Pavarotti’s High C: How a Would-Be Goalkeeper Became the World’s Most Popular Tenor

Luciano Pavarotti’s “trademark” was the harmonious blend of vocal talent and personal charisma. His forty-year career on the stage was built on a distinctive personality and a genuine zest for life.

Between Notes and Goalposts

Luciano Pavarotti performed at the world’s most renowned opera houses but was born and died in the same city — Modena. There, in northern Italy, he was born on October 12, 1935, and he died there 72 years later.

As a child, he was the son of a “singing baker” and a factory worker and moved with his parents to a village for a year because of the war, where he developed a serious interest in farming. Despite joining the church choir and taking early vocal lessons, Pavarotti did not initially plan to become a professional singer.

After school, he intended to become a football goalkeeper but, at his mother’s insistence, took a job as a teacher. Two years of teaching elementary school convinced him to return to music. His passion for football stayed with him all his life, and the sport also helped bring him into pop culture.

Pavarotti reached a much wider audience in the classical repertoire after performing the aria *Nessun Dorma* during the World Cup final held in Italy. After his 1990 performance at the Rome stadium, Puccini’s piece became the best-selling classical recording ever, according to the Guinness Book of Records.

A Long Road to Finding His Voice

At 19, Pavarotti received high praise from local tenor Arrigo Pola, who spent more than two years coaching the talented student for free because Pavarotti couldn’t afford lessons. The unstable income from working as an insurance agent wasn’t enough to live on. His father didn’t refuse to help but was not going to support him indefinitely. If by age 30 Luciano hadn’t started earning from performances, he would have had to take another job to support himself.

Six years of classical vocal training passed without visible results: the first performances brought no earnings. When Pavarotti lost his voice at one concert, he took it as a sign that singing wasn’t working out and considered looking for something else.

But fate had other plans: the vocal-cord lesion later disappeared, leaving no trace of the growth that had been incompatible with singing. As the singer recalled, his voice returned along with its natural timbre — he suddenly heard the very sound he had been searching for.

Second Wind

Pavarotti considered the start of his professional career to be his victory in an international vocal competition in 1961. That same year, Luciano started a family: his first wife, and the mother of his three eldest daughters, was opera singer Adua Veroni.

In 1963, his name appeared on posters at the Vienna State Opera and London’s Covent Garden, and in 1965 Pavarotti debuted in the USA, substituting for an ill tenor during a tour in Miami.

In 1985, applause at Milan’s La Scala lasted nearly two minutes after Pavarotti’s performance, and in 1988 the artist received 165 bows at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper (a Guinness World Record).

It seemed his talent was too vast for sold-out opera houses, and the singer increasingly moved from theaters to open-air venues. Critics called him the artist who brought opera to the people. In 1991, Pavarotti performed for 150,000 spectators in London’s Hyde Park, and in 1993 he gathered over half a million listeners in New York’s Central Park (an all-time record), with a million more watching the televised broadcast. That same year, the tenor performed before 300,000 Parisians in an open-air solo concert on the Champ de Mars.

Luciano Pavarotti also popularized opera in a series of stadium performances with José Carreras and Plácido Domingo in the joint project “The Three Tenors.” That collaboration enjoyed 15 years of commercial success.

All About Him

Beyond his musical achievements, Pavarotti was honored for his charity work. For refugee aid, for example, he donated over $1.5 million. The artist helped earthquake victims in Armenia and funded the clearance of landmines, among other causes. The International Red Cross awarded him a prize for services to humanity.

Pavarotti’s charitable work coexisted with flaws in his professional reputation. Most notably, he gained a reputation as the “king of cancellations.” Because of a habit of canceling performances, Luciano strained relations with several opera houses. At the Chicago Lyric Opera alone, he canceled 26 out of 41 performances over eight years, missing almost every second scheduled show. Eventually, the company stopped working with him, terminating a 15-year contract due to financial losses.

Critics didn’t always admire his talent. After one particularly poor performance, Pavarotti never sang again at La Scala, and his negative experience acting in the 1982 film *Yes, Giorgio* permanently dampened his interest in acting.

In 2002, the singer split with his manager, who accused him of being musically illiterate. After the scandalous dismissal, Herbert Breslin published a sensational exposé alleging the “king’s” inability to understand the orchestra’s high C part.