The Three Tenors are José Carreras, Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti. They sang together for the first time on 7 July 1990 at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, on the eve of the World Cup final of Italia 90, with Zubin Mehta on the podium. That open-air night brought together the three most famous operatic voices of their time and produced the best-selling classical recording in history.
José Carreras was born in Barcelona in 1946 and stood out from his youth for the lyric beauty of his timbre. Plácido Domingo, born in Madrid in 1941 and raised in Mexico, built a career of exceptional breadth, with more than a hundred stage roles. Luciano Pavarotti, born in Modena in 1935, was the Italian voice par excellence, celebrated for the clarity of his high notes.
By 1990, all three had spent decades in the world's leading opera houses. Seeing them share a stage seemed unlikely: they were, in theory, rivals.
The occasion had a moving purpose: to celebrate Carreras's return to the stage after overcoming leukaemia, and to raise funds for his foundation against the disease. The setting was extraordinary: the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, Roman baths of the third century, turned into an open-air stage.
Zubin Mehta conducted the orchestras of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Rome Opera before thousands of spectators and a worldwide television audience, drawn also by the World Cup final to be played the next day.
Each tenor sang arias and songs on his own. There were arias by Puccini, among them Domingo's E lucevan le stelle and Pavarotti's Nessun dorma, alongside Neapolitan songs and popular melodies. The close brought the three together in a medley arranged by the Argentine Lalo Schifrin, with numbers such as Maria, Memory and O sole mio.
As an encore, the three sang Nessun dorma together, which has since become the trio's unofficial anthem and one of the operatic melodies most widely recognised by the general public.
The recording of the concert, In Concert, became the best-selling classical album of all time. The format was repeated at the World Cup finals of 1994 in Los Angeles, 1998 in Paris and 2002 in Yokohama.
Beyond the figures, Caracalla showed that opera could reach a mass audience without lowering its standards. Many of today's opera lovers heard opera for the first time thanks to that Roman night.
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