Photograph of Luciano Pavarotti at Villa Pace with Rosa Ponselle at the piano, used in 1982 in an issue of The Baltimore Sun Magazine.
N.B. - Luciano Pavarotti remembers his encounter with Rosa Ponselle: As a boy in Italy, growing up in my hometown, Modena, I can hardly remember a time when the name Rosa Ponselle was unfamiliar to me. (…) One can imagine how I felt, having grown up admiring an artist whom I had known only from a series of prized phonograph records, meeting her in person—and not only meeting her, but actually "singing" with her! (…) It was at Villa Pace, her magnificent home in the Greenspring Valley near Baltimore, that I met and sang with her. My visit to her villa was the culmination of a telephone-and-letter friendship that had begun a few years earlier. (…) After much animated conversation and a splendid meal, we made our way into her expansive music room, where, before she sat down at the piano, she said to me apologetically, "Luciano, I'm not in form today. Every day when I get up in the morning I try out my 'pianissimo'. If it's there, I'm in top form, and I can do anything. Today, it isn't there, but we'll sing together anyway, in full voice." And sing we did! From fragments of arias and snippets of duets to the beloved Tosti songs so dear to us both, we let our voices mate in one long shimmering line of harmony. My only wish was that we could have been transported magically into a modern recording studio, so that the whole world could have shared this once-in-a-lifetime experience.
(Rosa Ponselle & James A. Drake - "Ponselle, A singer's Life", foreword by Luciano Pavarotti - Doubleday & Company, Inc. - Garden City, New York, 1982)
