11
DIVINE VOICES
Most opera lovers never forget the first time a sound unlike any other bypassed their ears and shot straight to their hearts. Mine came at the New York City Opera in the 1970s, when Beverly Sills was ecstatically warbling her way through Donizetti’s queens and Rossini’s heroines. A graduate student at Columbia University, I would buy cheap tickets and inch into empty seats closer to the stage. From the very first performance, I was transfixed.
I couldn’t explain why. Growing up in a Polish American family that played polkas rather than Puccini, I, like most of my generation, listened to Simon & Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, and, of course, the Beatles. Yet not even bridges over troubled waters, Chelsea mornings, or gently weeping guitars captivated me as opera did.
Italian coined a word for such infatuation: melomania, an “excessive love for music.” Opera—a quintessentially Italian invention—incites the most extreme cases. Why? According to the music expert and author Fred Plotkin, a former performance manager at the New York Metropolitan Opera, it’s “all about passion…about the rekindling of the soul, about having an open window into what makes us human.”
He also identifies something else: the “essential secret that opera lovers know and those on the outside never suspect,” an undercurrent of raw sexuality, presented in onstage dramas that often are “far more erotic than a cheap film, a pulpy novel, or the latest rock video.” Lust, incest, rape, jealousy, betrayal, revenge—all strut and slink across the opera stage. Lovers furtively embrace. Spouses cheat. Courtesans lose their hearts. Serial seducers leave no petticoat unturned. Nobles and slaves, consumed by passion, lie, steal, bribe, kidnap, even kill.
These sweaty carnal impulses appear before us robed in sumptuous arias, poignant duets, and throbbing choruses. The plot twists may defy logic. The sets may be opulent or spare. The performers may be older, heftier, or shorter than the characters they play. None of these things matter. During one performance of Puccini’s Turandot, the soprano in the role of the irresistible ice princess bore such a disconcerting resemblance to John Belushi that I simply closed my eyes and listened. Ultimately voices—deservedly described as divine—seduce us by creating sounds that express feelings words alone could never convey.
This splendid confection of music, drama, costumes, sets, special effects, and complete suspension of disbelief could not have emerged anywhere but in Italy. Maestro Mario Ruffini, a conductor and composer in Florence, describes opera (la lirica, in Italian) as “the ultimate expression of the collective Italian genius—the Italian sun captured in sound…the epitome of the Italian voice, the Italian soul, the Italian passion.”
IN THE TWILIGHT of the Renaissance, a group of Florentine poets, philosophers, and professional musicians devoted themselves to re-creating something that hadn’t been heard since ancient Greece—a stage drama set to music. One evening in the late 1590s, they performed Dafne, the story of the innocent maiden turned into a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s lustful pursuit, in the elegant Sala delle Muse (Hall of the Muses) in Florence’s Palazzo Tornabuoni (where I’ve had the extraordinary thrill of presenting my books). The enthralled audience had no idea they were listening to the first opera in musica (work in music).
Opera emerged as a true art form with the 1607 premiere in Mantua of Orfeo: Favola in musica (Orpheus: A Fable in Music). Claudio Monteverdi included roles for a type of singer who no longer exists: a castrato, who underwent “castration for artistic purposes,” as historians refer to it, to preserve a boy’s high-pitched voice. Now viewed as bizarre and cruel, castration was once widespread—almost solely because of Italy’s passion for music.
As composers added different voices to create harmony in religious works, choirmasters needed singers capable of carrying the higher notes. Women, the obvious candidates, were excluded. The apostle Paolo had explicitly directed that female worshippers “keep silence in church.” In Rome and the Papal States, the Vatican extended this injunction to any public venue.
Young boys could sing like angels, but their musical careers typically ended when their voices broke. In the sixteenth century, a few Spaniards who had been accidentally castrated by injuries in childhood joined the Sistine Chapel choir, one of the jewels of the papacy. In 1599, besotted by their voices, the music-mad Pope Clement VIII approved the hiring of Italian castrati. In a country with many children but limited opportunities, parents, often impoverished, opted for castration in the hope (not always realized) of ensuring their sons’—and their families’—financial security.
