Pavarotti: from football dreams to opera stardom

MODENA, Italy (Reuters) - Like most Italian boys, Luciano Pavarotti used to dream of being a football star. Instead, he rose to opera stardom and entranced stadium audiences with his singing voice rather than his football skills.

Pavarotti died in the early hours of Thursday after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 71.

The rotund, black-bearded tenor, regarded by many as the greatest of his generation, shot to fame with a stand-in appearance at London's Covent Garden in 1963 and soon had critics gushing about his voluminous voice.

Perhaps his biggest gift to the music world was when he teamed up with Spanish stars Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras at the 1990 football World Cup in Italy and introduced operatic classics to an estimated 800 million people in TV coverage around the globe.

Sales of opera albums shot up after the gala concert in Rome's Baths of Caracalla and strains of Puccini's aria "Nessun Dorma", from his opera "Turandot", became as much a feature of soccer fever as the usual more raucous stadium chants.

Born in 1935, Pavarotti's father was a baker who liked to sing and his mother worked in a cigar factory. They lived with modest means in a small apartment in Modena but fled to the countryside during World War Two.

He began singing in the local church choir at the age of nine, but his parents wanted him to have a steady job and for a while he worked as an insurance salesman and teacher.

After voice training in the 1950s, Pavarotti discovered he had perfect pitch. He started singing on the operatic circuit and his big break came thanks to another Italian opera great, Giuseppe di Stefano, who dropped out of a London performance of "La Boheme" in 1963.

Covent Garden had lined up "this large young man" as a possible stand-in and a star was born.

In 1972 he famously hit nine high C's in a row in "Daughter of the Regiment" at New York's Metropolitan Opera, which he referred to as "my home".

Thirty years later, Pavarotti was still one of the highest paid classical singers even though his public performances were fewer and further between.

FAREWELL TOUR

Medical problems beset "Big Luciano" in the final years of his career, forcing him to cancel several dates of his marathon worldwide farewell tour.

In July 2006 he underwent surgery in New York for pancreatic cancer and retreated to his villa in the Italian city of Modena. He said he hoped to resume the tour soon but had to cancel his first planned public appearance a few months later.

"I have had everything in life, really everything. And if everything is taken away from me, with God we're even and quits," he said in one of his last interviews.

On the few occasions he performed in the past decade, Pavarotti was criticised for his lack of mobility, sometimes seating his large frame centre stage to belt out the arias.