by Paul Potts
Along with a few students from the language-only classes, I spent my evenings exploring the restaurants and pizzerias of Rimini, usually round Viale Vespucci, a principal thoroughfare behind the main seafront.
For the first time in my life, I truly felt I belonged somewhere. Not only did I get to sing most days, but I also met up with other people, and they actually liked me. In language lessons, we practised different types of scenarios as we progressed. In one session I came across a question I would have dreaded fifteen years earlier. We were asked to say what we thought of each other. When one of the girls in the class was asked what she thought of me, her response almost made me blush.
“Paolo é bello e simpatico.”
This was a new experience for me. Back in school, I’d been used to people saying nasty things to me when asked this, not being told I was handsome and nice.
In the singing lessons we would work on different repertoires with the teacher, Mario Melani. He was the artistic director of the Accademia del Teatro “Città di Cagli,” the opera school at Cagli, a small town in the rural part of Marche. I recognised the school from the programs of the Francisco Viñas competition in Barcelona that had almost been the nemesis of my career. I got on well with Mario. He was a good teacher; he told me that my main weakness was the amount of tension in my body.
The répétiteur for the course was a brilliant pianist called Carlo Pari. He was always great fun, and as well as being a brilliant musician he was a great attraction for the female members of the course with his slightly dishevelled long dark hair. On one occasion, we had a look at a piece from Giordano’s Andrea Chenier. It was a powerful aria called “Improvviso” in which the main character takes the local lords to task over the fact that they were feasting while the poor struggled to get bread. I was singing one section when I noticed that Carlo had stopped playing because he was laughing so much.
“Be careful with your vowel sounds,” explained Lee, one of the assisting teachers who would later become a great friend. “They can change the meaning of the whole sentence.”
“If you sing those words on Saturday,” a still chuckling Carlo added, “then the audience will laugh at you!”
I was confused. I had sung, or thought I had sung, “ho un grande pena” (I have great pain).
“You ended the word pena with an ‘e’ not an ‘a,’” Lee explained. “Pene means penis. You were singing about how big your penis was!”
At the end of every week, we would perform a concert at different small venues in villages round the local area. The director of the language school, Bruno Fabbri, acted like a local impresario and organised our post-concert dinner. The food was usually quite simple, but always unbelievably fresh and tasty. At this particular meal it was bread, cheese, and cold cuts. I loved the fresh pasta in Italy and also the ever-present smell of garlic and oregano. The wine flowed, followed by the inevitable limoncello and grappa. Both of these were best served ice cold. The limoncello was way too sweet otherwise, and the grappa had a serious kick. The women liked the limoncello but not the grappa, so I ended up drinking nearly all of it!
The first concert was very eventful. We were performing outside the church in Villa Veruchio, not far from Rimini. It was a windy evening, probably due to a thunderstorm in the area. Lee was there to assist Carlo, and it was all she could do to hold the piano’s lid up. In the end the weather became too bad and the concert ended early.
We played in a few different places, including Castello di Longiano, but my favourite was one of the capitals of the old northern kingdom of Italy, San Leo. A pretty little town, San Leo is nestled in the mountains surrounding San Marino. Our journey there took us above the altitude where your ears pop, and the scenery was breathtaking.
The month ended all too quickly, and it was nearly time to say goodbye to the rest of the group and head home. But I was approached by Bruno’s daughter, Silvia, who asked if I wanted to stay on for a couple more months. I hesitated because I had only set aside enough money for four weeks, and not only would I have to pay the fees but would also have to cover my living expenses. She said she would speak to her father.
Silvia came back and offered me a 75 percent discount on the course fees, although I would have to pay full price for the accommodations. I worked things out and decided I would go ahead. I felt I had made progress, both with my Italian and my singing, and I wanted this to continue.
My stay extended, I visited Florence and Venice with the language school, and was enchanted by both cities. There were more singing sessions, this time with a baritone, Thomas Busch. I returned to San Leo again, and was put in charge of page turning for Carlo.
This was a challenging job. I wanted to sidestep it, as I knew how difficult it would be, trying to concentrate on the music while admiring Carlo’s playing on the piano. Page turning is hard enough without its being a very fast-flowing Schubert piece. The piece was sung well by a Northern Irish soprano called Rebekah Coffey, but I couldn’t concentrate on her singing because of the speed of the accompaniment. If I was a moment late in turning the page, I got a stern look from Carlo; if I was a moment early, I got a glare.
San Leo was a beautiful city, and its auditorium had great acoustics and atmosphere. The audience tended to be a well-educated one, polite in their applause and a little reserved. This particular Saturday evening was to prove a watermark moment for me. I had already performed Francesco Cilea’s “Federico’s Lament,” one of my favourite pieces, and also Giordano’s “Improvviso”—this time with the correct pronunciation of pena! I just had one more aria to sing: “Nessun Dorma.”
With Carlo at the piano, I tended to perform “Nessun Dorma” more slowly than I had with my backing track. That didn’t bother me, because I felt that a few of the popular recordings were too quick, as if in too much of a hurry to get to the famous bit. Unlike my earlier performances, this time, I could sense that something was different: the audience was attentive from the start.
