I guess I was about 10, the sort of age where boys become men and feelings are internalized and suppressed, yet there I was crying my eyes out, not in pain but just unable to contain myself, the raw emotion just overwhelming. Why? It was my first opera; I’d been dragged unwillingly, dolled up in my best, to Covent Garden. The music started, the performance progressed, I was nonplussed, fidgeting. And then He sang, his voice soaring through the theatre, powerful, dripping with raw emotion, passionate, majestic and totally spellbinding. Words incomprehensible in a foreign language, yet with meaning clear. He held us there, entranced by his voice captured in a way totally incomprehensible to a boy with tears streaming unnoticed down his cheeks. Pavarotti was his name, and it took me several years before I fully appreciated and understood and, standing in the rain in Hyde Park with 150,000 others as our tears merged unnoticed with the rain and dripped earthwards, those boyhood memories finally made sense. I was too young to understand or even fully appreciate you back then, but thank you Luciano Pavarotti for the joy you brought to me and so many others through the years. You may be gone but your legacy will live on through your recordings continuing to entertain us for eternity.

sd