Luciano Pavarotti

Luciano Pavarotti was born in Modena in October 1935, the son of a baker and amateur tenor. He trained with Arrigo Pola and Ettore Campogalliani and made his professional début at the Teatro Reggio Emilia in 1961 as Rodolfo in *La bohème*. His Covent Garden début followed in 1963 as Rodolfo, his Vienna State Opera début in 1963, and his Metropolitan Opera début in 1968 — also as Rodolfo, the role that became his international signature.

His central repertoire was the lyric Italian tenor parts of the bel canto and verismo tradition. Rodolfo, the Duke of Mantua, Nemorino in *L’elisir d’amore*, Tonio in *La fille du régiment* (the role in which his nine high Cs at the Metropolitan in 1972 became one of the legendary individual vocal feats of post-war opera), Riccardo in *Un ballo in maschera*, Cavaradossi in *Tosca*, Manrico, and — in his later career, after the gradual darkening of his voice — Calaf in *Turandot* and Otello. His career was shaped from 1980 by the manager Tibor Rudas into a parallel concert and recording phenomenon that took him outside the conventional opera-house circuit and into stadium and arena performance, with the *Three Tenors* (with Plácido Domingo and José Carreras from 1990) the most visible vehicle of his cultural reach.

Pavarotti was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor in 2001 and the Italian Order of Merit. He died of pancreatic cancer in Modena in September 2007. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his Italian operatic work from the 1960s and 1970s.