I've been an opera lover since I was a teen-ager (Okay, so I was a weird kid!). I even took a couple of years' lessons from a retired Metropolitan Opera soprano. I turned out to be a bass-baritone, but I went around for a couple of years blatting tenor arias—an octave down. It was in my second year at the university (1950-51) that I fell in with questionable companions and became actively interested in folk music.

My first acquaintance with Luciano Pavorotti was in the mid-1970s when I was working as an announcer at a classical music radio station in Seattle. One Sunday morning, the featured work was a Rossini's Stabat Mater, a religious oratorio written in the mid-1800s and based on a thirteenth century hymn, stabat mater dolorosa (" The mourning mother was standing "), describing the lamentations of the Virgin Mary as she stood beside the cross upon which her son was crucified.

I cued up the record, announced the morning's featured work, read a few notes about it, then flipped the switch starting the record. I turned the mic off, picked up my cup of coffee, and propped up my feet. I'd heard the work before and liked it, but this particular record was done by several singers I had never heard before.

When the tenor aria, cuius animam, started, I pricked up my ears. Here was a tenor voice with a power and clarity that, as well-acquainted with opera singers as I was, I had rarely heard before. "Who is that?" says I, and picked up the record jacket. A fairly young Luciano Pavarotti. New to me, and obviously very, very good!

At the end of the aria, Pavarotti took a high note—a very high note—that is in the music. But most tenors manage to avoid it by opting to sing a lower note. Pavarotti hit the note cleanly and held it for the full duration (and perhaps a bit more), and a few measures later, the aria ended. I sat there with my mouth open! Amazing! And within about thirty seconds, every button on the phone lit up. "Who is that!??" was the question everyone had.

So from that point on, I knew who Luciano Pavarotti was! I have a fair collection of his records; one, a full-length opera:   Lucia di Lammermoor. He is definitely one of the finest operatic tenors who ever graced a stage. There will never be another like him and he will be sorely missed.

But there are a number of other fine tenors extant. One in particular to keep an ear open for is Juan Diego Flórez. Born in Lima, Peru, young (34), and heart-throb handsome, he has sung at the Met a number of times so far, and at opera houses all over the world. He is gaining quite a bit of renown, and he has a few CDs out. He is a great admirer of Pavarotti. But his own voice is quite different:   perhaps not quite as powerful as Pavarotti's, his voice is lighter and has a silvery clarity—and it has an amazing flexibility that most tenors (including Pavarotti) simply can't match. Listen for this young man. He's phenomenal!

The king is dead. Long live the king!

Don Firth