How ‘Nessun Dorma’ changed the perception of opera for ever
Italia ’90 brought Puccini’s aria to the masses – but has it become too popular by half, asks James Hall
One weekend in 1989, a junior BBC sports producer called Philip Bernie was enjoying a rare lie-in in his west London flat. A song came on the radio: Luciano Pavarotti’s rendition of Nessun Dorma from Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot. The stirring aria – with its rousing final note that lands on the “-ò” of Vincer-ò, the Italian word for “I will win” – planted a seed in the 28-year-old’s head. “I thought, ‘God, that’s fantastic’. And particularly Vincer-ò, which seemed very apposite for football. So I lodged it at the back of my mind,” Bernie recalls today.
Weeks later, the producer was making a short documentary about Italian football ahead of the World Cup, due to kick off in Milan in June 1990. He wanted to end it with a music montage featuring Marco Tardelli’s famous celebration after scoring the goal that sealed the World Cup for Italy against West Germany in 1982. Mouth-agape, tears streaming and his arms pumping wildly, Tardelli’s celebration was an “ultra-italian expression of extreme exaltation”, Bernie thought. “And it absolutely married up with the climax of Pavarotti singing Vincer-ò in Nessun Dorma.”
The interplay of opera and football, it was almost as though Tardelli was singing himself. The clip was shown on the BBC twice on the same day in December 1989 and, following input from Grandstand’s Des Lynam, the corporation decided that a 1972 recording of Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma should be used in its opening credits for the tournament itself.
What happened next changed the perception of opera for ever. Helped by England’s progression to the semi-finals, Nessun Dorma captured the nation’s mood. It sent opera up the charts, turned Pavarotti into a surprise pop star aged 54 and opened up the genre to millions of new fans. The following summer, 125,000 people packed Hyde Park during a torrential rainstorm to watch the tenor sing. The phenomenon was not confined to the UK. Separately from anything to do with the BBC, a concert by The Three Tenors – Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras – took place in Rome the night before the World Cup final (won by West Germany). A recording of the concert became the bestselling classical album of all time. Its centrepiece was Nessun Dorma.
“As an aficionado football fan and a young opera singer still trying to figure out my path in life, [The Three Tenors’] broadcast held me in thrall,” Andrea Bocelli tells me. “I was struck by the choice, so ingenious and penetrating in its simplicity, to go among the people [and] to return opera to the public.”
Bocelli, who is now 61 and has sold over 90million albums worldwide, regularly includes Nessun
Dorma in his set.
“What makes Nessun
Dorma so brilliant are both its frequent high notes and the intense level of expression it demands,” he explains.
The song’s climax “could set on fire even the iciest soul”.
The association with football had its detractors, of course. Purists thought it demeaned the art form and resented its new mass appeal. An anonymous letter to Opera magazine in October 1991 from a Hyde Park attendee said audience members “talked, joked and laughed” throughout. “The argument that Pavarotti is a man of the people bringing opera to the masses is a load of tosh, since the masses in Hyde Park showed little interest in listening,” thundered the letter.
What’s more, the aria has since been somewhat overplayed. “Any old tw-t sings it and then he gets a round of applause,” says Michael Volpe, the plain-speaking founder of Opera Holland Park in west London. “[You think],‘you’re awful. You’ve no right to be going anywhere near it.’ But the punters go mad because it has this sense of otherworldliness with the Vincerò note.” But Volpe, a Chelsea fan, thinks the 1990 “moment” was a very good thing. “I know football fans who had never heard a note of opera and they will recite to you phonetically the lyrics of that aria,” he says. There was a definite boost to his box office as a result, he adds.
And, recently, Nessun Dorma has received yet another lease of life. Seeking to boost spirits during lockdown, Italian tenor Maurizio Marchini sang the aria from his balcony in Florence in March. The clip became an internet sensation. Thirty years on from Italia ’90, and in hugely altered circumstances, the song’s theme about summoning the willpower to win remains as relevant as ever. And perhaps it is this indomitable spirit, as much as football, that really explains why the song endures.
The Three Tenors in Concert: 30th Anniversary Edition CD/DVD is out on July 3 on Decca Classics