Luciano Pavarotti

Snapshot

Luciano Pavarotti performed at the Salzburg Festival four times between 1976 and 1985, including a Mozartean title role in Idomeneo that showed a classical range beyond his signature Italian repertoire. He is the tenor who did more than any other individual to make opera a global entertainment: the Three Tenors Rome concert of 1990, conducted by Zubin Mehta, reached an estimated 800 million viewers.

The Story

Luciano Pavarotti made his Salzburg Festival debut on 31 July 1976 with a recital of Italian art songs at the Grosses Festspielhaus. He returned in 1978 as the Italian Singer in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, conducted by Zubin Mehta, a brief but resonant cameo that brought his distinctive tenor into a German repertoire context. In 1983 he returned for the title role in Mozart’s Idomeneo, a challenging classical part that drew a Salzburg audience of around 1,800 and demonstrated that his instrument could sustain the demands of 18th-century opera seria. He gave a second recital in 1985.

Four appearances over a decade is not a long Salzburg career by the standards of singers like Herbert von Karajan’s long-term collaborators, but Pavarotti’s significance to the Festival sits in a wider frame. He was the tenor who made opera legible to audiences who had never attended an opera house. The Three Tenors concert in Rome in 1990, with Domingo and Jose Carreras under Zubin Mehta’s baton at the ancient Baths of Caracalla, was broadcast to an estimated 800 million viewers during the FIFA World Cup. “Nessun Dorma” from Puccini’s Turandot became the most recognised aria on earth almost overnight.

His “Pavarotti and Friends” charity concerts raised over thirty million dollars for refugees through the 1990s. He died in Modena in 2007. The city where he was born, where he won a regional singing prize in 1961 that launched his career, received him back at the end.