From the seventeenth through most of the nineteenth century, thousands of Italian boys underwent a surgical procedure, usually performed by “doctors” (many less than reputable), to remove the testicles or crush the spermatic cord. Never officially condoned, castration was explained as a necessary “treatment” after a fall or a bite by a goose or pig. Boys—some as young as seven and none older than twelve or thirteen—may not have grasped its lifelong consequences.
Without testes, a male’s vocal cords and larynx remained small, but his lungs and rib cage continued to develop. Most castrati grew tall, with barrel chests, gangly limbs, beardless faces, and hairless bodies. The penis remained intact; sexual desire—if not performance—also seems to have endured. As he grew to adulthood, one young man poignantly described himself as “castrated in the genitals, not in the heart.”
The voce bianca (white voice) of a castrato, fuller and richer than a boy’s and extremely flexible, was often compared to a nightingale’s. The most successful castrati pursued careers that straddled church music and popular opera, appearing both as handsome heroes and, gowned and wigged, as heroines. Astounded by their virtuosity, enraptured audiences would shout, “Evviva il coltellino!” (Long live the little knife!).
THE CASTRATI, WHO WERE BELIEVED to sublimate sexual passion into song, provoked endless curiosity and gossip. One ran off with an Irishwoman; their marriage ended in an annulment. Another fell in love with a widowed contessa in Bologna whose outraged brothers hired assassins to murder him. A singer in the Sistine choir conducted an ongoing homosexual relationship, described as a “veritable passion,” with a cardinal.
The best-known castrato, Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli (1705–1782), showed early musical promise and underwent castration at twelve, after his father’s death. Called Il Ragazzo (The Boy), he began touring Europe at fifteen, astounding crowds with his enormous range, supple voice, and vocal stamina. Farinelli and a trumpet player once engaged in a musical duel, with the singer matching and surpassing every flourish, “at last silenced only by the acclamations of the audience.” Yet particularly in women’s roles, Farinelli also elicited some barbs.
“What a pipe! What modulation! What ecstasy to the ear!” wrote a London critic. “But heavens! What clumsiness! What stupidity! What offense to the eye!”
In 1737, the queen of Spain entreated Farinelli to come to Madrid in the hope that music therapy might lift her husband’s severe depression. Night after night he would sing the same melodies, a ritual he repeated until the monarch’s death nine years later. Under the king’s successor, Farinelli’s role expanded to master of court entertainment. Retiring as a Spanish knight with a generous pension, he bought a villa near Bologna and entertained celebrity guests, including Mozart and Casanova, until his death at age seventy-seven.
Unlike Farinelli, many castrati had lonely personal lives and lackluster careers, limited to singing in church choirs. As attitudes changed over time, they were increasingly mocked and ostracized. After the French invasion of Italy in 1796, Napoleon banned the procedure—a step Italy itself finally took in 1870. The last castrato in the Sistine choir retired in 1913.
OPERA LOVERS’ PASSION for heavenly voices gave rise to a new genre: bel canto, or beautiful singing, in which the meaning of words mattered less than their impact on the ear—and the heart. Three Italian composers with names as lyrical as their music—Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti—infused their compositions with a passionate effervescence that enchanted audiences.
Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868), son of a trumpet player and a singer in Pesaro on Italy’s Adriatic coast, seemed born with music in his blood. He sang as a child, started composing as a young teen, and soon mastered the violin, horn, and harpsichord. His lilting melodies, rhapsodies of joy with a thrilling buildup of orchestral sound over a lyric repeated again and again, won him the nickname Monsieur Crescendo.
