The Three Tenors is how noted operatic tenors Plácido Domingo, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti are billed when they perform together. The trio began their collaboration with a series of concerts, given particularly (but not exclusively) during the Football World Cup Finals.

In 1990, hundreds of millions of people around the world watched the Three Tenors give a concert at the opening of the Italia '90 World Cup in Rome. It was originally conceived to raise money for Carreras's foundation and also as a way for his colleagues, Domingo and Pavarotti, to welcome their colleague back to the world of opera but has been repeated a number of times since then. They sang together at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles for the 1994 finals, at the Champs de Mars in Paris during France '98 and in Yokohama during the 2002 tournament. They have also played in other cities around the world, usually performing in stadiums or other large outdoor venues.

The concerts were a great commercial success, and have been accompanied by a series of best-selling recordings including Carreras - Domingo - Pavarotti: the Three Tenors in Concert, The Three Tenors In Concert 1994, The Three Tenors: Paris 1998, The Three Tenors Christmas and The Best of the Three Tenors. Zubin Mehta was the conductor for most of these recordings.

The Three Tenors' repertoire extends beyond opera to Broadway numbers and even pop hits. Their signature tunes include Nessun Dorma from Puccini's Turandot and the Italian ballad standard O Sole Mio. The commercial success of this populist repertoire has been accompanied by criticism from opera "purists", who felt it didn't compare with the power of an opera performance. "I understand the complaints of purists. But I don't want the purists to go to the Three Tenors", Domingo told an interviewer in 1998. At the same time the Three Tenors demonstrated the possibilities for mass marketing of classical music, setting a nearly impossible target for other classical artists to match.

The success of the Three Tenors also led to antitrust action by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission against Warner Bros. and Vivendi Universal. It found that they had conspired not to advertise or discount the albums of the Rome concert (released by PolyGram, later taken over by Vivendi) and of the Los Angeles concert (released by Warners) in order to protect sales of the jointly released album of the Paris concert.

With Pavarotti, the oldest of the three, intending to retire after a farewell tour in 2005, it seems unlikely that the Tenors will perform together at the 2006 World Cup in Germany.

The phenominal success of the Three Tenors has led to various copies of the format, including The Irish Tenors and The Three Sopranos.

External links

• The 3 Tenors (http://www.threetenors.com/) - official site
• A Tenor Who Knows No Bounds (http://www.tenorissimo.com/domingo/Articles/ny092798.htm) - includes Domingo's thoughts on "purists" and the Three Tenors
• "A Requiem for Classical Music?" (http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/nerr/rr2003/q2/requiem.htm) from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's Regional Review - discusses the influence of the Three Tenors' success on the classical music market
• FTC press release (http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2003/07/vivendi.htm) on the "Tenors" antitrust action