Word: local
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that time he had joined his father in the church choir and a local opera chorus, and had begun performing impromptu serenades on summer evenings outside the family's apartment house, accompanying himself on the guitar. But music still seemed no more than an avocation. At 18, he enrolled in a teacher-training course. Two years later, just as he was settling into the routine of instructing eight-year-olds in public school, music began to look like a vocation after all. He and his father accompanied the local chorus to an international music festival in Llangollen, Wales, where?...
Deciding that "teaching was too hard on my vocal cords," he took a job selling insurance, then set about painstakingly acquiring a vocal technique from teachers in the area. At 25, having won a vocal competition in nearby Reggio Emilia, he was awarded an engagement in a local production of La Bohème. Within the span of three weeks, he married Adua and sang his first Rodolfo. His debut led to other bookings in Italy and, eventually, at minor houses all over Europe. La Scala offered him a job as a house stand-by for all its tenor roles...
...property has a closed-circuit TV camera for screening visitors, yet the gate is rarely shut, except at night, because nobody wants to be bothered with all that opening and closing. Musicians like Conductor Claudio Abbado, in-laws, the curator of Pesaro's Rossini Museum, journalists, the local -the guests constantly come...
Later, on the terrace near a stone fountain he designed himself, Pavarotti presides boisterously over a table that rarely has fewer than 14 or 16 guests around it. Over plates of polenta (cornmeal porridge), sausage and pork in a thick gravy, washed down with Lambrusco, the talk moves from local politics to musical gossip: the burglary of Herbert von Karajan's Saint-Tropez villa, or the scheduling problems caused by the love affair of two internationally known singers...
...drive to Modena. There, in the cobbled square in front of the city's handsome Romanesque cathedral, he is greeted familiarly as "Luciano" by seemingly hundreds of old friends and schoolmates, and as "Signor Tenore" by everyone else. His father, 65, still sings in the church choir and local chorus-and now enjoys the status of a recording artist, thanks to a few small roles on Pavarotti's albums. Both parents will join the Pavarotti ménage soon. Luciano plans to settle everybody in a newly purchased 17th century mansion, which has a poplar-lined avenue leading...