Luciano Pavarotti

• 1. Introduction

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  Luciano Pavarotti hit nine high Cs during the aria "Ah! mes amis" at New York's Metropolitan Opera on the 17th of February 1972, then returned for seventeen curtain calls. That night in La fille du régiment earned him a nickname that stuck for the rest of his life: the King of the High Cs. He went on to sell more than 100 million records, and a concert he sang once with two other tenors became the best-selling classical album ever made. He was born into a two-room apartment on the edge of Modena, the son of a baker who could sing but never dared try it professionally. How did that boy end up performing before crowds of hundreds of thousands, opening an Olympic ceremony, and topping best-seller charts alongside pop stars? He was also, by his own industry's account, a singer many opera houses grew afraid to book, a man investigated by his own government over his taxes, and a father whose death split his family over money. This is the story of a voice that filled the world's largest stadiums, and of the man behind it who did not always make it easy.

• 2. Finding The Voice

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  Pavarotti was born on the 12th of October 1935 in a public housing block on the outskirts of Modena, in Northern Italy, to Fernando Pavarotti, a baker with an amateur tenor's voice, and Adele Venturi, who worked in a cigar factory. Money was tight; the family of four shared a two-room apartment. Fernando had a genuinely fine voice, Pavarotti later said, but nerves kept him from ever singing for a living. War drove the family out of the city in 1943, and for the next year they rented a single room from a farmer in the countryside, where the boy discovered a fondness for farming.

  Football came before opera. Pavarotti dreamed of becoming a goalkeeper and, after finishing his teacher-training school, wanted to try it professionally, but his mother steered him toward the classroom instead. He taught at an elementary school for two years before choosing music. At home, his father's record collection introduced him to the great tenors of the era, Beniamino Gigli, Giovanni Martinelli, Tito Schipa and Enrico Caruso, though his favorite was Giuseppe Di Stefano. Mario Lanza left an even deeper mark. "In my teens I used to go to Mario Lanza movies," Pavarotti recalled, "and then come home and imitate him in the mirror." Around age nine he had already begun singing alongside his father in a small local church choir.

  His father gave grudging permission in 1954, when Pavarotti, then 19, began serious study with Arrigo Pola, a respected teacher and professional tenor in Modena who taught him without charging a fee. A year later, singing with the Corale Rossini, a male choir from Modena that included his own father, Pavarotti won first prize at the International Eisteddfod in the Welsh town of Llangollen. He later called it the most important experience of his life, the one that convinced him to become a professional singer. When Pola left for Japan, Pavarotti moved on to study with Ettore Campogalliani, who was also teaching his childhood friend Mirella Freni, whose mother worked alongside his own in the cigar factory. Freni would go on to a major opera career of her own, and the two later performed and recorded together repeatedly.

  He supported himself through these years first as a schoolteacher, then as an insurance salesman, while six years of study produced only a handful of unpaid recitals in small towns. A nodule on his vocal cords brought things to a head with a concert in Ferrara that he called disastrous, and he decided to quit singing altogether. The nodule vanished soon after, and with it, he wrote in his autobiography, came a breakthrough: "Everything I had learned came together with my natural voice to make the sound I had been struggling so hard to achieve." Within months he would step onto a stage in Reggio Emilia and start the career that quitting had almost ended.

• 3. King Of The High Cs

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  Reggio Emilia's Teatro Municipale hosted Pavarotti's professional debut in April 1961, as Rodolfo in La bohème, after he won the Achille Peri International Competition. Francesco Molinari-Pradelli conducted, Mafalda Favero staged it, and his first known recording, of the aria "Che gelida manina", came from that very performance. International engagements followed fast: Belgrade in December 1961, then the Vienna State Opera on the 23rd of February 1963, then Covent Garden that September, where he stepped in for an indisposed Giuseppe Di Stefano and gave his career, in his own telling, a real boost.

  Miami handed him his American debut in February 1965, in Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, purely by accident. The scheduled tenor fell ill with no understudy ready, and Joan Sutherland, who already knew Pavarotti could sing the role, recommended him. Weeks later, on the 28th of April, he made his La Scala debut in Franco Zeffirelli's production of La bohème, with Mirella Freni as Mimi and Herbert von Karajan, who had personally requested him, conducting. Sutherland and her husband, conductor Richard Bonynge, then brought him along on their 1965 tour of Australia, where he and Sutherland sang forty performances in two months. Pavarotti later credited her with teaching him the breathing and diaphragm technique that carried him through the rest of his career.

  On the 2nd of June 1966, at Covent Garden, singing Tonio in Donizetti's La fille du régiment, Pavarotti became the first tenor to land all nine natural high Cs written into the aria "Ah! mes amis". Six years later he repeated the feat at the Metropolitan Opera, on the 17th of February 1972, and this time seventeen curtain calls followed along with the nickname that would define him. A cold nearly upset his solo recital debut at William Jewell College in Missouri in February 1973; he clutched a handkerchief throughout, telling people afterward he simply didn't know what else to do with his hands. The handkerchief stayed with him for every solo performance that followed.

