Pavarotti: A Voice for the Ages    • Share   • Read Later Ira
Nowinski / Corbis  Luciano Pavarotti before a recital.  Audience
members at the Metropolitan Opera looked at one another in
amazement. Did we just hear what we thought we heard? Onstage,
the strapping young Italian tenor singing opposite Joan
Sutherland in The Daughter of the Regiment had just trumpeted a
ringing high C, then another, and another. He was singing an
aria that most tenors transpose down a step, in order to get by
on B-flats (tough enough). But this fellow tossed off every high
C in the aria with astonishing ease and brilliance — nine in
all. The effect was electrifying. Within a day the Met box
office was besieged, and Manhattan's media mills swung into
action.  That was in 1972. The tenor was Luciano Pavarotti. For
a decade he had been building an international operatic
reputation as a real comer. Now, with those high C's at the Met,
he announced that he had fully arrived. Virtually from that
moment until he died this week of pancre