He excelled, but was forced to quit because, he told an interviewer from Cigar Aficionado magazine, "all that speaking was damaging my voice. Uncertain that he would be able to sustain a career in music, he also trained as a teacher, before moving into insurance sales. You have to do something with great force under control and it is very difficult." "I must study because singing in the way you sing in the shower is not enough. "I am not a natural singer," he told BBC Music Magazine in 1993. He was a diligent student (it is a myth that he cannot read music). It won first prize, and as a result the teenage Pavarotti caught the attention of a local professional tenor, Arrigo Pola, who took him on as a pupil even though he could not afford to pay for his lessons. In his youth, Pavarotti sang in a local opera chorus, the Corale Rossini, with which he travelled to Wales in 1954 to take part in the Llangollen international singing competition. His father, Fernando, was a baker and keen amateur singer, and his mother worked in the Toscana cigar factory.
He divides his time between homes in Pesaro, a Central Park apartment in Manhattan, and two flats in Monte Carlo. Albert Canto, the music critic for Il Giorno described it as "kissed by God and hailed by man" before berating him for singing "less and worse" and dabbling in popular concerts at the expense of opera. The man is larger than life in all senses: immensely wealthy, hugely popular and, most important of all, prodigiously talented, even if his voice is no longer the vibrant, lyrical, honeyed instrument it once was. Tickets for his four performances sold out immediately, and you can bet that most of the audience – from those who've paid £175 to sit in the stalls to those standing in the slips for a fiver – are there for Pavarotti not Puccini. "Because of my size, people see me once and don't forget me," he once said. Since then, he's had a hip and knee replacement and shed 50lb, but he still cuts a considerable figure. For in this performance of Tosca, the heroic revolutionary love interest, Cavaradossi, will be played by Luciano Pavarotti, 67 next birthday and so overweight that last time he performed the role here, in 1992, he spent much of the production leaning on props. But the audience at the Royal Opera House this Friday will need to suspend theirs absolutely. All opera requires a certain suspension of disbelief.
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