  Television multiplied his reach. His Rodolfo in the first Live from the Met telecast, in March 1977, drew one of the largest audiences ever recorded for an opera broadcast, and Grammy wins and gold and platinum discs followed. In 1979, Time magazine put him on its cover, and he returned to the Vienna State Opera that year after a fourteen-year absence, singing Manrico in Il trovatore under Karajan again. In the 1980s he brought his artistry back to the houses that had launched him: Rodolfo under Carlos Kleiber, Radames under Lorin Maazel, Gustavo under Claudio Abbado, each time in Vienna or at La Scala.

  He also began shaping the next generation. From the early 1980s, his Pavarotti International Voice Competition gave young singers a stage alongside him. To mark his 25th anniversary in the profession, he brought a group of competition winners on tour, first to Modena and Genoa, then to Beijing, where he closed the trip with an inaugural concert in the Great Hall of the People. Ten thousand people gave him a standing ovation for nine high Cs. It was, in miniature, a preview of the scale his voice was about to reach far beyond any opera house.

• 4. From Aria To Arena

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  BBC producers picked Puccini's "Nessun dorma", from Turandot, as the theme for their coverage of the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy, and Pavarotti's recording of it turned into a genuine pop hit. The song never really left him after that; it became his trademark for the rest of his career. On the eve of that World Cup's final, at the ancient Baths of Caracalla in Rome, he joined Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, with Zubin Mehta conducting, for what became known as the first Three Tenors concert. Pavarotti opened one highlight, di Capua's "'O sole mio", with extended vocal runs that Domingo and Carreras then repeated note for note. The resulting album sold millions of copies and became the best-selling classical record ever released.

  Stadiums and parks became his regular venues through the 1990s. A televised concert in London's Hyde Park drew a record 150,000 people. In June 1993, more than 500,000 listeners packed the Great Lawn of New York's Central Park while millions more watched on television, and that September, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, an estimated 300,000 turned out to hear him. The Three Tenors reunited for three more World Cup finals, in Los Angeles in 1994, Paris in 1998, and Yokohama in 2002.

  Other unlikely pairings followed. In September 1995, he sang Schubert's Ave Maria with Dolores O'Riordan; Diana, Princess of Wales, watching in person, later told O'Riordan the performance had moved her to tears. He recorded "Miss Sarajevo" with U2 that same year, and in 1999 he sang a major concert at Boca Juniors' La Bombonera stadium in Buenos Aires alongside Mercedes Sosa. On the 12th of December 1998, he became the first opera singer to perform on Saturday Night Live, singing with Vanessa L. Williams; that same year he received the Grammy Legend Award.

  His one real venture into film, Yes, Giorgio in 1982, cast him as the lead in a romantic comedy directed by Franklin J. Schaffner. Critics and audiences both rejected it, though it still picked up an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song. He fared better on the small screen, taping more than twenty live opera performances for television between 1978 and 1994, mostly with the Metropolitan Opera, and won two Primetime Emmy Awards for his PBS specials. In September 2003 he released Ti Adoro, his only true crossover studio album, most of its thirteen songs produced by Michele Centonze; Pavarotti described it as a wedding gift to Nicoletta Mantovani. A 2019 documentary directed by Ron Howard, made with his estate's cooperation, drew on family archives and performance footage to trace the arc from Modena chorister to global phenomenon.

• 5. The King Of Cancellations

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  Opera houses started calling him "The King of Cancellations" long before critics turned on him in print. The nickname followed a pattern of withdrawn bookings that eventually cost him one of his most important American relationships. In 1989, Ardis Krainik of the Lyric Opera of Chicago severed a fifteen-year partnership with Pavarotti after he had cancelled 26 of his 41 scheduled appearances there over eight years. The final straw came when he walked away from a season premiere less than two weeks before rehearsals, citing sciatic nerve pain that he said needed two months of treatment. Krainik's decision to ban him for life was noticed across the opera world.

  Herbert Breslin, one of Pavarotti's former managers, published a book called The King & I in 2004 that took a much harder line. Critics called it bitter and sensationalistic, and it faulted Pavarotti's acting, his inability to read music well, his difficulty learning parts, and his personal conduct, while still crediting their years of shared success. The following year, in a 2005 BBC interview with Jeremy Paxman, Pavarotti pushed back on the claim that he could not read music at all, though he did admit he never learned to read a full orchestral score. Whatever the truth of his musical literacy, it never stopped him from delivering the nine high Cs and decades of performances that built his reputation in the first place.

• 6. Marriages Money And The Taxman

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  Pavarotti met Adua Veroni in the 1950s and married her in 1961; the couple had three daughters, Lorenza, Cristina and Giuliana, before separating in the early 1990s and divorcing in 2002. On the 13th of December 2003, he married his former personal assistant, Nicoletta Mantovani, who was 34 years younger than him and had already given birth to their daughter Alice that January, when Pavarotti was 67. Alice's twin brother, Riccardo, was stillborn.

