Pavarotti DARED Elvis to Sing Nessun Dorma Live — Nobody Was Ready For THIS...

There's a small, plain white handkerchief in storage at Graceland, folded into a neat square, with no rhinestones and no initials. The card beside it says three words: "Gift, opera singer." Almost nobody has ever asked what that means. Los Angeles, spring 1973. Luciano Pavarotti — five years into his Metropolitan Opera career, already spoken of as one of the great tenors of his generation — heard Elvis Presley's "It's Now or Never," recognized the melody underneath it as O Sole Mio, and said, in Italian, that Elvis had taken a beautiful thing and hollowed it out. What Pavarotti didn't know was that a Mississippi teenager had once wanted nothing more in life than to sing opera, and had spent fifteen secret years teaching himself Italian phonetics from records, alone, in a spiral notebook nobody had ever seen. The dare: Nessun Dorma, unamplified, in the original key, in the real Italian, ninety seconds with the microphones deliberately pulled — live, on television, in front of a studio audience that came for rock and roll. This video is a dramatized retelling inspired by the lives and careers of Elvis Presley and Luciano Pavarotti. Dialogue and certain events have been recreated for storytelling purposes. Subscribe for more true and untold stories from the life of the man they called the King.