The Nessun Dorma effect: how Pavarotti cleaned up football and enraged opera purists

One weekend in 1989 a junior BBC sports producer called Philip Bernie was enjoying a rare lie-in in his Maida Vale 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 ‘Vincerò’, 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 taster documentary about Italian football for the draw of the imminent World Cup, due to kick off in Milan the following June. He wanted to end the documentary with a music montage featuring Italian midfielder Marco Tardelli’s famous celebration after scoring the goal that sealed the World Cup for Italy against West Germany in 1982.

Mouth-agape with 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 ‘Vincerò’ in Nessun Dorma.” The interplay of opera and football, of passion and emotion, worked brilliantly. 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 lobbying by Bernie and input from presenter Des Lynam and Grandstand editor Brian Barwick, 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 and Paul ‘Gazza’ Gascoigne’s now-legendary tears, Nessun Dorma captured the nation’s mood in the summer of 1990. 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 into a drenched Hyde Park 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 best-selling classical album of all time. Its centrepiece was Nessun Dorma.

Puccini’s aria became synonymous with Italia 90. It made a particularly life-changing impression on one rookie opera singer at the time. “As an aficionado football fan and a young opera singer still trying to figure out my path in life, I remember [The Three Tenors’] broadcast held me in thrall the entire time,” Andrea Bocelli, who will be performing Nessun Dorma in Rome tonight for the Euros 2020 opening ceremony, tells me. “I was struck by the experiment: 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 62 and has sold over 90 million albums worldwide, regularly includes Nessun Dorma in his set: he has sung it in venues from the Hollywood Bowl to London’s O2 arena. “What makes Nessun Dorma so brilliant are both its frequent high notes and the intense level of expression it demands. Both traits correspond to a state of mind characterised by a burning passion and an unlimited willpower,” he explains. The song’s emotional punch strikes at the heart of “even the most neophyte audience” while its climax “could set on fire even the iciest soul”.

But despite this, Nessun Dorma had its detractors. Opera purists in the UK and beyond were unimpressed that the masses had co-opted their high art form. The association with football was particularly galling to some: the game had a bad reputation in 1990 due to hooliganism and tragedies including the Heysel Stadium and Hillsborough disasters.

Yet rather than demean opera, the longer-term legacy of Nessun Dorma was actually to help rehabilitate football. A series of events in the early 1990s — improved safety with all-seater stadiums, consistently solid performances by England, the Premier League’s formation, the publication of Nick Hornby’s fan-autobiography Fever Pitch — all helped to clean up football’s image.

Watching it became an acceptable middle-class pursuit. And a contributing factor to this, a spark beneath of the great game’s great modernisation, was the success of Nessun Dorma.

Looking back after 30 years, the BBC’s opening credits to World Cup Grandstand certainly feel dated. Over 80 seconds, viewers saw shots of Renaissance paintings, a curtain rising on a grand stage, and ethereal dancers in floaty dresses prancing around an orange globe. But then it segued into the football montage — Pelé, Cruyff, Maradona… Tardelli — just as Pavarotti reached his almighty crescendo. With over 20 million viewers watching each England match, the song simply “took off” after coverage started in the second week of June, says Bernie.

“It was a very fresh thing to use classical music in that guise around sport,” he says. So fresh that Pavarotti’s record label, Decca, were said to be initially reluctant to let the song be used. But they granted permission and released it as a single. By the time England beat Belgium to reach the quarter-finals at the end of June, the song had reached number two, staying there for three weeks (it was held off the top spot by Elton John’s Sacrifice).

The tenor’s album, The Essential Pavarotti, reached number one. Britons’ icy souls had been lit up. “It was a huge success. Decca reaped the rewards,” says Bernie, who is now Head of TV Sport at the BBC.

Michael Volpe, the founder and General Director of Opera Holland Park in West London, says the unexpected crossover hit was an “amazing cultural moment” that acted as laypeople’s gateway drug to opera. “I know football fans who had never heard a note of opera and they will recite to you phonetically the lyrics of that aria,” says Volpe, a long-term Chelsea supporter.

It changed his audience too. One night in the early 1990s, Volpe was told by a surprised middle-class Holland Park regular that his son’s football coach was sitting in the row in front of him. Volpe got chatting to the coach. “I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ He said, ‘I like a bit of opera now. Ever since that Nessun Dorma.’”

Pavarotti-mania reached its zenith when the tenor put on his vast free Pavarotti in the Park concert in Hyde Park in July 1991. In pouring rain, he dedicated Puccini’s Donna Non Vidi Mai to a sopping Princess Diana, who was sitting in the VIP section next to Prince Charles. “Even the future King of England was not able to do anything about that moment,” Dickon Stainer, President of Classics and Jazz at Universal Music Group, which owns Decca, has said.

Since the early 1990s, Nessun Dorma has remained opera’s most recognisable aria. At the 1998 Grammys, Pavarotti –who died in 2007 – was due to sing it but pulled out at the last minute with a sore throat. Aretha Franklin stepped in and delivered an extraordinary rendition. The song has been used in films from Bend It Like Beckham to Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation, and musicians including metal band Manowar and former Yardbird Jeff Beck have covered it.

To mass audiences, Nessun Dorma has become shorthand for opera. In 2007 a Carphone Warehouse employee called Paul Potts won ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent after singing it (the clip has been viewed 183 million times on YouTube). Donald Trump used it in his 2016 campaign trail but Pavarotti’s widow asked him to stop. From Presidents to the Queen of Soul, from songbirds to Yardbirds, Nessun Dorma has had a life of its own.

Opera diehards have sniped. 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.

Speaking about the 1990 Rome concert, Bocelli concedes that many opera purists were unimpressed. But he dismisses the criticism, describing opera’s then-new lease of life as a “breath of fresh air, on a global scale, in a world that was on the verge of forgetting its own popular vocation”.

Volpe says that Nessun Dorma’s unending popularity can be “a bit of a pain in the arse” in general. “Any old t___ sings it and then he gets a round of applause. [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. And that’s the thing. It’s like a cultural tick. Everyone knows that moment.”

Buffs remain wary. A 2010 poll of BBC Radio 3 listeners to find the UK’s favourite aria didn’t even include Nessun Dorma in its top 10. "Nessun Dorma is booted into touch" was the Reuters headline at the time.

But the aria’s role in smoothing football’s rough edges cannot be overstated. “There was suddenly a change in attitudes in the Nineties. Nessun Dorma played its part. It gave a different tinge to how football was viewed,” says Bernie, who was rewarded for his song choice with a free LP and a ticket to the Hyde Park concert just behind Charles and Diana.

Volpe says that the initial Nessun Dorma-related boost to ticket sales has inevitably trailed off over the years. “The curve has flattened, to borrow a phrase,” he says.

His allusion to the Coronavirus pandemic is strangely apt. Nessun Dorma received yet another lease of life at the start of lockdown when an Italian tenor called Maurizio Marchini sang it from his balcony in Florence. The clip became an internet sensation.

Thirty-one 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.

Andrea Bocelli performs Nessun Dorma tonight at the Euros 2020 opening ceremony, from 7pm on BBC One