A Modena baker's son became the world's most famous tenor
Luciano Pavarotti (12 October 1935 – 6 September 2007) moved from Italian opera houses to stadium pop. The 1990 Three Tenors concert during the FIFA World Cup made him a global television star. He trained seven years after ditching goalkeeper dreams his mother redirected toward teaching—then singing.
Born in crowded Modena public housing to baker-tenor Fernando and cigar-factory worker Adele, he idolized Di Stefano and absorbed Gigli, Caruso, and Schipa from his father's records. Professional tenor debut came in 1961; farewell included Nessun dorma. Complete-opera recordings fixed his bright high register in living rooms worldwide.
Crossover concerts broadened opera's audience while purists argued taste; either way, few classical voices owned late-twentieth-century mass media like his.
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His first taste of success came in 1955, when Modena's Corale Rossini choir, with his father among its voices, won the top award at the Llangollen International Eisteddfod in Wales. He studied with Arrigo Pola and then Ettore Campogalliani, who also taught his childhood friend Mirella Freni, and paid his way as a teacher and insurance salesman through six lean years of unpaid small-town recitals. After winning the Achille Peri competition he appeared as Rodolfo in La bohème at Reggio Emilia in April 1961. He made his American debut opposite Joan Sutherland in Miami in February 1965 and joined her Australian tour that summer, singing forty performances in two months. At Covent Garden on 2 June 1966 he became the first tenor to deliver all nine natural high Cs in Ah! mes amis from La fille du régiment, and repeating the feat at the Metropolitan Opera on 17 February 1972 earned him seventeen curtain calls.
Source: Luciano Pavarotti
