By the 1990s, Pavarotti had begun devoting more time to solo concerts, as well as performing with the Three Tenors and for humanitarian causes as Pavarotti & Friends, which paired him with the pop and rock stars that Mantovani loved, such as U2. He saw them as no different to him, Mantovani says, “sometimes even better, because they were capable of writing music. I remember once he was with Elton John when he was composing, and he looked at me, and said, ‘You see! It’s like seeing Puccini at work. It’s unbelievable.’ ‘He had a deep respect for everyone, for his colleagues too.”
In 1992, Pavarotti had experienced the unthinkable: boos at La Scala when his voice cracked on a high B in Verdi’s Don Carlo. He was 56. In his autobiography, Pavarotti noted that “tenors start to lose their voices at 50”. That moment in Milan must have been painful for him. “When somebody speaks about that, I always say, please go back and listen to the recording. Then tell me if there is someone that can sing better,” Mantovani says. “It’s a challenge: you should do it,” she adds. “Then you tell me the answer.
“It’s not true that the voice gets worse,” she says. “The voice gets full of everything, of your joy, of your tears, of everything in your life. So it’s a different voice, more mature, but beautiful. Luciano left this world still with a great voice.”
Their relationship became public knowledge in 1996, when they were photographed in the sea together in Barbados. “When the world didn’t know, it was easy,” she says, but they had never tried to hide their love. “When it came out… then we had some trouble. All the people criticise. My daughter, who is here with me, she’s always shocked by that. I mean, in our world now, it would not be news; at that time, there was really a big attack. They say everything, you know, about myself, but Luciano was on my side.”
The couple married in 2003; their daughter Alice (pronounced Alee-chay) was born earlier that same year. She was four when he died, 22 now, and, Mantovani reports, “She’s a journalist. I spent all my life escaping journalists and now I have one at home. But I love it. It’s, what do they say, ‘the circle of life’.”
