Give me an aria

Andrea Bocelli, star operatic tenor, has never sung in an opera. Is it because he is blind? Or because he is more attuned to pop chart success with Sarah Brightman than to `serious' classical duets with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa? Tomorrow we find out. Daly

What is a tenor to do if success comes with material he despises, but the opportunities to perform his real love - Italian opera - are limited by physical handicap? The answer, it seems, is to press on with the pap and the pop and to hope that The Voice will shine through.

So it is for Andrea Bocelli, a 38-year-old Italian tenor, blind, admired by Luciano Pavarotti and taken up commercially by the Lloyd Webber-esque Sarah Brightman. The pair are presently in the singles charts (and at No 1 in Ireland) with "Time to Say Goodbye", taken from Bocelli's fourth album Romanza.

Bocelli may be far more than a singer of classical-ish pop ballads but, at present, all publicity efforts are concentrated on positioning him in that World Cup-"Nessun Dorma" market known as "crossover" - music for those growing out of pop who think classical is a bit difficult.

That was the market available, and Bocelli has waded in (Romanza is at number 6 in the UK album chart), clearly in the hope that commercial success will lead to the operatic challenges - recitals or staged operas - that he longs to attempt.

Unfortunately, the campaign to sell pop-type records needs to emphasise his blindness - an unknown singer needs a hook to catch the media (beyond declarations of talent), which irritates Bocelli no end.

A tall, dark and handsome man with too much designer stubble for my taste, Bocelli, on a publicity tour to Britain, is magisterially bored by questions about his blindness, dismissing as meaningless the tag of "the blind tenor" bandied about by his PRs.

He lost his sight completely through a football injury when he was 12, but says it was of no consequence, either to his operatic ambitions or to his horsemanship.

"Kids have no tragedies, the tragedy is people making a fuss out of something they consider tragic," he says. And his childhood sounds gorgeous, if limited in terms of musical opportunity. Bocelli, whose first pony was called Stella (Star), grew up with his younger brother on his parents' farm in Tuscany - they produced wine (Chianti Bocelli) and cereals, but also owned a large tractor dealership.

"The first thing that counts in my life was my encounter with music," he says, speaking through an interpreter because he feels his English is inadequate. "It was my first medicine: it calmed me if I was irritable, it made me feel peaceful. My mother often used it to stop me crying. The second important thing was my passion for animals - above all, horses."

Bocelli, who is married with one child and another on the way, still rides - he is the owner of six Arab horses, including a stallion, Jasir - and skis, though he says his friendship with the champion skier Alberto Tomba has been exaggerated.

"I would be very excited by the idea of riding a difficult horse, just as I would feel similarly excited when I started to sing, to approach a very difficult piece of music," he says. "One of the reasons behind my success is this tenacity, which has been there for ever, this refusal to accept defeat."

As a child, Bocelli listened to many records but liked only opera (especially Puccini, Mascagni, Leoncavallo and Giordano, as well as Verdi). He favoured tragedies, and had no taste for pop music even then. It is clear that he has recorded the songs on Romanza purely for commercial reasons: he was first offered work outside opera partly, he says with a hint of gritted teeth, because the narrow-minded felt his blindness might hamper an opera performance.

But he also seems to lack that visceral need for success. Before the fairy-tale story that swept him to fame and glory across Europe, Bocelli was more interested in singing for fun than for money or posterity. "When you have a vocation for something you don't need to practise with a view to having a career - you really just do it for pleasure," he says.

He qualified as a lawyer, and worked as a public defender and a club pianist. But other people would ask why he wasn't a famous singer. "I was perfectly happy to sing for myself, or for my friends. I always say to young kids, people who come to my house, that one becomes a singer because other people want one to become a singer."

His rise over the past four years has been extraordinary, even if so far restricted to the kind of Italian pop and folk-songs that Bocelli's mentor, Pavarotti, favours as an encore. He has sold five million records in Europe. Fans come to his house and mob him in the street.

The story began in 1992 when Bocelli auditioned for Zucchero, the Italian pop star who was making a demo of "Miserere", the song he wrote with Bono of U2, in the hope of persuading Pavarotti to sing.

The maestro's response is now the stuff of (cross-over) legend, faithfully recorded by the PR machine. "Zucchero! Who is this guy?" Pavarotti asked. "Thank you for writing such a wonderful song. Yet you do not need me to sing it. Let Andrea sing "Miserere" with you, for there is no one finer."

Pavarotti's response, reported on national television, gave Bocelli "a huge lift" at a difficult time in his life. "I had started to realise that my voice was rather like a horse full of fantastic qualities but also many defects and a lot of bad habits," he says. "My voice was like a horse that was capable of running at record speeds, but was in fact lagging behind the others. So I learned that to train this voice properly would be to win the most important race of my life."

And, to Bocelli's surprise and delight, Pavarotti followed up. "One night I was already asleep, and the telephone rang. I answered and heard a voice saying, `This is Pavarotti speaking.' I thought it was a joke, but fortunately I didn't react with a rude word. And then, coming to, I recognised the voice. One of my more unusual alarm calls."

Pavarotti was calling to invite Bocelli to sing at his annual televised party in Modena - Pavarotti and Friends; as an added inducement (were it necessary), Bocelli was to come a week early to stay at the house and work with the maestro.

"It wasn't intimidating, because he immediately put me at my ease. It was all done in a very natural way," says Bocelli. "I got to his house - he welcomed me sitting at a table piled with cakes and desserts, like Father Christmas. We ate together and then very naturally moved into another room, where there was a piano. So my accompanist found himself with me on one side and Pavarotti on the other. He was a bit intimidated by this."

Bocelli, meanwhile, made the most of the experience. "From this master of technique that is Pavarotti I tried to learn everything I could - Pavarotti was really full of advice and good suggestions," he says. "When I met him I still had certain problems with the acute notes, and he really smoothed the way ahead for me."

But is Bocelli any good as an operatic tenor? The Independent's arts editor Mark Pappenheim, who is also an opera critic, hears shades of Pavarotti when he listens to Bocelli. "It is exactly the same squillo quality, which is a silver trumpet-like tone," he says. "Listening blind, so to speak, one might well mistake him for Pavarotti... If you ask me if I want to hear this man sing some real Italian opera, the answer is yes." But the clamour for that moment is, at least among the British opera circles, not yet with us. Only one of the several opera critics I contacted had heard of Bocelli, let alone heard him sing. But that situation, at least, is temporary. Tomorrow evening he makes his British debut as a guest of Kiri Te Kanawa, who is giving a recital at Hampton Court. Then perhaps that squillo quality will register here too