THE VOICE FROM MODENA: A Life of Luciano Pavarotti

In the autumn of 1935, the city of Modena smelled of rain on stone and of bread. It was a smell that belonged, more than to the city itself, to one particular corner of it: a small bakery on the outskirts where a young man named Fernando Pavarotti worked the ovens through the grey hours before dawn, his forearms dusted white, his voice — when he let it out, which was not often enough for the neighbors who loved to hear it — rising over the clatter of pans in a tenor so natural, so unschooled and yet so right, that people said God had wasted it on a baker.

Fernando did not think he was wasting anything. He rose at four, shaped the dough, fed the ovens, and went to Mass, and after Mass, when the town’s amateur choir gathered, he sang Verdi and Puccini for the joy of it, never once imagining a stage larger than the nave of a parish church. He kept, in a cabinet that his son would later describe as the single most important piece of furniture in the house, a small and precious collection of gramophone records: Beniamino Gigli, Giovanni Martinelli, Tito Schipa. On Sunday afternoons the Pavarotti apartment on Via Giardini — two rooms, no running water on the upper floor, a single stove that heated one corner and left the rest of the flat in a chill that outlasted the Modenese winter — filled with the crackle and swell of those records, played over and over on a wind-up gramophone until the grooves themselves seemed to have memorized the shape of Fernando’s hopes.

On the twelfth of October, 1935, in that same flat, Adele Pavarotti gave birth to a son. She had been carrying twins; the daughter did not survive. The son they named Luciano lived, small and healthy enough, and grew in a household that was poor in nearly everything except two things: music, and the particular, ferocious tenderness that Italian families reserve for an only surviving child. Adele worked in a cigar factory, rolling tobacco leaf for hours that bent her spine and roughened her hands, and it was understood without discussion that whatever else the family lacked, the boy would not lack food, and he would not lack the sound of singing.

He would say, decades later, sitting in dressing rooms from Milan to New York with a towel around his neck and a glass of mineral water in his hand, that his first memory of music was not a memory of listening but a memory of being inside it — his father’s chest against his small back as Fernando held him and sang, the vibration traveling through the child’s bones before the child had any name for what a note was. This is the kind of thing a man says about his own childhood once he has become famous, and it would be easy to dismiss it as a performer’s embellishment, a good story told for journalists. But those who knew the Pavarotti household in the years before anyone had heard of Luciano confirm something close to it: that in that flat, singing was not a special occasion. It was the weather.

Modena in the mid-1930s was a city of arcaded streets and Romanesque stone, dominated by a cathedral — the Duomo — whose bell tower, the Ghirlandina, could be seen from nearly every rooftop in the old town. It was also, like every Italian city in those years, a place living under the lengthening shadow of Fascism. Mussolini’s portraits hung in the classrooms; the radio, when it was not playing opera, carried the clipped cadences of state propaganda. Fernando Pavarotti was no partisan of the regime — he was, by every account, a private man whose politics extended little beyond his family, his ovens, and his choir — but no Italian of his generation could raise a child entirely outside politics’ reach, and Luciano’s earliest years were shaped, whether he understood it at four or five years old, by a country tightening itself for a war that would soon arrive at the family’s own door.

Before that, though, there were the ordinary pleasures of a poor child’s Modena. There was the Piazza Grande, where he would later say he first understood that a voice could travel — that a sound made in one corner of an open space could reach and move a person standing far away, invisible to the singer, transformed by nothing but air. There was the football pitch, dirt more often than grass, where a boy quickly nicknamed for his size discovered an early, consuming passion that had nothing to do with music at all. And there was his grandmother, and his cousins, and the dense, noisy, affectionate tangle of extended family that Italians of that region and era took as simply the condition of being alive.

Fernando’s own singing was, in a way that Luciano would spend much of his adult life explaining to interviewers, both a gift and a warning. Fernando had, by every account of those who heard him — and there are more such accounts than one might expect for an amateur baker from a provincial choir — an extraordinary natural instrument: a tenor of real beauty, with the kind of ring and freedom that professional singers spend careers trying to manufacture. But Fernando was, temperamentally, unfit for the life such a voice might have earned him. He suffered from what his son later called, with the particular blend of exasperation and reverence sons reserve for such judgments, an incurable stage fright — a paralysis that meant a man who could fill a choir loft with sound became, before any audience larger or more formal than his neighbors, unable to produce more than a whisper.

It became, in later years, one of the load-bearing stories of Luciano’s own myth: that he had inherited his father’s voice but not his father’s fear, and that everything he achieved was, in some sense, the completion of a sentence his father had left unfinished. Whether this is entirely true, or whether it is the kind of narrative shape a life acquires only in retrospect, hardly matters. What matters is that it was true enough for the people who lived it, and that Fernando Pavarotti, all his life, listened to his son sing with a pride that had no envy in it at all — only the settled satisfaction of a man who has watched something he loved find, in another body, the freedom it could not find in his own.

The war reached Modena in earnest by 1943. The city, an industrial center with rail lines the Allies wanted broken, endured bombing that sent the Pavarotti family, like thousands of their neighbors, out of the town center and into the surrounding countryside for safety. They lived for a time as displaced people live everywhere — in a rented room in a farmhouse, dependent on the kindness and the produce of strangers, listening for aircraft, counting the days by shortages rather than by calendar. Luciano was eight, nine, ten years old across these years — old enough to remember them clearly, too young to be given any explanation beyond what a frightened adult offers a frightened child.

It would be sentimental, and probably inaccurate, to claim that the war shaped his voice or his art in any direct way. But it shaped him. It gave him, as it gave an entire generation of Italians who came of age amid rubble and ration cards, an appetite for pleasure and warmth that never entirely left him — a horror of privation that expressed itself, later, in a famous and much-photographed love of food, of company, of excess in all its generous forms. Men who have been hungry as children rarely become abstemious adults, and Luciano Pavarotti, whatever else might be said of him, was never an abstemious man.

The war ended in 1945. Modena, battered but not devastated, began the slow work of reconstruction, and the Pavarotti family returned to the city and, eventually, to something like normal life. Fernando went back to his bakery and his choir. Adele went back to the cigar factory. And Luciano, not yet ten years old, began — without quite knowing that this was what was happening to him — the long apprenticeship of a boy who has music in his blood and no earthly idea, yet, of what to do with it.

He would spend the next decade discovering the answer, by way of a soccer pitch, a teacher’s certificate, an insurance office, and a series of moments — some of them almost accidental — that would turn a baker’s son from Via Giardini into, eventually, the most famous tenor voice of the twentieth century. But that story, the story he liked to tell, always began here: in two cold rooms above a Modena street, with a gramophone turning Gigli’s voice round and round in the dark, and a father who sang like an angel and could not bear to be watched doing it.