Even before Luciano Pavarotti sang it in front of thousands at the 1990 World Cup, Puccini’s aria "Nessun dorma," an impassioned call to stay awake from the opera Turandot has been one of the most popular crowd-pleasing standards in the operatic repertoire, but recently it’s become a sure-fire hit in another realm: reality television.
The latest attention grabbing, viral version comes from a 13-year-old Romanian singer, Laura Bretan, who set off golden showers of confetti (as well as a controversy among voice teachers), with her performance on America’s Got Talent.
Simon Cowell, the sharp-tongued appraiser who helped launched this genre of television, exclaimed after hearing Bretan, “I have never heard anything like that in all these years of doing this show.”
Actually, he has. In 2007, Cowell was one member of a judging panel when an inauspicious snaggle-toothed mobile phone salesman from Wales auditioned for Britain’s Got Talent. Like a hen set before a pack of hungry wolves, Potts walked on stage to face the judges, professing his lifelong dream to sing opera. And he did:
"I wasn't expecting that," Cowell said. "This was a complete breath of fresh air. You were absolutely fantastic."
Arman Schwartz, the scholar in residence for this summer’s Bard Music Festival, which is centered on the output and legacy of Puccini, traces the widespread popularity of the aria back to Pavarotti's performance at the 1990 World Cup and the subsequent Three Tenor concerts: "On the one hand, this makes sense," he wrote in an email. "Calaf (who sings it in the opera) is Puccini’s most unambiguously 'heroic' and 'virile' character. His climactic high B on the word 'vincerò' (I will win) can easily speak to other triumphs, while drawing on pop cultural narratives of classical music heroism: think of Jose Carreras’s battle with leukaemia (the immediate context for the first Three Tenors event), or English underdog Paul Potts's victory on the reality show Britain’s Got Talent."
Since then, “Nessun dorma" has become a cliché trotted out by classically trained or operatic sounding singers, looking for an audition song one step beyond a power ballad. One of the youngest singers to take on the aria was tow-headed 10-year-old Jackie Evancho, who took on the song in 2011.
The trend has bridged countries and languages. The same year as Evancho's version, a unshaven hoodie- and flannel-wearing Bulgarian tenor sang the selection on his country's X Factor.
In 2015 the quartet Vox, or "the classiest boy band there is" according to America's Got Talent judge Howie Mandel, broke the aria into four-part harmony, causing fellow judge Heidi Klum to profess her love for classical music and opera.
The aria's fame, reaching well beyond that of the opera Turandot, was likely an unintended consequence. According to Schwartz: "the aria contains several features — a chorus lamenting 'And we, alas, must die'; an orchestral postlude that bleeds seamlessly into the subsequent scene — that suggest that Puccini imagined the aria as a more integral part of his most 'symphonic' opera and would have been surprised by its afterlife.”
But what a glorious afterlife it's been.