Pavarotti heard a demo tape and told Zucchero to hire the unknown singer instead
In 1992 the rock star Zucchero auditioned tenors to cut a demo of his song Miserere for Luciano Pavarotti. Pavarotti listened to the tape and insisted Zucchero record it with the demo singer, a blind former lawyer called Andrea Bocelli. The song became a hit across Europe and launched a career of over 90 million records.
Bocelli was born on 22 September 1958 and grew up on his family's farm near Lajatico in Tuscany, about 40 kilometres south of Pisa, where they sold farm machinery and made wine. Congenital glaucoma impaired his sight from birth, and at 12 he went completely blind after a football struck him in the eye. Music had always been his comfort: piano from six, then flute, saxophone, trumpet, trombone, guitar and drums. At 14 he won a singing contest in Viareggio with O sole mio.
He studied law at the University of Pisa, paying his way by singing in piano bars, where he met his future wife Enrica in 1987, and he worked for a year as a court-appointed lawyer. After Miserere, he toured Europe with Zucchero in 1993 and sang Nessun dorma in solo sets. At the Sanremo Music Festival he won the newcomers' section in February 1994 with a record score.
The following year he placed fourth at Sanremo with Con te partirò. The English soprano Sarah Brightman heard him sing it while dining in a restaurant, and the pair recorded it as Time to Say Goodbye, a farewell for the boxer Henry Maske. It spent 14 weeks at the top of the German chart and outsold the country's previous best-selling single by more than a million copies.
Operatic roles followed, starting as Rodolfo in La bohème in Cagliari in 1998, along with a duet with Celine Dion, The Prayer, which won a Golden Globe. No solo classical album has outsold his Sacred Arias, and in 2019 Sì gave him his first number one albums in both Britain and the United States.
Source: Andrea Bocelli