“Give me the laundress’s bill,” he once said with typical geniality, “and I will even set that to music.” In less than three weeks, Rossini created one of the most charming romantic operas: Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville). Beethoven predicted, rightly, that it would be “played as long as Italian opera exists.” Even if you have never heard any of Rossini’s forty full-length operas, you would recognize his stirring William Tell Overture, which provided the theme for the classic Lone Ranger television series as well as countless commercials.
Rossini’s passions extended beyond music to food. After Il barbiere’s opening night, Rossini wrote to the soprano Isabella Colbran (whom he married in 1822) that “what interests me more than music is the discovery that I have made of a new salad, which I hasten to send to you.”
A connoisseur of sophisticated pleasures, Rossini retired from opera composition in his late thirties. Separated from his volatile first wife, he lived with and eventually married Olympe Pélissier, an artist’s model and vivacious socialite. The ebullient couple, the toast of Paris, reveled in the delights of the musical mecca of their day until Rossini’s death at age seventy-six.
WHILE ROSSINI ENJOYED a long and pleasurable life, Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1835), as if sensing that his days would be tragically few, rushed to fill them. A child prodigy, the son and grandson of accomplished organists and music teachers in the Sicilian city of Catania, he could sing an aria at eighteen months, read music at two, and play the piano at three. He composed his first songs when he was six.
The handsome young artist, according to anecdotal accounts, wrote his first opera to win the approval of the parents of a girl he hoped to marry. Yet Bellini never wed. Instead, he became entangled with a series of married women—who, as he wrote to a friend, saved him “from a passion for an unmarried girl, which could land me with an eternal tie.”
Surrendering wholly to his passion for music, Bellini swore, “I will stamp my name on this epoch.” And so he did. Works such as La sonnambula (The Sleepwalker) and I puritani (The Puritans) won praise from Liszt, Chopin, and the hypercritical Wagner, who admired the Italian’s “uncanny ability to match music with text and psychology.” In a letter, Bellini reported, “My style is now heard in the most important theaters in the world…and with the greatest enthusiasm.”
Bellini labored over each of his ten operas so intensely that he compared his efforts to “vomiting blood.” He expected audiences to respond with equal emotion. “Opera must make people weep, feel horrified, die through singing,” he insisted.
That’s exactly how I feel when I listen to his Druid high priestess in Norma, considered the most difficult role in the soprano repertory. As if exposing every micrometer of her psyche, Norma’s voice rises and falls, softens and deepens, all the while floating hypnotically from the stage.
The pressures of living up to expectations—his own above all—undermined Bellini’s health. At about age thirty, he developed a digestive disorder he described as “a tremendous inflammatory gastric bilious fear.” In 1835, at thirty-three, he suffered an acute attack and died of dysentery in Paris. Music lovers lauded him as one of Italy’s greatest composers but also mourned the loss of the works he didn’t live long enough to write.
WITH ROSSINI’S RETIREMENT and Bellini’s death, Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848) stepped into the spotlight—an unlikely position for a poor boy from Bergamo whose father ran the municipal pawnshop. Yet at age nine, he won a scholarship to a local music school.
In his thunderbolt career, Donizetti would write 75 operas, 16 symphonies, 19 string quartets, 193 songs, 45 duets, 3 oratories, 28 cantos, and several chamber pieces. The intense young artist fell in love with the daughter of a prominent Roman family when she was just thirteen; they wed several years later in 1828.
The first opera I saw in Italy—in Venice’s jewel-box Teatro La Fenice (before it burned to the ground in 1996, to be rebuilt in 2003)—was Donizetti’s frothy L’elisir d’amore (The Elixir of Love). New to Italian, I couldn’t understand the lyrics, but the score bubbled like musical champagne. Donizetti gained even greater popularity with operas such as Anna Bolena and Roberto Devereux that brought British history to dramatic musical life.
