After many weeks of rehearsal, the night at the opera arrived. Of all the siblings in the household, my dad was chosen to go with his mother -- my grandmother, naturally -- to watch my grandfather perform in the opera.
Before the show started, my dad heard a voice warming up from behind the curtain. In his mind, my dad knew that this was his father's loud and clear singing voice. When they raised the curtain, however, the voice was not my grandfather's, but that of Arrigo Pola, the star of this production of Il trovatore. Please take a listen to Pola's rendition of "Ah! si ben mio," which is from the aforementioned opera:
A few years later, Pola would transform a young singer named Luciano Pavarotti into the legendary tenor. This pupil that would outshine his teacher so much, that you can't really find a clear photo of Pola on the Internet. You would also be hard-pressed to find recordings of Pola, other than 11 tracks on YouTube and a single audio interview. It would be just my luck that this blog entry would be up there in the few searches for Arrigo Pola!
As for my grandfather -- several decades later, his wife would sit at the piano, while he would sing in a clear, albeit less powerful, tenor voice. I was less than a year old when my grandfather passed away, so I can't recall his beautiful tenor. In any case, from the moment Il trovatore opened that night, my dad would associate Arrigo Pola's voice with his father's. Recently, my brother found the few Pola recordings on YouTube, and he shared them with our dad. Sure enough, my dad heard his father through those recordings.
Would you care to listen to another recording of my grandfather, I mean, Arrigo Pola? This one's from the sad clown opera, Pagliacci:

As for the photo to the left -- that's as close to the sad clown as I'll get, in all likelihood.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot: Happy Halloween!