Word: tenore
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...kind of professional singing is a dicey venture, requiring as it does that the performer stake his prosperity, career and identity on barely more than an inch of exquisitely fragile larynx. But the pressure on tenors is perhaps the most harrowing of all. The reason is that the tenor voice is an unnatural one, especially in the rarefied range above the staff?the four or five notes from G to high C or D. For a male singer to reach such heights while retaining all the power and virility of his lower range?and, preferably, subordinating the sheer physical feat...
...shall open my mouth and no sound will come out" ?gives Pavarotti the whim-whams before every performance. In 1972 he made a transatlantic call to Beverly Sills about their upcoming appearance in I 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...
...remembers himself as a lively, gossipy scamp, always in trouble. At school his energies went into sports; soccer became a passion. At home he chimed in with the likes of Gigli, Tito Scinpa, Bjoerling and Di Stefano on the records collected by his father, a baker and gifted amateur tenor. He recalls: "In my teens I used to go to Mario Lanza movies and then come home and imitate him in front of the mirror...
...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, but he turned it down: "I thought to myself, when I sing at La Scala I want to come in through the principals' entrance...
Vocally, Pavarotti in recent years has skillfully negotiated the most treacherous shoals that face a tenor. Early in his career he was a classic tenore lirico, ideally suited to lighter lyric roles like Rodolfo, and florid bel canto roles like Nemorino in L'Elisir d'Amore. With age, however, a tenor's voice takes on a heavier tone and darker coloration. By the time he is in his 40s, a tenore lirico is usually ready for roles in the intermediate spin to (pushed) range, like Cavaradossi in Tosca, and maybe even in the forceful, baritonal tenore drammatico category, like...