Yet Donizetti, with his light, bright touch, gained his greatest acclaim for setting madness to melody. The heroine of his best-known opera, Lucia di Lammermoor, pulls us with her as she loses her grip on reality in a coloratura tour de force. When I saw Beverly Sills perform the role, I immediately understood why she was acclaimed as “the fastest voice alive.”
Ironically, Donizetti himself would descend into madness. Biographers believe that he contracted syphilis in his youth. Undetected, it may have led to the death in infancy of his three children and possibly contributed to his wife’s demise as well. In 1845, at age forty-eight, the composer was diagnosed with advanced syphilis and severe mental illness.
The following year, he was confined in an establishment “devoted to cerebral and intellectual maladies.” He wrote desperate letters seeking freedom; no one ever mailed them. His brother and nephew finally managed to bring Donizetti home to Bergamo, where he died in 1848.
DONIZETTI SOMETIMES WROTE OPERAS for specific sopranos, including the diva who would gain fame for her voice and infamy for her relationship with Giuseppe Verdi. Giuseppina Strepponi (1815–1897) appeared the perfect bel canto heroine: slim and pretty, with an oval face, a prodigious memory, superb training, and well-honed acting skills. By age twenty, she toured constantly through Europe, her life a whirl of triumphs, applause, and adoring crowds.
“No woman but me is so desired by the public,” she wrote to her manager, who called her La Generalina for her steely determination. But, as often happened with female singers, romantic passion—and its consequences—soon jeopardized her professional career. At age twenty-two, Giuseppina discovered she was pregnant (probably by one of her managers), practically an occupational hazard for sopranos at the time. (“For a woman to keep her virtue in a stage career,” an eighteenth-century pope observed, “is like making her jump into the Tiber expecting her not to get wet.”)
Giuseppina arranged for a family in Florence to care for her son and quickly returned to the stage. Within two years, she placed another newborn, father unknown, on the foundlings’ turnstile at Florence’s orphanage, with half a coin attached to her hand with a ribbon. She gave the other half to a couple who, for a guarantee of steady payments, claimed the girl as their own.
A mesmerizing performer, Giuseppina achieved the level of primadonna assoluta (leading soprano of the highest rank) and realized her dream of singing to rapturous acclaim at Milan’s La Scala, the premier opera house in Italy. While there, she encouraged the theater manager to produce a new opera by young Giuseppe Verdi, with her in the female lead.
During rehearsals, the celebrated soprano met the ruggedly handsome composer. They shared several passions—for music, of course, but also for English literature, especially Shakespeare. However, life soon swept them in different directions.
Verdi (1813–1901), born into a poor rural family, learned music from the local priest before studying in the country town of Busseto. Married with two small children, he struggled for recognition as a composer. Then tragedy struck—again and again and again. His daughter, not yet a year old, died in 1838. The following year, his infant son developed pneumonia and passed away in the arms of his anguished mother. Then encephalitis killed Verdi’s young wife. For the third time in as many years, he wrote to a friend, “A coffin leaves my house! I am alone! Alone!” He swore never to compose again.
Then a libretto, shoved into Verdi’s coat pocket by a Milan impresario, revived his passion for opera—and life. Nabucco, the story of Hebrew slaves yearning for freedom in Babylon, would tap into the nationalism pulsing through the Italian peninsula. Verdi wrote the female lead for Giuseppina as he recalled her glorious prime. But her overworked voice had begun to falter.
As a single mother providing for her illegitimate children and her aging mother, Giuseppina had performed nonstop for years, sometimes five or more times a week. She struggled valiantly through the first performances of Nabucco at La Scala in 1842 but soon reached the limits of endurance.
As her career waned, Verdi’s star rose, and he turned to Giuseppina to navigate the behind-the-scenes labyrinth of contracts and negotiations. By 1843, newspaper gossips hinted of a romance between the maestro of the moment and the fading prima donna.
