I will never forget the first time I heard Pavarotti. In the mid-Seventies I was working as an announcer at KXA, a classical music station in Seattle (now, sadly, defunct). Marvelous job! I got to sit there with a cup of coffee, my feet propped up, playing music that I thoroughly enjoy. Another job benefit was getting ego-strokes from people who said, "Oh! You're a radio announcer!" and suddenly became highly impressed with me. And I got paid for all this!

This particular Sunday afternoon, the major work the program director had scheduled was the Rossini Stabat Mater. I put the record on the turntable, read a bit from the liner notes, started it up, and sat back. Not that long into the piece is a tenor aria, the cujus animam, that I had heard before sung by Beniamino Gigli. Gigli, a famous tenor from yesteryear, was no slouch. But on this recording, it was sung by Luciano Pavarotti. I had never heard of him, so I gave him a close listen. The further he got into it, the more impressed I became. Finally, it hit me that this was one of the finest tenor voices I had ever heard. Then, near the very end, he took the high note. It was incredible coming back through the big studio monitor speakers. I don't know what the note was—up around C, I'm pretty sure—but I sat there with my mouth open!

About twenty seconds later, all the buttons on the phone lit up. On weekends, KXA was a one-man operation, so for the next half-hour I was fielding phone calls. They were all the same. ""Who is THAT!??" When things calmed down, I dug through the station's music library and found another record: a collection of operatic arias sung by Pavarotti: "King of the High Cs." So later in the afternoon, I played a few cuts from the record, and again the phone lit up.

I think a lot of Pavarotti records were sold around Seattle that afternoon. Including to me.

Don Firth