Do we like Luciano Pavarotti?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decades of charity work and no harmful words found, with a tax stoush and a lip-sync mark on the ledger.
Pavarotti was the tenor who dragged opera out of the stuffy hall and into stadiums, and he was the one the whole world sang along to. He also made his hometown of Modena a stop on the global pop calendar, with his Pavarotti and Friends concerts bringing pop stars on stage with him. That is where most of his goodness shows up.
The charity side is the real deal. The annual Modena concerts raised money for poor and war-hit young people around the world, and the UN's Ban Ki-moon later credited him with raising millions of dollars for humanitarian aid. Ban called him “a true friend of the UN”, and Pavarotti served as a UN Messenger of Peace.
The big stoush was with the Italian taxman. Prosecutors accused him of dodging tax of around $20 million on income from 1989 to 1995, and he had already agreed to pay more than $11 million in back taxes and penalties in a civil settlement. In October 2001 a Modena court acquitted him of the tax fraud charges, so no conviction stands, though the money he paid is a fair mark on the ledger.
The other knock is about the show, not the soul. A 1993 report said he lip-synced to a recording of his own voice at a Modena concert in 1992, and that an artist alleged he had copied three of her pictures for prints he sold. His lawyer said he had always made clear the works were copied from her book, and Pavarotti did not respond about the lip-sync in that report.
On the harm test, the reporting we read shows nothing harmful from him: no campaigning against anyone, no conspiracy rabbit holes. What there is runs the other way. In 2016 his family said his values were “incompatible with the world vision of the candidate Donald Trump” when the campaign used his Nessun dorma without permission.
That is the recent theme too. In September 2026 his family said they had “never granted permission to use the voice, name, or identity of Luciano Pavarotti” in a video posted by far-right leader Roberto Vannacci. They said they distance themselves from any link between him and political messages. Politicians keep borrowing a dead man's voice, and his family keeps handing it back.