IN 1846, AFTER RETIRING at age thirty, Giuseppina moved to Paris, where she taught singing and performed for private audiences. When Verdi joined her, Giuseppina took on new offstage roles—as his companion, lover, secretary, adviser, hostess, and muse. She adored loving and being loved by the man she called her “magician,” who gave her back the respectability she feared she had lost forever.
In 1848, as political upheavals rocked Europe, the lovers returned to Italy to settle in Busseto. The townspeople were outraged to discover that the maestro had dared to bring an unmarried woman of the theater into their midst. Giuseppina soon became, as the biographer William Berger put it, “the Yoko Ono of Busseto.” When newspapers ran stories of her past lovers and abandoned children, locals threw stones at Verdi’s windows.
Desperate for tranquillity, the couple moved to rural Sant’Agata—an oasis for Verdi, but a solitary “valley of tears and yawns” for Giuseppina. As Verdi took on commissions from Europe’s leading opera houses, the pair traveled, often returning to Paris for prolonged periods.
After seeing Alexandre Dumas’s Lady of the Camellias in a Paris theater, they conceived of an opera based on a consumptive courtesan who falls in love with a young aristocrat but sacrifices her happiness for his family’s honor. For Giuseppina, the story paralleled her own life as a traviata (a woman who had strayed and lost her way). For Verdi, it exposed the moralistic self-righteousness they had encountered in Busseto.
Having shared the croce e delizia (torment and delight) of forbidden love that Verdi would immortalize, the couple worked together closely, with Giuseppina singing the mellifluous arias of the heroine Violetta as they flowed from the composer’s piano. According to musicologists, La traviata, the opera born of their shared passion (and my favorite of Verdi’s works), has been performed somewhere in the world every single night for the last hundred years.
In 1859, the composer and his first lady formalized their union. The groom, forty-six, and the bride, forty-four, traveled to a small village near Geneva, where an abbot pronounced them man and wife, with the coachman and bell ringer as the only witnesses. Verdi never issued any public announcement of the marriage.
AFTER ITALY BECAME an independent nation in 1861, the composer’s genius and acclaim blazed brighter than ever. But, as Gaia Servadio reports in The Real Traviata, Giuseppina fell into a deep depression, complained of constant pain, and put on so much weight that a journalist described her ample chin as “lying restfully on her breast.” The couple quarreled in high-decibel screaming matches, and Verdi began spending more time away.
In his midfifties, as if entering a passionate second spring, Verdi became infatuated with a much younger, zaftig Czech soprano named Teresa Stolz (1834–1902), the mistress of a frequent conductor of his works. Verdi wooed her by writing a great opera about a noble slave in ancient Egypt. Teresa, with formidable features and regal bearing, seemed born to play his Aida. The premiere in 1871 catapulted her to stardom. Touring in the role, sometimes with Verdi conducting, Teresa began signing her name “Aida.”
In an odd romantic triangle, Verdi, his wife, and his presumed mistress lived at Sant’Agata and often traveled together, spurring talk throughout the opera world. Gossips whispered of a showdown, with Giuseppina threatening to leave if Teresa didn’t and Verdi declaring that “she stays, or I blow my brains out.” Both women remained in his life.
In her later years, Giuseppina, racked with physical and psychological maladies, wandered through the mists of Sant’Agata, cocooned in sorrow. In November 1897, after more than half a century with Verdi, Giuseppina came down with pneumonia. Her “magician” brought the last violets of the season to the woman who had inspired his Violetta. She was buried with the small bouquet in her hand.
Teresa remained the maestro’s faithful consort but never became his lawful wife. At age eighty-seven, he wrote to her, “Believe in my love—great, very very great, and very true.” The following year, Verdi, whose music seemed as vital as air to his countrymen, died.
A NEW GENERATION OF COMPOSERS forged a fresh approach they called verismo, which translates as both “truth” and “realism.” Rather than creating grand epics, they strove to express the passions of real people, “great sorrows in little souls,” as Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), the last of Italy’s operatic princes, put it.