  For years Pavarotti listed Monte Carlo, in the tax haven of Monaco, as his official residence, until an Italian court rejected that claim in 1999. Judges ruled his Monaco address could not possibly house his whole family and accused him of tax evasion. He agreed in 2000 to pay the Italian government 24 million Italian lira, and in 2001 an Italian court acquitted him of the tax evasion charges. It was a legal fight that traced directly back to the fortune his voice, and his willingness to sing anywhere the world would pay him, had built.

• 7. Giving It Away

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  Every year, Pavarotti hosted the Pavarotti & Friends charity concerts in his hometown of Modena, sharing the stage with an unlikely roster that included B.B. King, Andrea Bocelli, Zucchero, Jon Bon Jovi, Bryan Adams, Bono, James Brown, Mariah Carey, Eric Clapton, Sheryl Crow, Céline Dion, Elton John, Queen, George Michael, the Spice Girls, Sting and Barry White, among others. The concerts raised money for United Nations causes and for victims of the conflicts in Bosnia, Guatemala, Kosovo and Iraq. After the Bosnian war he personally financed the Pavarotti Music Centre in Mostar to give the region's artists a place to train, and in February 2006 the city of Sarajevo made him an honorary citizen for that work.

  In May 1990, he sang at Moscow's Bolshoi Theater to raise money for rebuilding after the 1988 Armenian earthquake, performing Gounod's Ave Maria alongside the French Armenian pop star Charles Aznavour. He and Diana, Princess of Wales, were close friends who worked together specifically to raise money against landmines worldwide. In 1998 the United Nations named him a Messenger of Peace, a role he used to draw attention to the Millennium Development Goals, HIV and AIDS, child rights, urban poverty and slum conditions.

  His benefit concerts kept reaching new audiences. In June 1999 he performed at Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium in Beirut, the largest concert held in the city since the end of the Lebanese Civil War, drawing 20,000 people from across the Persian Gulf region. That same year, a charity concert he hosted funded a school for orphans of Guatemala's civil war, later named Centro Educativo Pavarotti in his honor; the school is now run by the foundation of Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchú Tum. In 2001, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees gave him the Nansen Medal, crediting him with raising more money for refugees than any other individual. That same year, the White House named him one of five recipients honored for lifetime achievement in the arts, and at the Kennedy Center ceremony that followed, Kofi Annan, that year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, surprised him on stage to praise his humanitarian work.

• 8. Final Curtain

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  On the 13th of March 2004, Pavarotti gave his last operatic performance, singing the painter Mario Cavaradossi in Puccini's Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera to a long standing ovation. That December he announced a 40-city farewell tour produced by Harvey Goldsmith, and his last full-scale performance took place in Taiwan in December 2005. On the 10th of February 2006, he closed the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Turin with "Nessun dorma", his final public performance. Unsure his voice could carry the moment live, he prerecorded the song and lip synced it with the International Olympic Committee's approval; the audience gave him the longest, loudest ovation of the night anyway.

  His body had been failing for years by then. He had struggled with his weight, reaching 350 pounds at his heaviest, and underwent double hip replacement and knee surgery in 1998. Neck surgery to repair two damaged vertebrae followed in March 2005, and early in 2006 he had back surgery and then contracted an infection in a New York hospital that forced him to cancel concerts across the US, Canada and the UK. In July 2006, after abdominal pain and weight loss, doctors diagnosed pancreatic cancer, a disease with a very low survival rate. He cancelled his remaining concerts and had the tumor successfully removed at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, but the cancer had already spread. Pavarotti died at his home in Modena on the 6th of September 2007. His manager said afterward that "he remained positive until finally succumbing to the last stages of his illness."

  Modena Cathedral hosted his funeral, attended by Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi and Kofi Annan, while the Italian Air Force's Frecce Tricolori flew overhead trailing green, white and red smoke. After a procession through the city center, his coffin travelled ten kilometres to Montale Rangone, part of Castelnuovo Rangone, for burial in the family crypt, a funeral broadcast live on CNN. The Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival both flew black flags in mourning, and opera houses including London's Royal Opera House sent tributes. He left behind his wife, four daughters and one granddaughter, and an estate valued at up to 300 million euros before debts and mortgages of 18 million euros, spanning a villa in Pesaro, his childhood home in Modena, a co-op apartment in New York, and an apartment in Monte Carlo.

  He had signed three separate wills, one for his Italian assets, one for his American assets, and a handwritten third that cut into his wife's share. The Italian will split his estate evenly between Mantovani and his four daughters together; the American will left all of his US holdings to Mantovani alone. His daughters, feeling shortchanged, contested the arrangement, and a prosecutor in Pesaro investigated whether Pavarotti had been of sound mind when he signed it. A judge-approved compromise in July 2008 finally gave the daughters the house in Pesaro. Two Guinness World Records outlived the dispute: one for the most curtain calls ever taken, 165, and one for the best-selling classical album of all time, the Three Tenors recording he still shares with Domingo and Carreras. In 2022, fifteen years after his death, Pavarotti received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 7065 Hollywood Boulevard, a small marker for a voice that had already filled stadiums the boulevard's sidewalk could never hold.