Understandably annoyed that they had accepted a flat fee for the first disc and therefore received no royalties, Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras made no such mistake the second time around. It is estimated that as many as a billion people heard portions of the next Three Tenors event, which took place in 1994 and was disseminated to the world via cable, audio and video. In 1996, the trio reunited for a world tour that brought each a cool US$1 million (HK$7.8 million) per night. Another Three Tenors disc was issued in 1998 and a Christmas album (complete with Jingle Bells and Feliz Navidad) in 2000; what would seem to be the final reunion took place in 2003.

Whether the success of The Three Tenors was a good thing for classical music has been much debated. In the same way that blockbusters such as Jaws and Star Wars set new financial goals for Hollywood - encouraging studios to emphasize prefabricated, comic-book-like "hits'' - The Three Tenors, in the very act of proving that an ostensibly "classical'' album could make a fortune, helped inspire a vast dumbing-down at the record com-panies.

Other musicians did their best to jump on the bandwagon. Albums were devoted to Three Irish Tenors, Three Tenors of the Golden Age, Three Mo' Tenors and, inevitably, The Three Sopranos - none of which began to match the commercial success of the original team.

Moreover, the concerts hardly rep-resented Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras at their best. The famous arias were rolled out in a perfunctory manner - scarcely comparable to the tenors' best studio recordings - and the novelty numbers were sometimes downright awful. They certainly couldn't do My Way and Singin' in the Rain as smoothly and idiomatically as Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly; for that matter, they didn't sing Those Were the Days as well as the all-but-forgotten Mary Hopkin.

Still, The Three Tenors were a phenomenon and, on whatever level, they brought opera into the lives of many who had been unaware, dismissive or simply scared of it. Now, with the trio unlikely to sing together again - Pavarotti is in the midst of a farewell world tour, Domingo is cutting back on his appearances while keeping busy running opera houses in Washington and Los Angeles, and Carreras (always the least significant of the three) is singing with much less polish than he once did - maybe it is time for their saddened admirers to start looking towards a new generation of tenors who may have been undervalued.

Nobody seems likely to dominate the field the way Pavarotti and Domingo once did - the first with his honeyed tone and effortless lyricism, the latter with his fierce intelligence and superlative melding of music and drama. But two of the most highly touted younger singers will be appearing with Washington National Opera this month.

Salvatore Licitra won world attention in early 2002 when he stepped in as a last-minute replacement for Pavarotti at the Metropolitan Opera, in what had been sold (and sold out) as Pavarotti's farewell to the company. By all accounts he did very well under enormous pressure.

Writing in the Financial Times, the famously strict Martin Bernheimer called Licitra "the real, rare thing,'' adding that he sang "with ringing fervor counterbalanced by expressive sensitivity, his tone open and brightly focused, his range broad, his diction crisp.''

Marcello Giordani, who joins the WNO on May 25, has a big, warm, healthy voice that he employs with spirit and intelligence. Recently he sang the all-but-impossible role of Benvenuto Cellini in Hector Berlioz's opera of the same name at the Met, hitting some of the most stratospheric high notes in the repertory with extraordinary assurance.

Looking beyond Licitra and Giordani, a few names come up again and again. There is Roberto Alagna, who was hyped as the "fourth tenor'' as far back as the mid-1990s and was regularly booked as a duo with his wife, the glamorous and volatile soprano Angela Gheorghiu. Effectively self-taught, Alagna began as a light, supple lyric tenor but has moved increasingly into heavier roles; he is equally at home in the French and the Italian repertory.

Then there is Jose Cura, who has sung both Samson and Otello in Washington. He combines a full, ringing tenor voice (complete with marked baritonal shadings, a la Domingo, and just a hint of the trumpet) with a commanding and athletic stage presence.

The Canadian Ben Heppner may be the most satisfying musician in the newer lot, despite a long bout with chronic laryngitis that recently kept him out of circulation for the better part of a year. He has a Herculean voice that is nevertheless capable of great sensitivity, and he has taken on all of the hardest parts - Verdi's Otello, Berlioz's Aeneas (in Les Troyens) and Wagnerian characters such as Tristan and Lohengrin. But it is hard to imagine him in much of the Italian repertory, especially the lighter Verdi and Puccini works that remain a tenor's "greatest hits.'' Heppner seems to be a glorious special case.

On the other end of the spectrum are some lyric tenors with small, elegant voices, more in the style of the young Carreras than Pavarotti or Domingo. Leading that group would be Ramon Vargas, Marcelo Alvarez and - especially - Juan Diego Florez, who tosses off complicated bel canto melodies with sure lyricism, bright and seemingly effortless high notes and virtuosic aplomb. Recently the Mexican tenor Rolando Villazon has won acclaim for his achingly sensitive recording of arias by Gounod and Massenet.

A word about Andrea Bocelli. Slowly, surely, I have come around to a certain admiration for Bocelli. He may never be a great tenor but, through hard work and fierce determination, he has become quite a good one - far better than he was when his first recordings and video appearances made him famous. Bocelli's fans delight in his triumph over adversity (he has been blind since the age of 12), his soft high notes, his handsome face and his warm smile - and he has sold more records than any tenor outside the magic trio.

Still, the fact remains that his voice is a small one and his sightlessness effectively rules out participation in more than the occasional token opera performance.

Who knows where the next star will come from? In point of fact, the hottest figure in opera under the age of 50 is not a tenor at all but rather the radiant American soprano Renee Fleming. We may be heading back to a time when women are once again the great operatic draw, as they were in the years before Enrico Caruso conquered the world about a century ago. After all, divas such as Jenny Lind, Adelina Patti and Nellie Melba sang before hundreds of thousands of listeners in the last part of the 19th century. And indeed, various groups of operaphiles sometimes refer to the 1950s and 1960s as the age of Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi or Joan Sutherland.

Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever tried to claim an "age'' for, say, Giuseppe di Stefano, Mario del Monaco or Franco Corelli, to mention three of the more gifted, popular and bankable tenors who sang with these legendary ladies.

As the English critic JB Steane wrote in his book Singer of the Century: "The Italian tenor cuts a curious figure in the world's eyes: part romantic, part ridiculous; idol of the gallery; bete-noire of the highbrows; the voice of passion, the voice of the ice cream man.'' As far back as 1911, Richard Strauss parodied the genre by putting a primping tenor-for-hire in his comedy Der Rosen-kavalier, but then turned around and gave the character one of the loveliest and most complicated arias in the repertory. If the era of The Three Tenors has come to an end, their archetype will be with us for as long as people care about singing.