While I was fascinated to find Puccini’s notes, letters, libretti—and hat collection—on display at his unpretentious home at Torre del Lago in northern Tuscany, I was even more intrigued by his operatic love life. With equal passion, the composer pursued lovely ladies, fast cars, and wild geese.
After a scandalous affair, Puccini ran off with his pregnant piano student Elvira, wife of a friend and mother of two young children. By the time her husband died, making it possible for them to marry, Puccini was involved with another woman, who fully expected to become his wife. Pressured on all sides, he eventually married Elvira—late in the evening in a local church, with only a few witnesses and cloths thrown over the windows.
Unlike this least romantic of weddings, Puccini’s operas were saturated with passion. In La bohème, he translates what he called “tenderness mixed with pain” into music I think of as the sound of love’s lightning bolt setting two hearts afire. In Tosca, passion compels his diva-heroine to do the unthinkable and murder the man threatening to kill her lover. In Madama Butterfly, our hearts break as the sweetest of Japanese brides sacrifices herself for her son and his American father. Only in Turandot, the grand spectacle Puccini didn’t live to complete, does love prevail in triumphant majesty.
Puccini himself often chose the voices for his operas. During auditions for La bohème in Livorno in 1897, a rough-featured Neapolitan tried out for the romantic lead. As he sang Rodolfo’s “Che gelida manina!” (What a cold little hand!), Puccini interrupted to ask two questions:
“Who sent you? Was it God himself?”
THE ASPIRING TENOR was Enrico Caruso (1873–1921), the third of seven children of a hard-drinking car mechanic in Naples, who left school at age ten to earn money for his family. Determined to pursue his passion for singing, Caruso paid for professional training by hiring out his voice to serenade the sweethearts of besotted suitors. At eighteen, he used some of these earnings to buy his first pair of new shoes.
Debuting in La bohème, Caruso electrified the audience with the full powers of his outsize lungs and vocal cords. His costar, the soprano Ada Giachetti, was equally impressed. Their onstage passion sparked an offstage romance, but the situation was complicated. Ada was married with a young son. Caruso was renting a room at Ada’s mother’s home. Her seventeen-year-old sister Rina had become so infatuated with the tenor that she washed his clothes and ironed his shirts.
Ada soon became pregnant. With a substantial payment from Caruso, her husband slipped out of their lives. After she and Caruso had a second son, Ada withdrew from the stage and settled into the luxurious home the tenor bought in London.
The “voice of the century” would make its way into the homes of millions of fans who never entered an opera house—thanks to the newly invented gramophone, which revolutionized the way people listened to music. From 1904 to 1920, Caruso made more than 260 recordings, which sold so many copies that the poor boy from Naples became a millionaire and an international celebrity. As the first modern operatic superstar, Caruso found himself besieged by reporters, photographers, fans, sycophants—and groupies.
Neither tall nor handsome, the charming tenor nonetheless acquired lovers in every city he visited. Some of his liaisons lasted so long that the father of one “fiancée” sued him for breach of promise. Ada’s younger sister Rina, who had blossomed into an international prima donna, began singing with Caruso in the same passionate duets as her sibling—with the same offstage romantic consequences.
In 1908, Caruso returned from a triumphant tour to an empty house. Ada had run off with the chauffeur. His son later described the tenor as “a man nearly gone out of his mind.” Shattered by Ada’s betrayal, he seethed at the humiliation of the mother of his children leaving the world’s greatest singer for a driver.
Shortly afterward, Caruso, overcome with passion, sang the fervent lament of the jilted lover Canio in Pagliacci with real tears running down his cheeks. The audience wept too—as they would whenever he performed what became his hallmark role.
“That night my voice changed forever,” Caruso said. “I was living the great pain that you need to make great music.” Critics applauded the transformation. Over time, Caruso’s richly textured voice deepened into an instrument, in one’s words, “of incomparable beauty, dazzling, inebriant, celestially harmonious, and sinfully carnal—one of the most seductive ever bestowed on man.”