As the piece drew to a close, I remember feeling happy with my performance. Even so, I wasn’t expecting the reaction I got from the audience: the whole place erupted. I took my bows and quietly left the stage for the dressing room. Even from there I could hear the audience shouting for me to return. I couldn’t believe it.
Carlo came through and told me I needed to perform again. This was completely unprecedented. We discussed what I should perform, as I had already performed everything we’d prepared for the concert. By now, the audience had been applauding for over five minutes and we needed to get back on stage.
I walked out nervously and thanked the audience in Italian. I then announced my next song:
“‘E lucevan le stelle,’ dall’ opera Tosca di Puccini.”
Again, the audience erupted. I sang the aria and finished to another great reaction. I left the concert on an absolute high. It was the most wonderful feeling in the world, and I didn’t want to leave it behind.
My third month in Italy soon came round, and I took lessons from another teacher. This time it was a Russian mezzo-soprano called Svetlana Sidorova. She encouraged me to look at French repertoire by Massenet, and worked me through the famous aria “Pourqoui Me Reveiller.” I loved it, and although I didn’t agree with everything she said, I made very good progress; and she really helped me get my throat to relax.
She was impressed with my range, and wanted me to work on the junior section of the Rossini Festival in Pesaro. I would need to work hard, and I was really pleased that she felt I had potential. Her approach to stagecraft was to get us moving. She would play Tchaikovsky, in particular The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty. I found this a challenge. She wanted us to move as the music made us move. Her real aim was to make us lose our inhibitions, but that was always going to be a struggle for me.
As my time in Italy was drawing to an end, I had another lesson with Mario Melani. He expressed his amazement at how far I had come in just three months, both in my use of the Italian language and in my singing.
> “I’ll let you into a secret,” he told me. “I was on that panel in Barcelona. I liked your voice then. No one listened to you sing that day. Why? Because your Italian was so poor.”
Mario told me that he was so impressed with my progress that he wanted me to join the opera school in Cagli. Not only that, the fee for the year would be the equivalent of £700; he had offered me a special price. I couldn’t believe it. This was the same school in which all the semi-finalists at the Viñas competition were awarded a place.
I discussed the opportunity with Carlo and Svetlana. They both felt it was a good opportunity, but there was one very practical problem. How was I to live for the next year? Although the school at Cagli was well respected, the city itself was a small one and lodgings would be difficult to find, not to mention part-time work.
Carlo and Svetlana had another suggestion. The school in Rimini was looking to form its own conservatory. It was to open in January 2001, and jobs would be much easier to find in Rimini. My problem was that I was pretty much out of money. I knew that when I went back to the UK, I would need to return to my job immediately. I had already taken a huge leap of faith coming to Italy for three months. To stay for another year would take more than my confidence and bank balance could account for.
In the end, I put off my decision and headed back to the UK. After all, the I Malatesta conservatory in Rimini would open only five months later. Unfortunately, I was to learn that in Italy many things might be planned with great enthusiasm but that didn’t mean they would happen. This was to be the case for the I Malatesta conservatory. Might I have chosen the opera school in Cagli had I not had the cosy option of Rimini? I will never know.
CHAPTER NINE
Looking for Love
WHENEVER I WENT to the Horn and Trumpet for a few drinks, the chat would often turn to the normal discussions young men have. The Horn and Trumpet was a typical British pub of the time: a lively, noisy bar, with a smell of cigarettes that assaulted the senses in the years before the smoking ban. We’d sit there talking, and it never took long for the subject of girls to come up.
It was almost a decade after Allison before I had another girlfriend. Despite having some female friends at university, the relationships never progressed any further, although I did give one very tall blonde a Valentine’s card through the university postal system. She told me that she didn’t like me “that way.” I had heard this many times and just assumed I was unattractive.
The discussions at the pub would get quite raucous, and on one particular Sunday we went round the table asking people when they had lost their virginity. Most of them said at varying times in their teens. I was honest.
“I’m still a virgin!” I said.
The whole bar seemed to go quiet, as if everyone in the pub had heard what I’d said.
“You don’t admit to things like that!” one of the group said.
I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t see the point in lying about it; there was nothing to gain. It was just bragging rights. My lack of social skills was showing again, but I genuinely saw no reason to feel ashamed. I was what I was. I’d got by thus far, not measuring myself by other people’s standards.
I remained hopeless around girls. From time to time I was approached, but I wasn’t able to recognise the signs of a girl liking me, and so I didn’t respond in any way, ignoring their advances. If I was given a girl’s number by one of the guys in the group, I would just assume they were winding me up. After all, who would be interested in me?
As I reached the end of my twenties, my luck with girls slowly started to change. In between the trips to Barcelona and Rimini, I took part in Bath Spa University’s production of Mozart’s Magic Flute, playing the role of Monostatos.
