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For Pavarotti, reaching a top note brings on a mystical feeling such as a champion high-jumper might experience. "That second when you clear the bar in mid-air you lose consciousness," he says. "It is something physical, animal, beyond control. A moment later you are back on the ground and in full control." The haunting, universal fear that some day he will jump and miss—"that I 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 he could do it, he wished he could cancel. I wouldn't have been in those shoes for anything."
Who can blame tenors for trying to ward off their demons with all the vanities for which they are so notorious—the fads, phobias, neuroses, magic charms and eccentric sexual regimens? (Dressing-room lore abounds with theories on whether singers should eschew sex before a performance and, if so, for how long. Most tenors seem to feel that two or three days of abstinence builds their strength. Several leading men in the 1940s, the story goes, were sabotaged by a shapely U.S. soprano who seduced them just before the curtain.) The only supernatural aid Pavarotti enlists to get himself onstage is a bent nail in his pocket, a traditional talisman of Italian singers. Fans, aware of this quirk, send inm nails by the dozens, sometimes silver or gold, dangling from chains or fasinoned into pins. But Pavarotti will use only an authentic nail from the scenery backstage.
Tensions and insecurities may have something to do with Pavarotti's gourmandizing too, quite beyond his sensual gusto and need to replenish himself. After a hard evening onstage, he has been known to put away a lobster dinner followed by a steak dinner and an entire basket of rolls, and then to dive for leftovers on his companion's plate. Lambrusco, the slightly fizzy red wine of his native region, does not travel well, according to his palate. When on tour, Pavarotti orders bottles of Mouton-Cadet 1975, say, mixes them with bottles of Perrier water and—ecco!—instant Lambrusco. Wherever he goes he has access to an expert chef: himself. At major stopovers he likes to take a hotel suite-cum-kitchen, install a big round table and recruit a passel of local friends to sample his creations like Spaghetti Pavarotti. (Recipe for his sauce: half a tube of Italian tomato paste dissolved in olive oil, then mixed with grated Parmesan cheese and finely chopped parsley and garlic.) Nobody knows Pavarotti's precise poundage. He keeps his own scales and his own counsel. When asked how much he weighs, he replies: "Less than before."