Italian operatic tenor, a superstar whose hundreds of recordings and international appearances have made him the best-known opera star of all time, eclipsing even Caruso. Achieving worldwide acclaim, he was hailed as a master, and his public appearances were booked up to five years in advance. With his tuxedoed girth, his black beard and dark eyebrows, he cut quite a figure on the concert stage, mopping his brow with the ever-present white handkerchief.
Pavarotti spoke of himself as a country boy and remembered his childhood in Modena as happy. He was surrounded by kin and by music. His dad, a baker, sang in the chorus of local productions with a beautiful tenor voice. His mom, Adele, only saw her son perform once as her severe heart condition confined her to her home. As a boy, more slender than in later years, he excelled at sports, particularly soccer. He sang in a children’s choir and knew he wanted to make music his life, but for the sake of security, he worked as a teacher for two years before making his professional opera debut in “La Bohème” on April 29, 1961. He made his La Scala debut in 1965 and reached another career high point when he debuted with New York City’s Metropolitan Opera on November 23, 1968.
While studying to become a teacher, Pavarotti met Adua Veroni and they married in September 1961. They had three daughters, Lorenza, Cristina and Juliana. After 35 years marriage, he went public about his love affair with his secretary, 26-year-old Nicoletta Mantovani in 1996, and he separated from Adua. He and Mantovani had met in 1993 when she joined his staff of eight as a temp secretary to help organize his international tours. Her fluency in four languages aided her usefulness in that post. Neither Mantovani nor Pavarotti would say when their relationship turned amorous, but paparazzi photographed them nuzzling in Italy in 1995 and on Barbados in 1996.
Increasingly rotund as the years went by, Pavarotti underwent hip-replacement surgery in July 1998. A short time later, minor surgery was performed on his left knee as well. He first injured his hip when he was a 12-year-old soccer player and it was aggravated by his weight, making performing increasingly difficult in later years. From the early ’80s on, Pavarotti canceled shows left and right. Because of illness, he dropped out of the live Grammy telecast. When he performed with Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras in Paris in July 1998, a concert broadcast to more than a billion viewers, he came on the stage in great pain.
After that, Mantovani made sure he stuck to the daily regimen of swimming, weight training and walking prescribed by therapists. She has also kept him on a low-fat diet that has helped him shed nearly 50 of his 300 plus pounds. If he attempted to overindulge, she took his plate away, and he let her. She declared that he was “something of a hypochondriac.” Despite many health and mobility problems, Pavarotti was an unsuccessful dieter. Food was not his only passion. He enjoyed sports, the outdoors, and horses, and he owned an equestrian center, Club Europa, near Modena.
Pavarotti released his autobiography, “My Story” in 1981. The baker’s son had become a rich man. On April 27, 1999 an appeals court in Rome ruled that Pavarotti owed $2.5 million in back taxes to the Italian government. Prosecutors alleged that he had failed to declare $19 million in income. On trial in September 2001 for income tax evasion, he claimed that he had only earned $1,400 a year in Italy from ’89 to ’95 as most of his business was conducted outside the country. After a month-long trial Pavarotti absolved of tax fraud in late October 2001.
His wife, Nicoletta Mantovani, age 34, had twins by C-section on January 13, 2003. It was a difficult pregnancy and the boy was stillborn; the daughter, Alice, survived. In late September 2003, the Italian tenor released his first solo studio album in 15 years, and unlike all his others, it was an album of Italian pop music. He predicted that the other tenors would follow his suit, claiming “I am a challenger. I think I am ahead of all of these things because I am a curious one and I like to try new things.” He dedicated one of his songs to his daughter Alice.
On December 13, 2003, in Modena, Italy, the tenor married his longtime girlfriend and mother of his 11-month old daughter.
The world of live opera bade a loving farewell to the Italian tenor on March 13, 2004 after he sang his last magnificent note in “Tosca” at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. The ecstatic audience greeted him with a 35-second standing ovation, and, at the opera’s conclusion, paid tribute for 11 minutes of resounding bravos that led to four curtain calls. Pavarotti said that although he was retiring from opera, he would continue appearing in concert until 2005.
His failing health got the better of him, however. The tenor underwent surgery on July 7, 2006 to remove a malignant tumor from his pancreas. The cancerous mass had been discovered the prior week and Pavarotti was forced to cancel his concert engagements for the remainder of the year. On August 8, 2007 he was hospitalized with a fever. He was released two weeks later but died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Modena at about 5 AM local time on September 6, 2007.
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