Luciano Pavarotti's famous white handkerchief began not as a theatrical statement but as a security blanket at a 1973 recital in Liberty, Missouri, when a nervous tenor did not know what to do with his hands. This episode follows him from a working-class childhood in Modena, where his baker father had a beautiful tenor voice but crippling performance anxiety, through wartime displacement to a single rented room in the countryside, a stint as an elementary school teacher, and the 1955 choir victory in Wales that convinced him to sing professionally. Years of unpaid recitals and selling insurance ended with a vocal nodule and a disastrous concert in Ferrara that made him quit, and the nodule healed only after the pressure lifted.

We cover Joan Sutherland's lessons in diaphragmatic support on a 1965 Australian tour, the 1972 Met performance of ...