The performances went well, and my strength surprised two burly rugby players who were to drag me offstage as part of the action. Things got even better for me when it came to the last-night party. I got chatting to a slim, pretty girl named Elizabeth, one of the viola players in the orchestra. She was quite shy, like me, and we hit it off very well. We chatted, and she told me she liked my eyes. We arranged to meet a few days later, and it soon became clear that I would be cycling to Bath even more.
Right from the start my father was unhappy about our relationship, even though he’d never met Liz. I would stay at her place, and we went together to Portsmouth to see my brother John and his then long-term girlfriend. However, our relationship wasn’t meant to be, and after a few months we split up. That was fine by Dad; he seemed to think I should be married to my music. In fact, he insisted that it might be better if I stayed single forever, as my singing was more important.
My father and I also differed on other issues. He didn’t believe in sex before marriage and expected me to follow his example. Mum always tried to stay out of arguments with Dad, as he tended to be stubborn. I firmly believed that sex belonged within a loving relationship, as an expression of love. My opinion was that a marriage doesn’t start with a marriage ceremony. The wedding ceremony is simply the public formalising of the relationship. I was certainly waiting for the right person, but not necessarily for marriage. My father and I disagreed on this, which sometimes led to heated arguments.
It felt as if my father feared that meeting someone would lead me to give up my singing. As much as singing meant to me, I wasn’t going to be forced into choosing between that and the love of my life. Like anyone else, I wanted to be loved and held by someone who would accept me for who I was; to be someone’s “forever” person. Why should I have to choose between music and love? And as for the singing, it was hard enough just trying to succeed for myself. I didn’t want to have to live my father’s dreams as well.
When I made the decision to stay on in Rimini, Dad told me he feared I would not return; that I would meet an Italian girl and have a “few bambini.” The fact that I had been enjoying my time there must have been obvious, and this wasn’t just about the music. I’d made friends with a couple of local Italian girls and I found one of them, Fulvia, attractive. She was pretty, pleasant, and, as I was to discover, extremely perceptive.
I performed one of my favourite duets with Fulvia, “O Soave Fanciulla” from La Bohème. During one of our performances at a local spa hotel, we were waiting for our stage time, close to the hotel’s swimming pool. Being humorous in a foreign language can be a challenge, but I decided to give it a go. I adapted some of the words from “O Soave Fanciulla,” offering my hand and singing to her:
“Dammi’ll braccio, mia piscina . . .”
The original word, piccina, means “sweetheart”; piscina means “swimming pool.” To my delight, Fulvia laughed. I could sense that she liked me, but I wasn’t sure in what way or how much. My normal cowardly self seized on my uncertainty with the language, and I never made my move. I wanted a relationship with her, but I was worried about how that would work.
In my third month in Italy, Fulvia and I found ourselves being put through our paces. Svetlana, as usual, was trying to make us move and lose our inhibitions. She asked the group to walk round and look into each other’s eyes. I found myself face to face with Fulvia. As she looked into my eyes and I into hers, she broke down in tears. I was confused; I’d said nothing. Svetlana stopped the group and we sat in a circle. She asked Fulvia what she had seen.
Fulvia answered in Italian:
“Guardai il suo viso e nei suoi occhi e ho visto la tristezza non ho mai visto prima. Era profondo e non ho potuto andare oltre di esso.”
By this point, my Italian was good enough that I understood with a sinking heart what she was saying:
“I looked at his face and into his eyes and saw a sadness that I had never seen before. It was deep, and I could not get past it.”
I knew what she had seen. The load I carried was never far away, but I had never been able to talk about it. In that small room, in a language that wasn’t my own, I tried to explain what I had been through. I found myself talking to the whole group about the bullying and the
abuse. Then both Fulvia and I cried.
Back in Bristol, I came up with a way of getting around my struggles in chatting up women: I started talking with them on the Internet. I saw chatting on the net as a modern way of old-fashioned dating. Online, I was able to be a little less nervous and actually demonstrate a sense of humour. The challenge was always going to come when I met the unsuspecting person.
I got chatting to a couple of women from different parts of the world, including a woman from South Africa. For a while, I chatted with an Australian from Melbourne called Chrissie, but when we met there wasn’t the chemistry we were hoping for. I didn’t give up, though, and continued to get to know people. Then in January 2001, I started chatting with a twenty-year-old girl from South Wales.
I was working nights at Tesco at the time. I would get home around seven most mornings, have some breakfast, and lounge around in front of the computer doing council casework and chatting on the net. After a few days, there was only one woman I was chatting with: Julz.
It helped me get through the long work night, knowing that I would chat with her before she went to work. After a couple of weeks of this, we exchanged phone numbers and started to talk on the phone. I offered to send a photograph of myself and Julz said that was fine, although she didn’t feel comfortable sending one of her own.
We were getting on well, and so we agreed to meet. I still remember the date clearly: 2 February 2001, and the meeting-up point: Swansea Railway Station. Julz had a distinct advantage over me in that she had my photograph, but I still didn’t know what she looked like. She could very easily have run away and I would never have known any different. I was thirty, ten years older than Julz, and concerned that she might think the age gap would be a problem.