La Storia siamo Noi: Luciano Pavarotti (ENG SUB)

Luciano Pavarotti (Modena, 12 October 1935 – Modena, 6 September 2007) was an Italian tenor. Gifted with a voice that is ringing in the high notes and rich in the middle, with clear phrasing and a limpid timbre, he is counted among the greatest tenors of all time, as well as among the greatest exponents of opera music. With over 100 million copies sold worldwide, he is estimated to be one of the top singers in any musical genre, also in terms of sales, as well as one of the most successful Italian singers internationally.

Pavarotti's name became known to the general public thanks to his increasingly frequent television performances, such as his role as Rodolfo, filmed live at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in March 1977, alongside another Italian, Renata Scotto, which garnered the highest audience ratings of the time for a televised opera. The artist has won several Grammy Awards and platinum and gold records.

Known as "Maestro" and by the nicknames Big Luciano and Big P, given to him in the Anglo-Saxon world, over the course of his career, which spanned over half a century, he has won six Grammy Awards, including a Grammy Legend Award, awarded to him in 1998. Furthermore, by virtue of his contributions to the world of music, he received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2001 and was awarded the highest honors of the Italian Republic.

Pavarotti possessed a true tenor voice, very clear and, especially in the early part of his career, extended significantly into the high notes, reaching full command of the C4 and D4. The highest note he could perform was E flat, which he never actually sang, having never performed in operas that required it. He did, however, sing the falsettone F4 from Bellini's I puritani, though only on recordings and never live. Pavarotti's lowest note was a low A, which he also never sang due to his exclusively tenor role in opera, for which such low notes are rarely expected. Although he was unable to read the entire orchestral score, as he admitted in an interview with the BBC, Pavarotti had a perfect command of the musical parts written for a tenor and a piano.

An artist at times informal and a skilled communicator, in the modern sense of the term, and above all a significant figure even outside the world of entertainment, Pavarotti has been recognized by many critics as one of the finest tenor singers of the 20th century, a register that has also produced numerous great protagonists in the world of opera.

On February 10, 2006, during the opening ceremony of the Turin Winter Olympics, he lip-synced—due to the freezing temperatures that prevented him from mastering his voice—"Nessun dorma," an aria from Giacomo Puccini's Turandot, which had been recorded in the studio a few weeks earlier. It was the Maestro's final performance. In July of the same year, he underwent emergency surgery at a New York hospital to remove a malignant tumor from his pancreas.