“THE SINGING MACHINE” EARNED this reputation with nonstop appearances. As the leading tenor for eighteen seasons at the Metropolitan Opera, Caruso sang in 863 performances as well as the earliest Live from the Met radio broadcasts. But fame brought Caruso fortune, not happiness.
When he was unknown, Caruso recalled singing “like a bird, careless, without thought of nerves.” Later, he felt valued “only because of my throat, which I have sold to managers as Faust sold his soul to Mephistopheles.”
Scores of women sauntered through Caruso’s bedroom—or he through theirs—but he swore he’d never marry. Then at a christening party in Connecticut, Caruso met Dorothy Park Benjamin (1893–1955), the socialite daughter of a wealthy patent attorney. She was twenty-five, about two decades younger than the tenor. Passion once again prevailed.
In August 1918, Dorothy became Caruso’s wife. Her disapproving father and invalid mother weren’t invited to the wedding. Caruso’s children, living with their aunt Rina (whom Caruso had promised to marry), read about the nuptials in a banner headline in the Livorno newspaper: CARUSO SPOSA AMERICANA (Caruso marries American woman). He never offered a word of explanation.
As ardent as any lover he played onstage, Caruso showered his young bride with jewels, evening gowns (she never wore the same one twice), and furs. Dorothy reciprocated with unmitigated adoration. A year after their marriage, she gave birth to a daughter whom Caruso named Gloria “because she will be my greatest glory.” But his grueling performance schedule—and his two-pack-a-day smoking habit—had undermined his health.
Chronic headaches and a cough worsened. In 1920, during a performance of Samson and Delilah at the Met, Caruso knocked down two “pillars” woven of straw. One fell from a height of three stories, slamming into his back and causing excruciating pain. In another opera, he began hemorrhaging so severely from his throat that he kept wiping blood from his mouth with handkerchief after handkerchief passed to him by the chorus. Acute pleurisy, doctors determined, had fulminated into bronchial pneumonia.
Over the next few months, Caruso suffered through a series of misdiagnoses and questionable treatments still debated in the medical literature. After several operations, Caruso sailed to Italy in the summer of 1921 with his wife and baby daughter to recuperate. For a few idyllic weeks in Sorrento, he seemed to be improving. Then his condition worsened, and he died in Naples en route to Rome for emergency surgery. The cause of death was peritonitis (infection of the peritoneal sac) caused by a burst abscess below his kidney.
In 1986, the songwriter Lucio Dalla, inspired by a stay in Caruso’s hotel suite in Sorrento, wrote a tribute to the tenor. The verses poetically describe his love as so passionate that it melted the blood in his veins. The haunting chorus in Neapolitan—“Te voglio bene assaje / ma tanto tanto bene sai” (I love you, you know / so much, so much, you know)—embedded itself in the hearts of listeners around the world.
OF ALL THE SINGERS who have belted out this soulful tune, none compared with Luciano Pavarotti (1935–2007), another barrel-chested tenor whose voice, like Caruso’s, seduced audiences far beyond opera stages. Born in Modena, the son of a baker who sang in the local choir, Pavarotti studied to become a teacher (at his mother’s urging) but couldn’t resist his passion for opera.
At nineteen, he began intensive musical training. Six years later he debuted as Rodolfo in La bohème in Reggio Emilia. Not long afterward, he substituted in the same role at London’s Covent Garden, personally selected by an acclaimed Mimì, the soprano Joan Sutherland.
With a sonic marvel of a voice, Pavarotti quickly established himself as the “King of the High Cs,” performing on opera stages around the world. Critics praised his clarity of diction, stage presence, and effortless high notes as well as his remarkable ability “to attract people, perhaps seduce them, to his art”—with both a voice of unmatched beauty and a warm, engaging personality that sparkled in his many media appearances.
