio audience and the judges.

To one not very good performance of a very familiar stretch of music, they gasped; they clutched their chests; they opened wide their eyes; and finally, they rose to their feet in ecstatic acclamation. You would have thought that the judges had never heard anything so wonderful, and the greater part of the public agreed, pushing Mr Potts beyond warbling tots and transsexual singing groups into the heart of the Queen's prospective evening of entertainment.

If you regularly went to any kind of professional opera house, anywhere in Europe, you might not have been so overwhelmed. "Nessun Dorma", too, is, though a most beautiful and solemn passage in the context of a man contemplating his imminent brutal execution, somewhat meaningless as a mere gobbet, all effect and no causes, as Wagner said about Meyerbeer.

The rapture displayed ought to have a clinical name, and it does; it is called Stendhal syndrome. It routinely affects a dozen or so American visitors to Florence every year. An American who has grown up in an average mid-Western city has probably never seen anything beautiful in the flesh before he arrives on his package holiday of great Italian cities. The sight of Florence is, literally, too much for him. He has to be put back in his box and returned to Idaho.

I would like to think that the evidently beauty-starved audience which is thrown into ecstasies by a Potts singing two minutes of Puccini with a microphone would be transported into a better world by more extensive exposure to great art. If they are affected so powerfully by this, what magic would be worked on them by the Parsifal I once heard in Munich or the stupendous late-80s Covent Garden Salome with Maria Ewing at her demonic height?

Of course, it's a ridiculous question. They wouldn't care for it at all. A mind in the grip of Stendhal syndrome cannot encompass much in the way of beauty, or intellectual power, or extravagance; it tends to turn away and describe what it has seen as boring. Two minutes of "Nessun Dorma", not very well sung, is as much as most people can endure. The most that can be said for this kind of success is that it represents, in its audience's reaction, a start. Go, go, go, said the bird: Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

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