The one singer Linda Ronstadt called “the best of all”
Linda Ronstadt never took a single second of her time onstage for granted.
She was always thrilled at the idea of singing for a living, and even if some of her records weren’t anything for her to be proud of, she was happy to have built herself up to the point where she could sing practically anything and still sound great. But when you look through her record collection, even she could tell when she was never going to reach the heights of what the true vocalists could accomplish.
But even if Ronstadt made the best tunes that she could, a lot of it came from her meticulously working at it throughout her career. She has said on numerous occasions that she doesn’t like going back to her old records because of how her voice sounded, but when she started to really take vocal lessons halfway through her career, it was like she completely turned a corner with her singing.
No one was expecting her to pull off Broadway tunes so well, but that was the tip of the iceberg. She wanted the chance to make music that was more sophisticated, and while she did have her moments of singing standards better than virtually anyone, even she realised that the greatest singers weren’t always the ones that stayed within the parameters of pop music. Frank Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney were great at what they did, but there was not much more the world had to offer.
And a lot of her favourite artists were prime examples of singers who didn’t come from the traditional pop sphere. Maria Callas was one of the greatest singers of all time, but her roots in Mexican music were what eventually inspired Ronstadt to try her hand at songs that weren’t in her own language. She was always willing to try something new, but someone like Luciano Pavarotti was almost impossible to match.
The idea of someone trying their hand at being an opera singer is already a big ask, but Pavarotti always made it seem so effortless whenever he sang. His tenor voice was one of the most beautiful sounds in the classical world, and even though Ronstadt had her personal favourites, nothing could even come close to the kind of majesty that Pavarotti had in his voice whenever he sang.
Callas still held a special place in her heart, but Pavarotti belonged in a class all his own as far as Ronstadt could tell, saying, “Oh, there’s so much good opera! You have to listen to the really good opera singers. [Like] the big fat Italian guy. He’s the best of all. I can’t think of his name. Wait. Let me think. Oh, I know: Luciano Pavarotti. Listen to him sing ‘Nessun Dorma’. If you can resist that, you’re hopeless. It’s transcendent.”
But what Pavarotti was doing was only the result of the hard work that he put in every single night. For someone who made everything sound so easy, it took a lot of raw hours working at his craft before everything sounded right, and considering what Ronstadt did on every album, she was willing to put in the work to be able to sing half as well as he did whenever he worked on his pieces.
‘Nessun Dorma’ is still one of the most brilliant operatic performances ever recorded, but Ronstadt felt that there was more to it than the notes on the page. It was all about the expression, and Pavarotti was the king of being able to squeeze out every ounce of emotion from everything he sang.
