WITH a global audience, it should have been the climax of Luciano Pavarotti’s career. However, when the star tenor made his last public appearance, at the Turin Winter Olympics in 2006, disease and a failing voice led him to fake a live performance of his trademark aria Nessun Dorma.

The disclosure comes in an affectionate but candid memoir published last week by Leone Magiera, a conductor and pianist who performed at Pavarotti’s side in more than 1,000 concerts. It paints a warts-and-all portrait of the singer’s passions for food and women, his triumphs and blunders.

Magiera reveals that for his swansong in Turin, the wheelchair-bound Pavarotti dubbed his voice in a studio over an earlier performance by the orchestra. On the day before the opening ceremony, Pavarotti recorded a video of himself performing on stage to ensure synchronisation of his lips and voice.

The recorded sound and video were then passed off as a live performance, with shots of Pavarotti standing before his audience cut into the broadcast.

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“On the evening of the ceremony, the orchestra pretended to play for the audience, I pretended to conduct and Luciano pretended to sing. The effect was wonderful,” Magiera writes in Pavarotti Visto da Vicino (Pavarotti Seen from up Close).

“Pavarotti’s great career thus ended with a virtual performance, something that was a bit sad but inevitable. It would have been too dangerous for him, given his physical condition, to risk a live performance in front of a global audience.”

Fifteen years earlier, in 1991, Pavarotti came close to wrecking a concert in Hyde Park watched by Prince Charles and Princess Diana. While singing the aria E Lucevan Le Stelle, from Puccini’s Tosca, the tenor suffered a bout of amnesia. “I saw an expression of terror on his face; he was next to me, and I prompted him. From that evening on, Luciano always had the music in front of him,” Magiera writes.

At a gala dinner attended by Princess Diana at the Savoy hotel, Pavarotti was in for another shock. He arrived arm in arm with his assistant Nicoletta Mantovani, 34 years his junior, but turned white and hastily dropped her arm when he saw his wife, Adua Veroni, who had turned up without warning.

Veroni looked furious when she saw Mantovani seated at her husband’s side. “If Diana hadn’t been at Luciano’s left, Veroni would definitely have caused an epic scene,” Magiera writes.

Pavarotti went on to divorce Veroni and marry Mantovani, the last in a series of secretary-lovers in their twenties whom he took on world tours. The longest affairs lasted up to seven years.

The memoir highlights Pavarotti’s gargantuan appetite. Hiring a celebrated chef from Genoa, Pavarotti flew enough food with him on a trip to China – stored in five huge refrigerators packed with pasta, pesto and giant wheels of parmesan cheese – to see him and his friends through a two-week stay.

However, he often fell foul of American customs officers, who confiscated the pig’s trotters and cured hams he tried to import.

On one flight aboard a private 12-seater plane from Romania to Italy, turbulence was so bad that the hostess, rosary in hand, started praying. Pavarotti announced: “Well, boys, if I have to die, I want to die eating.” He grabbed a packet of chocolate biscuits and helped himself to a generous handful.

Magiera makes no attempt to back his friend over the latter’s claim to the Italian taxman that he resided in Monte Carlo. Pavarotti, whose fortune was estimated at between £35m and £50m and who ended up paying more than £8m in back taxes, would stay in the principality’s most luxurious hotel when performing there.

“When the finance ministry asked him for the address of his Monte Carlo home, Pavarotti stayed mum,” Magiera writes. He couldn’t remember the name of the street or the number; the tenor had stepped into his flat only a couple of times at most.

In his last years, Pavarotti insisted on holding master-classes, but would fall asleep as his pupils sang. To avoid embarrassment an assistant would call his mobile phone as soon as he closed his eyes.

As he lay dying of pancreatic cancer last year, the 71-year-old was rarely lucid, but he did not lose his sense of humour. When he realised he could not manage to swallow a plate of pasta, he commented: “That’s an ugly sign for me - that I should prefer mashed potatoes to macaroni.”

Video of Pavarotti's last performance singing Nessun Dorma at Turin Olympics

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