My father didn’t like opera. When his favorite classical-music radio station aired an opera recording, he would almost invariably turn the dial to his second-favorite classical station. (That’s back when there were multiple dedicated classical-music stations in the New York metro area.) But he adored Pavarotti. He even went so far as to buy an [...]

His “Nessun dorma” was the twentieth century’s definitive one—the one that launched a thousand imitators. So it caused a bit of a flurry this week when The Guardian reported on a new book about Luciano Pavarotti that says the tenor was lip-synching a performance of that aria at the 2006 Turin Olympics. Not feeling well [...]