A dispiriting fog sat upon the city and encircled the parliament house where we worked in the press gallery. Another Canberra winter day.
One of my colleagues, possibly intent on lifting my Monday-morning mood, related that he had attended an Australian football match in Melbourne during the weekend.
Having travelled to Melbourne to report on Paul Keating’s latest doings or a political conference – neither of us can remember now, for it was in the early 1990s – he took himself to the MCG.
And there, he made plain without using the words, he had what we might call a spiritual experience.
He took along with him to the game a device called a Discman. Long before smartphones and Spotify, the Discman snugged into the pocket of an overcoat and played music from a CD. The quality of the sound through headphones was remarkable.
My colleague had little taste for the roar of a football crowd – we got enough of that from our regular doses of Question Time.
And so, high in the stands, he fitted a good pair of headphones over his ears, flicked on a CD of classical music and retreated into a world of beauty befitting a game of footy at the MCG.
It was, he said, an extraordinarily enjoyable thing to do.
As the gladiatorial contest unfolded on the ground’s great stage, he was borne almost aloft by works of musical genius.
My colleague was not given to revealing much of his inner world, but he spoke of one period of the game that clearly moved him to rhapsody.
Steve Lunam
Lacking suitable words, he placed his headphones over my ears and turned up the volume.
I was all but drowned within the voice of Luciano Pavarotti singing the unearthly aria Nessun Dorma from Puccini’s opera Turandot. The morning fog lifted, and spring may as well have sprung.
Pavarotti, possessing one of the greatest tenor voices of all time, died in 2007, but his rendering of Nessun Dorma (“Let no one sleep”) will never die in the memory of anyone who has heard it.
When my colleague introduced me to his experience of hearing it at the MCG, the fame of Pavarotti’s Nessun Dorma as an accompaniment to the physical glory of major sporting events was only beginning.
In 1990, Pavarotti sang the aria during the first concert of the Three Tenors (Pavarotti, José Carreras and Placido Domingo) on the eve of the 1990 FIFA World Cup Final in Rome. The world was enthralled. The album of the concert became the best-selling classical recording of all time.
The Three Tenors performed the aria at three more FIFA World Cup Finals: 1994 in Los Angeles, 1998 in Paris, and 2002 in Yokohama.
The final notes of the song, soaring high almost to heaven, might have been written expressly for any great sporting occasion, though this being an opera, the words refer to the planned conquest of a reluctant heart.
Tramontate, stelle!/ All’alba, vincerò!/ Vincerò! Vincerò! (“Fade, you stars! At dawn, I will win!/I will win!/ I will win!”)
In 2006, Pavarotti sang it for the last time at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy.
The lungs that were great bellows and the vast body that had been the sounding board for so many deathless performances were failing him.
He could not sing in the cold air, and though he lip-synched his signature song, the audience gave him a standing ovation. He could not have been hailed as a greater hero at this last public appearance if he had been a sportsman on the field.
Pavarotti was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer five months later, and died in September 2007.
All this flooded the memory as another Italian tenor, Andrea Bocelli, sang Nessun Dorma during the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics three weeks ago in Milan.
Though Bocelli does not boast the theatrical power of Pavarotti, the beauty of his voice and the choice of aria seemed just right, knitting the past with this latest acrobatic festival of snow and ice.
Sporting events may be dismissed as the bread and circuses of our time, but has there been a period within memory that is in greater need of spectacle and timeless beauty as distraction from the uglier episodes that pass for current affairs, from Mar-a-Lago to Gaza, Westminster to Sandringham and Kyiv to Bondi?
Happily, as the world tumbled ever deeper into darkness, we had the option of escape from unspeakable reality at almost every turn during our southern summer.
England’s cricketers visited, their boosters boasting they would be untroubled regaining The Ashes from an injury-depleted Australia.
Almost from the first ball in Perth, the threatened narrative was turned on its head in a series that gave new meaning to the word Test for the crestfallen Englanders.
And yet, day after day, city after city, the tourists’ Barmy Army gave merry voice to their songbook, notably the hymn “Jerusalem” that accompanies the English everywhere: “And did those feet in ancient time/Walk upon England’s mountains green.”
No sooner had England’s defeated cricketers departed, leaving the Ashes on Australia’s parched shores, than the world’s tennis players descended on Melbourne for the Australian Open.
They gave us weeks of athletic elegance and the pleasure of wandering their gilded realm at Melbourne Park.
Then came the Winter Olympics, its soundtrack and its fearless competitors teleported into our lounge room 24 hours a day if we wished.
And on Thursday, the footy returns when the Sydney Swans meet Carlton at the Sydney Cricket Ground. The NRL gets underway this weekend with two games in Las Vegas.
It’s tempting to slip on the headphones, tune up Pavarotti’s Nessun Dorma, offer a cold shoulder to the madmen currently occupying or coveting the world’s seats of power and rejoice in games that finish with a handshake, all the while hearing a soaring voice that promises, magnificently, “At dawn, I will win! I will win! I will win!”
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Tony Wright is an associate editor and special writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
