Word: foundings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Pavarotti, who is conscientious and meticulously punctual when he finally gets down to business, clashed at rehearsal with his costar, Soprano Renata Scotto, over her lateness and somebody's fluffs (whether hers or his was part of the dispute). They even stopped in mid-aria to exchange words not found in the libretto. On the day of the gala opening, Scotto received a letter warning that a claque was planning to boo her. It was signed "Enzo Grimaldo," the character played by Pavarotti. Scotto's husband accused Pavarotti of sponsoring the claque and alerted Adler and the San Francisco police...
...Puritani, arguing that their last-act duet, with its punishing high D-flats for tenor, should be transposed downward. Sills assured him he could hit the notes. "Only if you castrate me," he said. Last year, minutes before Pavarotti's TV recital, Metropolitan Assistant Conductor Gildo Di Nunzio found inm slumped in his dressing room "seeming so alone and terrified. He didn't think he could do it, he wished he could cancel. I wouldn't have been in those shoes for anything...
...when he was 27, he got a job as stand-by for Giuseppe di Stefano in a Covent Garden production of La Bohème and sang several performances. Conductor Richard Bonynge heard him and was "bowled over." Eventually, Pavarotti found himself singing with Bonynge's wife, Joan Sutherland, in a Miami production of Lucia di Lammermoor. To Sutherland's skeptical eye, this strapping unknown looked like "a big schoolboy." But to her ear? "Well, it was absolutely phenomenal ? the fabulous resonance, the shading, such range, such security." The Bonynges signed him up for a 14-week tour of Australia...
Those 14 weeks were a watershed that gave Pavarotti invaluable experience and exposure. In Sutherland he found a vital influence as well as a partnership that remains one of the most potent in opera. Says he: "I used to listen to her and think, how is it possible that this woman's notes never seem to end? How does she produce this endless chain of sound? I gradually realized it was her breathing. " Says Bonynge: "He was always getting hold of Joan around the middle and feeling her muscles. He wanted to figure out how her diaphragm worked. Especially...
...private workers are serious, those of public employees can be drastic. Some local governments soon will reap the whirlwind from years of promising elaborate benefits while making insufficient contributions to pension kitties. The General Accounting Office watchdogs reviewed at random 72 state and local government pension plans and found that 53 of them failed to make contributions on the level required by the Federal Government of private corporations. Says Michael Thome, head of the California state teachers retirement system: "Pension costs have been pushed into the future for somebody else to pay. Now, that day has arrived...