Opera Men

Microphones be damned! The male voices you are about to hear are the finest and most robust on the planet. Each set of lungs behind these golden tonsils has the capacity to power a blast furnace, the by-product of which is pure, molten delight. Start with superstars the Three Tenors, with their fabulous encore from "Nessun dorma." For more manly operatic brilliance, be blown away by our Next Steps.

Once you've had your fix of familiar icons like Pavarotti and Domingo, meet some of the men who may have slipped under your opera radar . . . like Verdi specialist and sometime Hollywood star Lawrence Tibbett, or Swedish tenor Jussi Bjorling, another non-Latin singer who made a huge impact on the operatic world (and died the same year at Tibbett). Follow your ears to the vocal power plant of our Deep Cuts.

No one owns the role of tenor quite like the Italians: Naples-born Enrico Caruso — here singing from I Pescatori di Perle — was one of the greatest tenors who ever lived, a household name in the first two decades of the 20th century. The Hollywood version of his life, The Great Caruso (1951), features Italian-American Mario Lanza, another tenor legend, in the title role. Here, Lanza gives us a blast from Leoncavallo's Pagliacci.

There's nothing in the world of music quite as moving as the soaring tenor of a broken-hearted Pavarotti. All the gentlemen on our Opera Men playlist manage to harness the force of a volcano and channel it into full-blown, note-perfect ecstasy. It's no wonder that the Three Tenors Concert, performed at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome on the eve of the soccer World Cup final in 1990, became the all-time biggest-selling classical record. You will not believe your ears.