Embraced by America, Pavarotti sang 379 performances at the Met and sold more than one hundred million records. In his parallel “poperatic” career, he paired with Elton John and Sting, sponsored a summer music festival, and played a sex symbol in a movie called Yes, Giorgio. In 1990, the Three Tenors—Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras—established a new form of opera: the stadium concert. Beginning in the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, they performed more than thirty times around the world, selling millions of recordings and videos.
Eventually Pavarotti’s passions—for food, women (as gargantuan as his love of food), and life itself—overshadowed his voice. After a string of no-shows, frustrated theater managers denounced him as the “King of Cancellations.” He was booed off the stage at La Scala and caught lip-synching at a concert in Modena.
Living like a sultan amid a harem of doting beauties, Pavarotti remained married to his hometown bride, mother of their three daughters, for thirty-four years. At fifty-eight, balding and hugely overweight, he began bantering with a slim twenty-three-year-old graduate student at a horse show he sponsored in Modena. After several weeks of flirtation, Pavarotti asked Nicoletta Mantovani to come with him on a world tour. She refused.
Would she at least come to the airport to wave him off? Nicoletta agreed, then couldn’t resist leaving with him—but only for a week, she insisted. She never returned to her studies. Instead, she became Pavarotti’s assistant, lover, mother of his twins (a boy who died at birth of complications of prematurity and a girl), and, in 2003, his second wife.
In 2004, at age sixty-four, Pavarotti began a global farewell tour. Within two years, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In his truly operatic final months, Pavarotti reconciled with his estranged daughters from his first marriage and bade farewell to their mother. He was buried with solemn ceremony in Modena’s cathedral in September 2007. Larger-than-life Luciano left behind an estate worth an estimated $465 million and a legacy that lives on in the passion he inspired in scores of young singers, who—despite formidable odds—hope to attain some small measure of his success.
WHEN PAVAROTTI LAUNCHED his career in the 1960s, advisers urged him to rise as far as he could as fast as he could because opera “would be dead in ten years.” Instead, he ushered in one of its golden ages.
In 1990, a young boy named Vittorio Grigolo sang the offstage folk song that begins the third act of Tosca. “Someday,” Pavarotti, playing the idealistic painter Cavaradossi, predicted, “you will be singing my role.”
The boy dubbed “Il Pavarottino” (Little Pavarotti) became a soloist in the Sistine Chapel choir before launching a career in opera. In 2018, Grigolo, praised as “the most galvanically convincing singer in the world today,” debuted as Cavaradossi at the Metropolitan Opera. “All my life I’ve been preparing for this role, this moment,” he said on opening night.
I watched Grigolo’s incandescent performance, not at New York City’s Lincoln Center, but three thousand miles away on a high-definition screen in a quaint theater in the little town of Larkspur, California, one of hundreds around the country that presents live operas from the Met.
Simulcasts are only one of the reasons the doomsayers predicting opera’s imminent demise have been proven wrong—again. Despite decades of dire forecasts, the most passionate of performing arts endures. If opera were mortal, its devotees contend, it would be dead by now. Instead, like one of its mythic heroes, opera refuses to die.
Italian works remain the people’s favorites, but the opera stage has evolved into a global village populated with performers of every nation, race, and hue. Recent seasons at the San Francisco Opera, my home company, have featured a Mexican Rodolfo in La bohème, a Romanian Violetta in La traviata, an American Radames in Aida, and a Swedish empress in Turandot—all giving masterful and moving performances.
Voices like theirs keep opera lovers like myself coming back season after season. The lyrics and notes may be the same, but every singer brings a unique passion to the stage, a passion given eternal life by the music that Italian masters crafted centuries ago.
For as long as humans yearn to hear what words alone cannot express, we will return, time and again, to listen with our hearts as well as our ears. And the divinely gifted singers of opera will continue—as the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio wrote of Verdi—to give voice to our hopes and to weep and love for us all.