(7 of 9)
By 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—to their delirious amazement —they won first prize. Encouraged by Adua, whom he had met and become engaged to during teacher training, Luciano decided to give singing a try. (Another Modena youngster, a childhood friend of Pavarotti's, had already made the same decision: Soprano Mirella Freni.)
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, but he turned it down: "I thought to myself, when I sing at La Scala I want to come in through the principals' entrance."
In 1963, when he was 27, he got a job as stand-by for Giuseppe di Stefano in a Covent Garden production of La Bohème and sang several performances. Conductor Richard Bonynge heard him and was "bowled over." Eventually, Pavarotti found himself singing with Bonynge's wife, Joan Sutherland, in a Miami production of Lucia di Lammermoor. To Sutherland's skeptical eye, this strapping unknown looked like "a big schoolboy." But to her ear? "Well, it was absolutely phenomenal — the fabulous resonance, the shading, such range, such security." The Bonynges signed him up for a 14-week tour of Australia.
Those 14 weeks were a watershed that gave Pavarotti invaluable experience and exposure. In Sutherland he found a vital influence as well as a partnership that remains one of the most potent in opera. Says he: "I used to listen to her and think, how is it possible that this woman's notes never seem to end? How does she produce this endless chain of sound? I gradually realized it was her breathing. " Says Bonynge: "He was always getting hold of Joan around the middle and feeling her muscles. He wanted to figure out how her diaphragm worked. Especially in her placement of high notes, he was able to understand what she did and transfer her way of doing it to himself."