Show goes on - without the fat man

After three days of suspense that gained a wider audience than any vocal performance, Luciano Pavarotti failed to turn up for his final appearance at New York's operatic temple, the Metropolitan Opera, this weekend.

Dosed up with pills and chicken soup, the world's best known tenor said at 5.15pm on Saturday that he had beaten his bout of flu and that the show would go on. Two hours later he pulled out.

This was expected to be Pavarotti's farewell to the Met, where he has sung every season for the past 33 years. It was also thought likely to be his last operatic performance, though he is scheduled to continue singing in concerts.

About 3,800 of New York's glitterati had paid up to $1,875 (£1,280) for non-refundable tickets to see Pavarotti play the painter Mario Cavaradossi in Puccini's Tosca, and thousands more were due to watch (for nothing) on a giant screen nearby.

The sickly superstar got little sympathy from the Met's general manager, Joseph Volpe, who told him: "This is a hell of a way to end this beautiful career of yours" after pleading unsuccessfully for him at least to come along and explain himself to the audience.

This time Mr Volpe was better prepared than on Wednesday, when Pavarotti pulled out of his penultimate performance at the last moment and the understudy, Francisco Casanova, was booed loudly by the audience. To prevent a repeat performance, the Met flew in the rising Italian star Salvatore Licitra as a back-up. He arrived by Concorde on Friday, and began rehearsing at once.

There were groans when Mr Volpe told the audience the result of the Pavarotti cliffhanger. But Licitra, at 33 half Pavarotti's age, received a standing ovation and took a solo bow that lasted two and a half minutes, the house lights turned up to help him bask in the adulation.

The newspapers are already trying out the phrase "fourth tenor", after Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras.

The New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini said: "The audience turned the evening from an anxious farewell to a beloved artist well past his prime into a star-is-born triumph."

He said Licitra was not an especially subtle singer, but added: "That husky sound and those powerful high notes are the real thing."

Licitra is also built along Pavarotti lines, and might one day be as big in more ways than one.

Opera-goers' reported reaction to Pavarotti's absence ranged from sympathy to a belief that he had added a paragraph to his own chapter in the book of tempestuous tenors.

"It gives new meaning to the word disrespect," said Ruth Hennessy, outside for the free show. "Poor thing," said Desiree deKalwill. "He's human also."