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The fat man sings no more.

Throughout his career, Luciano Pavarotti was known as much for his ravenous appetites for food, fame and sex as for his voice. He broke through in an era when opera-goers expected big bodies and big egos to accompany big voices.

But with his passing yesterday, so too passes an era of performers who recklessly lived large in every possible way. The new generation - challenged by modern productions that place acting chops on par with vocal skills, and hoping to avoid the debilitating health problems of opera stars past - maintain strict diets and svelte physiques.

"In the past, most of the singers were larger than life," said Richard Margison, a renowned Canadian tenor who once sang alongside Mr. Pavarotti, who died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 71. "That was the way back then. We're all trying to slim down and be more credible on stage now."

Weighing more than 300 pounds (136 kilograms) at the height of his career, Mr. Pavarotti epitomized the stereotype of the corpulent opera singer. He first gained recognition in the sixties, when critics and audiences alike thought that a rotund body made for a bigger resonating cavity and a fuller voice.

When soprano Maria Callas dropped 60 pounds in the mid-fifties, critics opined that she had also lost her voice.

"Everybody was saying, 'Where did the opulent tones go?' " said Linda Hutcheon, a University of Toronto professor and co-author of Bodily Charm, a book on the health effects of singing opera.

"But when you listen to the recordings of Callas now, you realize she sounded exactly the same before and after the weight loss."

Today, opera is downsizing. In 2004, American singer Deborah Voigt was bounced from the role of Ariadne at Covent Garden because she couldn't fit into a dress.

Soon after, Ms. Voigt had gastric bypass surgery and dropped 15 dress sizes.

Canadian tenor Ben Heppner and Mr. Margison, who these days dines on steamed vegetables and skinless chicken before performances, have also shed large amounts of weight recently.

"The aesthetics of movies are now being applied to opera," Dr. Hutcheon said. "Opera is no longer people walking onto the stage to sing standing still. It's drama."

That trend has its downsides.

Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman, who recently lost 150 pounds in part by doing Bikram yoga, says that the move toward skinnier singers has diminished the overall quality of opera.

"I'll take a full-bodied singer with an earth-shattering voice over a skinny singer who can't carry over second row any day," she said, fresh from a yoga class in London, where she's promoting her new album.

Ms. Brueggergosman said her dramatic weight loss had more to do with her family history - her father has had three heart attacks - than with industry expectations.

"I'm not for making singers thinner because it looks better," she said. "I'm for keeping our singers healthy so they'll live longer and we won't lose them prematurely."

While opera stars today are expected to be thinner, Mr. Pavarotti never bought into the trend.

"His passion was cooking," Mr. Margison said. "He loved to make pasta. He revelled in mozzarella. He loved sparkling wine. When he was at home he would often say, 'We'll rehearse tomorrow; tonight, we eat.' "

Mr. Pavarotti's tuxedo-popping girth led to a host of other health problems. His knees were so bad by the end of his career that he had to lean on stage props throughout performances. He also suffered from back pain.

"Pavarotti was very old school," said Blair Tindall, a classical musician and author of Mozart in the Jungle, which looks at the seedier sides of the opera and classical music worlds. "His lifestyle was, you go out after concerts and eat and drink and be merry. His lifestyle was about passion and, in his case, sex too."

That insatiable appetite was born, in part, from the tremendous pressure of the opera business, where one wrong note can finish a career.

"That can make for a lonely existence," Mr. Margison said. "A lot of people replace loneliness with a salad bar, or pasta or wine."