Maybe you know this story, but if you don’t, you should. Twenty years ago, at the 1998 Grammy awards ceremony in New York City, tenor Luciano Pavarotti was scheduled to do a live performance of his personal showpiece, “Nessun Dormi,” from Puccini’s opera “Turandot.”
A half hour into the national TV broadcast, however, Pavarotti suddenly announced that his throat was ailing and that he would be unable to perform. As you might expect, that left the Grammy producers in a bit of a lurch, since they had already booked the show along with a full symphony orchestra to back up Pavarotti.
Also on the bill that night was a singer with a little classical training by the name of Aretha Franklin, who was scheduled to perform a light little Blues Brothers number. So, as one of the producers later recalled, “I just ran up to her dressing room, and asked her if she would do it. And she said she wanted to hear the dress rehearsal. In those days we had a boombox with a cassette. And I brought it to her and played it for her. When she heard it, she said, ‘Yeah, I can do this’.”
So she did. Here’s how it went down:
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